I'm very pleased to announce the publication of my Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Animal themed colouring in book.
You can buy it here on Blurb (UK link but check the top right corner for your own territory).
I have priced it at £9.99 UK pounds plus postage and packing. The best thing is to first select your country or language option (top right corner on blurb.com) and then search for 'Meerkatsu'
It is print on demand, so it takes around a week to arrive. If you are new to Blurb, sometimes they offer a discount for your first order. Check the Blurb landing page for details.
Read more about this project:
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| Frigatebirds tussling over footlocks, just one example from my BJJ Animal Alphabet Colouring Book |
Background story
Around 4 years ago I began noticing the explosion in colouring books just after the publication of the Secret Garden by the very talented Johanna Basford, an artist I have followed for a long while. Although colouring books for adults (sometimes marketed as colouring therapy books) have been around forever, Johanna's book hit the market at the perfect time and went on to become a crazy bestseller - one million copies and counting!
I kept this thought at the back of my mind until I decided to create a colouring in project of my own - the War Lion colouring in sheet (July 2015). It was a single page that my followers could download and then print out and colour on their own. Here are some cool examples of their coloured in works:
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| My War Lion colouring sheet |
The War Lion then went on to become my popular rashguard of the same name (available here.)
The War Lion was an encouraging start to my colouring in ideas. I moved up a gear (Dec 2015) and designed some colouring in art cards which were given away in limited quantities with my blue Orchid Dragon kimono.
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| Inktober 2016 gave me the opportunity to thrash out my colouring book idea of an alphabet of BJJ animals. |
I was happy with the feedback from these projects enough to consider producing my own colouring book. But I needed a running theme and concept. Along came my Instagram based Inktober project in 2016...and along with it, the idea of the BJJ animal alphabet was born.
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| The book is available now from Blurb.com |
The Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Animal Alphabet Colouring Book
Using my Inktober sketches as the base, I redrew all the pieces again so that they were much neater and high quality enough for publication. Some ideas I had to abandon while I introduced new pieces into the mix.
Blurb is a print on demand self publishing company. They mainly offer high quality photo books but you can also make so-called Trade books (which is the option I used) and I found that these are actually better for colouring because the paper is uncoated.
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| My coloured in version of the frigatebirds |
The book features 29 original pieces of artwork all created by me. The majority of the artworks are printed on the right page so that if any ink bleeds through to the other side, it won't spoil the next piece. That being said, I highly recommend using colouring pencils (good brands include: Prismacolor, Caran D'ache Luminance, Faber-Castell Polychromos). Don't use felt or fibre tipped pens or markers, just in case they do bleed through.
Blurb is an American company but in many territories it offers a dedicated website in that language and prints the book locally, all you need to do to find my book is to type 'Meerkatsu' into the search box.
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| Cross choking cheetahs, an example page from the colouring book |
My book is printed on 105gsm pure white paper. The cover is softback laminated and the binding is perfect bound, which is pretty durable - you'll probably need to flatten the book when colouring in the pages. Altogether I found the ideal balance between offering a quality printed publication at an affordable price.
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| Tested by kids and adults! |
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| Colouring work by Pippa Granger |
BJJ Animal Alphabet Colouring Book by Meerkatsu from Seymour Yang on Vimeo.
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1 comments:
I Like so much bro. this is awsome.
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