Our much-anticipated adult coloring book, “Color at Home,” has now been delighting enthusiasts for a few months. It’s truly a unique offering in the world of creative relaxation, and we’ve realized we haven’t yet shared the fascinating journey behind its creation. For us, the process of bringing a coloring book to life was an unexpected adventure, filled with learning, creativity, and a deep appreciation for the art of illustration. We certainly never envisioned ourselves as “coloring book authors,” but the opportunity proved to be incredibly rewarding and insightful. This post aims to pull back the curtain and reveal the intricate steps and collaborative spirit that shaped every page of this beloved interior design coloring book.
In case you’ve missed our previous announcements, Color at Home: A Young House Love Coloring Book is an expansive 80-page masterpiece designed specifically for adults who love interior design and mindful creativity. This isn’t just any coloring book; it’s a vibrant journey through beautifully rendered home interiors, offering everything from detailed full-room drawings and elegantly decorated vignettes to inspiring design mood boards, frameable art prints, and captivating collections of home accents like pillows, chairs, and lighting fixtures. Retailing at just $12.99, it’s often available for under $10 on platforms like Amazon, making it a perfect stocking stuffer or thoughtful gift for any design enthusiast seeking creative relaxation. We’ll offer several glimpses into its pages throughout this post, but you can also explore a treasure trove of completed artworks by our amazing community on Instagram under the hashtag #YHLColoringBook. Just look at the stunning gold fridge creation below – truly inspired and very Snoop Dogg! This vibrant community engagement is one of the most fulfilling aspects of this entire interior design coloring project.
The initial spark for Color at Home came when a reputable coloring book publisher, the innovative husband-and-wife team behind Paige Tate & Co, approached us with the concept. We immediately recognized its immense potential as a fun, low-risk, and incredibly engaging way for people to experiment with color and interior design principles. Imagine being able to try out daring new color combinations or bold decorating schemes on paper *before* committing to them in your actual home – without the expense or effort of repainting walls or purchasing new furniture. This adult coloring book serves as a fantastic tool to build confidence, overcome “paint paralysis,” and empower individuals to make design choices with greater assurance. Beyond the practical benefits of home decor inspiration, the act of coloring itself offers a profound sense of relaxation and stress relief. It allows you to press pause on the demands of daily life and immerse yourself in a charming, virtual world of exquisitely designed rooms that, best of all, you’ll never have to dust or vacuum! It’s a truly therapeutic experience, a form of art therapy accessible right at home.
One might reasonably wonder how one “authors” a coloring book, especially when the intricate task of drawing the actual illustrations falls to another talented artist. In our case, we entrusted this crucial role to the incredibly skilled interiors illustrator, Joan Borawski, whose work was nothing short of “amaaaaazing” to behold. While we contributed brief written sections, including valuable color tips and engaging warm-up exercises at the front of the book (one of which is previewed below), our primary contribution was serving as the creative “art directors.” This distinction is important because it highlights the collaborative nature of such a project and how various skill sets come together to form a cohesive, beautiful product. Our role involved guiding the visual narrative and ensuring that every page resonated with our vision for home decor and design exploration, creating a seamless and inspiring journey for the colorist.
As art directors, our initial and most critical task was to meticulously determine the overall outline, thematic consistency, and logical flow of the entire book. This meant deciding precisely what content would appear on each of the 80 pages. We had to carefully consider the ideal number of full-room illustrations, charming vignettes, inspiring mood boards, meaningful quotes, botanical elements, unique collection pages (like those featuring chairs or lighting), and practical exercises we wanted to include. The goal was to offer a diverse range of subjects, from expansive living spaces to intricate details, catering to different coloring preferences and skill levels. To manage this extensive creative blueprint and maintain clarity throughout the long development cycle, we developed a comprehensive, 80-plus-page master document. This document served as our primary communication tool with Joan, meticulously detailing our concepts, providing references, and undergoing numerous revisions and annotations as the project evolved. It was the backbone of our collaborative creative process, ensuring every detail was accounted for and aligned with our vision for a truly immersive and inspiring home decor coloring experience.
Our creative process for each illustration often began in one of two distinct ways. Sometimes, we’d craft detailed mood boards or intricate collages of accessories and furnishings, providing Joan with a visual blueprint to render into a cohesive room design. These were often conceptual spaces, designed to spark imagination and encourage creative freedom. Other times, we started with a specific photograph, perhaps even one from our own home or a project featured in our previous works, giving the illustrations a familiar touch and a sense of history. This approach meant that some spaces within the coloring book might be recognizable to our long-time followers, adding a layer of personal connection and familiarity. For instance, pictured below is an original photograph that served as the initial inspiration for a beautiful dining room spread in the book. Interestingly, this particular view is an alternate perspective of a dining room that we proudly showcased in our second published book, demonstrating how inspiration can be reinterpreted in exciting new ways for a new medium.
We quickly learned a crucial lesson early in the development: not every photograph we adored would automatically translate into an equally compelling black-and-white line drawing. Some highly detailed photos, when converted, became excessively busy and cluttered, making them difficult or overwhelming to color, diminishing the relaxing aspect. Conversely, other images, stripped of their original vibrant colors, appeared unexpectedly plain or lacked visual interest as line art. To address this challenge, for each chosen photo, we provided Joan, our talented illustrator, with a second annotated version of the picture. These annotations contained specific notes and suggestions on what elements we believed needed to be tweaked, simplified, enhanced, or entirely omitted to create an optimal coloring experience. This iterative feedback loop was vital for transforming rich photographic content into engaging and colorable illustrations that resonated with the book’s purpose of providing mindful creativity through interior design. Here’s an actual example of one of these annotated inputs we sent to Joan, showcasing our collaborative approach to perfecting each page.
Often, after receiving our detailed input, Joan would respond with a preliminary rough sketch. These initial drafts were intentionally less detailed, often omitting elements like intricate rug patterns or complex textures, allowing us to collectively assess the foundational composition and overall visual balance. This step was invaluable for quickly identifying what was working well, what needed further adjustment to enhance colorability, or what elements might need to be completely removed or added as the illustration began to take shape. It was a fluid, back-and-forth process, ensuring that the essence of the design was captured while also making it suitable for a captivating and enjoyable coloring page for adults.
This particular dining room page was one of the very first illustrations we tackled, making it a significant learning experience for our entire team. We were all still developing an intuition for anticipating what elements might become problematic or overly challenging to color in the final version. Early on, we discovered issues such as sconces or artwork appearing too ornate and intricate for easy coloring, which could frustrate a user seeking stress relief. We also noted that large, undetailed areas like walls and ceilings could look excessively blank and potentially boring to fill in. Even subtle but critical details, such as the realization that a perfectly centered flower arrangement or chandelier might get partially obscured by the book’s binding, emerged during these initial rounds. So, armed with newfound insights from both an artistic and user experience perspective, we would diligently mark up these rough drafts with additional notes and send them back to Joan, refining our vision with each iteration. This collaborative problem-solving was key to creating a truly enjoyable and engaging adult coloring experience for our audience.
And just like that, another refined version would arrive in our inbox, each step bringing us closer to the final product. It truly was incredible to witness these rooms, initially just photographs or vague concepts, gradually transform into intricate, inviting line art. Joan’s ability to capture the essence of a space, often drawing these complex details by hand with such precision and artistic flair, was nothing short of artistic magic. Each new draft brought us closer to the vision of a perfectly balanced and engaging coloring page, reflecting both her immense talent and our collaborative guidance in crafting an ideal home decor coloring book.
For this specific dining room illustration, we had one more round of meticulous edits before finalization. For instance, the detailed rug pattern was intentionally omitted until this later stage. We collectively agreed to first see how the wallpaper design impacted the overall illustration before deciding on the appropriate level of busyness or ornate detail for the rug, ensuring visual harmony and avoiding overwhelming the colorist. To communicate these granular changes, Sherry and I mocked up specific adjustments in Photoshop, clearly indicating where we wanted the chevron pattern on the chairs to be tidied up for a crisp, clean finish in the final version. This attention to minute details truly elevated the quality and colorability of the page, ensuring every line was purposeful and conducive to a delightful coloring experience.
A little while later, after all the careful revisions and artistic refinement, the ultimate, final version of the dining room illustration arrived – the very page you can now enjoy coloring in our book. The journey from a simple photograph to this intricate line art was a testament to patience, collaboration, and a shared dedication to crafting the perfect adult coloring experience, offering both detail and accessibility for all skill levels.
As you can see, this particular image underwent quite a significant and fascinating evolution from its initial photographic inspiration to its beautifully rendered final form. This transformation perfectly encapsulates the entire creative process behind Color at Home, where real-world spaces are reimagined for artistic expression, mindful engagement, and to inspire personal color choices in home decor. It’s a journey of inspiration, iteration, and artistic collaboration that we are incredibly proud to share.
While some pages, like the dining room, demanded extensive collaborative effort and multiple rounds of refinement, others were relatively less involved, often due to their inherent simplicity or direct translation from initial concepts. A particularly special section of the book features rooms directly inspired by our own home – including our living room, dining room, bedroom, sunroom, and office (one of which is shown below). We meticulously designed these pages to feel both familiar to our loyal readers and universally inspiring, yet we still found ourselves making subtle adjustments. This often involved adding strategic artistic details or simplifying existing elements to ensure they translated perfectly into engaging line drawings – neither too busy to overwhelm nor too sparse to bore. Each room, whether inspired by our own spaces or conceptualized anew, was carefully curated to offer a diverse and delightful creative outlet within this unique home decor coloring book.
We are genuinely SO EXCITED for everyone to get their hands on Color at Home and begin infusing these beautiful spaces with their unique artistic vision. We had the privilege of inviting several individuals to test-color the pages during development, and it was absolutely awesome to witness everyone’s distinct interpretations. The diverse color schemes chosen truly made the same rooms look incredibly different, highlighting the transformative power of personal creativity and the endless possibilities of interior design. We wholeheartedly encourage you to share your completed pages with us on social media! Please remember to tag them with #YHLColoringBook so we don’t miss any of your incredible work. Your contributions not only inspire us but also create a vibrant and supportive community of fellow home decor coloring enthusiasts, sharing their stress relief coloring journeys.
Oh, and one final, incredibly helpful tip for both seasoned colorists and newcomers alike! While many experienced artists have their preferred markers or colored pencils for adult coloring books, for anyone diving into home decor subjects for the first time, we’ve found that colored pencils are remarkably error-proof and versatile. Even basic Crayola ones can yield fantastic results. With pencils, you can achieve more realistic shading, subtle blending, and nuanced textures, which are perfect for capturing the sophisticated feel of interior spaces. Markers, while vibrant, sometimes resulted in colors that felt too primary or cartoonish for our aesthetic – as if a room Caillou might inhabit (no offense to Caillou fans!). However, as brilliantly demonstrated by the gold fridge masterpiece shown earlier, professional coloring book enthusiasts can absolutely make watercolors and markers work wonders. Ultimately, the best medium is the one you enjoy most, and with plenty of pages for practice within Color at Home, you’ll undoubtedly discover your preferred style and enhance your creative relaxation journey!
Speaking of the pages themselves, we made sure to prioritize quality and user experience. Each of the 80 pages is printed on thick, premium paper, designed to withstand various coloring mediums without bleed-through and to provide a satisfying tactile experience. Furthermore, every page is conveniently perforated, making it incredibly easy to tear out individual sheets if you prefer to work on a flat surface or wish to share your finished artwork. This feature is particularly useful for the dedicated “frameable quote pages” we’ve included. These charming art prints mimic designs seen hanging in nearby full-room illustrations (like the inspiring “Do Less With More Focus” art visible in the room on the left below). Our vision was to offer a few larger versions of this art, allowing you to color them, effortlessly remove them, and proudly hang them in your own home if you’re so inclined, adding a personal touch to your DIY home decor. Similarly, we’ve incorporated several botanical pages that you can color and frame, bringing a touch of personalized artistry to your living spaces. These thoughtful features elevate Color at Home beyond a mere coloring book, transforming it into a source of customizable home decor and artistic expression.
To further enhance your design experimentation and unleash your inner interior decorator, Color at Home also includes dedicated “mood board” pages. These innovative spreads provide an ideal canvas for playing with various color combinations, patterns, and textures, all within a focused design context. For example, if you’re contemplating new accent colors for your kitchen, you could color the fabric swatches on a mood board page with those specific tones. Then, you can experiment with different cabinet and tile colors, observing how they interact with your chosen accents and how the entire color palette comes together. This visual preview allows you to meticulously plan your home decor choices and see how various elements might harmoniously come together *before* making any real-world commitments. It’s an invaluable tool for exploring color inspiration, refining your aesthetic vision, and making confident choices for your home, serving as a practical guide for design experimentation.
We genuinely hope that you, our readers and fellow design enthusiasts, will enjoy exploring and personalizing the pages of Color at Home as much as we relished the creative process of making it. This project, initially a delightful and somewhat random endeavor, evolved into a truly fulfilling experience that combined our love for home decor with the mindful benefits of coloring. We couldn’t be more thrilled that it’s now out in the world, inspiring creativity and relaxation in homes everywhere. For your convenience, all the direct order links are provided below, making it easy to embark on your own interior design coloring adventure today and discover the joy of creative expression.
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Books-A-Million | Indigo (Canada)
Amazon (UK) | Book Depository (Worldwide) | Fountain Books (Autographed)
A very special and heartfelt thank you goes out to our incredible editors, Reagan and Sada at Paige Tate & Co, and to our truly amazing illustrator, Joan Borawski. Throughout this creative journey, you all felt less like colleagues and more like cherished family friends. Your dedication, talent, and collaborative spirit were indispensable, transforming our vision into a tangible source of joy and creativity. This book truly wouldn’t have been possible without each and every one of you, our fellow #colornerdsforthewin!
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