Meet the Artist: How Pola Blue Designs a Coloring Book
Every Pola Blue book starts with a question rather than a drawing: who is going to colour this, and where will they be sitting when they do it? The answer decides line weight, page count and even how much white space each illustration needs.
Choosing a theme worth 50 pages
A good theme has to survive repetition. Ice cream, musical instruments, sea creatures and holiday scenes all work because each page can be genuinely different while still belonging to the same world. Weak themes run out of ideas by page fifteen.
Drawing for the age group
Toddler pages use thick, closed outlines and a single large subject on a mostly empty page. Pages for older children add background detail and pattern. Adult books go further still, with dense textures meant to be worked on over several sittings.
One rule applies to all of them: nothing is printed on the reverse of an illustration that matters, so marker bleed can never ruin a second drawing.
Testing with real colourists
Draft pages get printed and handed to children and adults before anything is published. If a shape is consistently coloured 'wrong', the drawing is unclear — not the person. Those pages get redrawn.
Print, Kindle and printable versions
Paperbacks are produced through Amazon KDP so they can ship worldwide, while printable PDF editions live in the Etsy and Naffy shops for families who want to reprint favourite pages at home. Preparing both means checking margins, contrast and file resolution twice — once for a printing press, once for a home printer.
Explore the books
Every idea in this article comes out of making coloring books for kids and adults. Browse the full collection or grab a printable edition to try at home.