Magic Marker Monday — Stained Glass Coloring Pages

“It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”

~Pablo Picasso

Welcome to Magic Marker Monday! If you haven’t heard about Magic Marker Monday yet, click here and then hurry right back…

We wanted to try something a little different in the coloring book realm and came across some great stained glass coloring books from Dover Publications a while back. They have a wonderful selection of beautiful stained-glass coloring books and kits that are perfect for hours of colorful fun!

This week though, we decided to try printing our own stained-glass coloring pages…

There are lots of free coloring pages on the web — Dover Publications is actually a great source for this too. You can sign up for a teacher’s weekly sampler and a regular weekly sampler just by signing up with an email account at their Dover Teacher’s Sampler page or their Dover Sampler page. Every week they will email you a link to an assortment of free printables including coloring pages, dot-to-dots, mazes, puzzles, hidden pictures, clip art, story excerpts, and more!

Another great source for free coloring pages for this project is at The Coloring Castle. They have a wide variety of simple prints to choose from that translate well to a stained glass look.

Now for the tricky part…

I’ll tell you up front, this would work much better with vellum sheets and a laser printer, but all I had to work with was tracing paper and an inkjet printer. Here’s how to made it work…

1) Choose a print without a border or crop off the border in a photo editor before printing to minimize the amount of ink your printer will be putting down on your tracing paper.

2) Affix the tracing paper to a sheet of regular printing paper using a re-positionable adhesive as shown in the photo above. This gives some structure to your tracing paper so it can feed through your printer without jamming.

3) Select the a fast draft or low resolution print option on your printer to minimize the amount of ink your printer will put down on the paper. If you have an option to select paper type, select a glossy paper option. This will prevent too much ink from being laid down on your paper.

4) As soon as you see the end of your print coming through the printer, grasp it gently and apply very slight downward pressure to prevent your print from smearing on any part of the printer as it finishes printing.

5) After allowing your print to dry thoroughly, draw in the border and stained-glass lines using a ruler and black permanent marker.

6) Hand the print over to the kiddos for coloring, then display prominently in a sunny window with double-stick tape.

Hope this project brings a little sunlight and a whole lot of fun to your wintery week!

What has your little artist been up to this week? Link up and share!

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Questions? Please feel free to email Michelle at childlif[at]gmail[dot]com or come and visit her at In The Life of a Child

Michelle is a stay-at-home mom, wife to her wonderful husband, and mother of their two adorable and much-loved children. Through her blog, In The Life of a Child, Michelle has grown a passion for supporting families who are parenting children through extreme medical challenges. Her oldest child was born with a rare birth defect known as a lymphatic malformation and was also diagnosed with cyclic vomiting syndrome. Michelle and her husband share a common goal as parents: To treasure every moment and raise their children to be extraordinary individuals.

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