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Ban's art extravaganza bonanza!

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
You certainly could publish these as a coloring book. One challenge would be orientation, as some images are landscape and some portrait. You'd have to resolve that. Otherwise, I suggest you take a look at other coloring books at Amazon to see what is the standard format and size and paper type.

I guess the other challenge would be volume. How many pages is typical for a coloring book? Would you have that many images? It must take a terrific amount of work to produce even one of these. They're quite fun and interesting! I bet you could get dozens of separate pages out of just one of these big pictures, if you could figure out how to extract or crop them. It would violate the integrity of the original. But hey, you could then offer the full images as a separate art book!
 

Ban

Troglodytic Trouvère
Article Team
I like that idea Skip! The works are all available online on instagram, here and artstation for free, so it wouldn't make too much sense to publish them as they are in a colouring book, but if I crop out individual characters and groups of characters, I'd be providing something different. I reckon it will also be a lot less daunting to colour them individually.
 

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
Actually, it's perfectly fine to offer them as a book for money. Online I have to download and print, probably at a lower resolution than what your originals can provide. Moreover, you could add commentary to add value to the printed book. You could talk about what the images mean, or the tradition of illustration (especially in your part of the world), techniques, personal observations, or whatever. Just short commentaries to accompany the images.

As for a coloring book, I was definitely daunted. There's just so much going on there, I would hardly know where to start. But give me just fragments and I might get brave. To me it looks just the thing for colored pencils or for watercolors. But there, the paper chosen will be important. Anyway, give it a thought or two. Think of it not so much as a way to make money as a way to distribute your pictures more widely and have more people enjoy them.
 
I agree with skip.knox that it doesn't matter that these are available for free online already. People like to pay for convenience and to support artists. Sure, there will be people who wont buy them because they are free elsewhere. But then, there are just as many people who would pay for them exactly because they are. It's a bit like supporting artists on Patreon or donating to streamers on Twitch. There's plenty of people willing to pay small amounts to artist.
 

Ban

Troglodytic Trouvère
Article Team
Thanks for the feedback guys. In the coming months I should have time to make a side-project out of cropping characters out of these images to make a colouring book with. Then I'd probably just self-publish it to have something nice for myself, and hopefully others, to own.

Moreover, you could add commentary to add value to the printed book. You could talk about what the images mean, or the tradition of illustration (especially in your part of the world), techniques, personal observations, or whatever. Just short commentaries to accompany the images.

I like the idea of adding a bit of background and context to the works. My thought at the moment is that i could include the entire image in the colouring book to start a "chapter", then write a short text for it before delving into the cropped characters. For each full image I'd highlight a different thing. And once I run out of stuff to talk about, I can always just sing praise for other people's work. An ode to Uderzo and Goscinny!
 

Ban

Troglodytic Trouvère
Article Team
To those who like myself didn't hear it either, Kim Jung Gi has passed earlier this month at the age of 47. He was an artist who I admired more than anyone else in the modern day. I regret to hear he left at such a tragically young age, but, in this tiny forgettable corner of the internet, I'd like to thank him for his dazzlingly dynamic work. If you weren't aware of him, please take the time to search his art.
 
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Ban

Troglodytic Trouvère
Article Team
Indeed it is. He was phenomenal at his work, making incredible things appear on paper using nothing but a pen and immense creativity.
 
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