Homemade Coloring Pages

Because it's my co-teacher's week to teach, I thought I'd spend this week showing general art projects that aren't necessarily connected to a theme. I bought a box of Crayola crayons that had a code inside to use on their website. It changes regular pictures into coloring pages! I took a picture of two kids at a time, making silly faces or just smiling. Then I went to the Crayola website, uploaded the photos, and printed out the coloring pages. All the parents, kids, and other teachers thought it was the coolest thing. If you haven't tried it, you must! The kids got a real kick out of coloring pictures of themselves! Some colored it so it looked just like them, others went a little crazy and added makeup or pink hair or green skin. It was great! That was last year. I tried it again this year and my code was no longer accepted. <sigh> I'm only allowed to use it once. (The nerve!) And I wasn't going to buy another box of crayons for another code. (This code only came on the 120-count box, not exactly cheap.) So I tried something else this year. I used Picnik to edit the pictures. This site is great. And most features are free. Even when the site is loading, it's super cute. "Growing grass..." "Buttering sandwiches..."Fluffing clouds..." "Stealing picnik basket..." It's so cute, you don't mind waiting! Anyway, once you upload your picture, just click on Create, and then Effects. Scroll down a bit and you'll see "Pencil Sketch." Click on that and it will turn your picture into, you guessed it, a pencil sketch. That's the next best thing to a coloring page. It worked great! The picture goes from this:

To this:

Picnik is actually what I use to blur out the kids' faces on my pictures. They also have a lot of fun features on their site. There's a neon feature that's wildly cool:

I think I might have to use Picnik more often to play around with pictures of the kids in my class. They'd love that!