Young Artists

As our family gathered from southern California and the coast to our house for Thanksgiving, it soon became evident that we would have to have lots of things to entertain them. We only had 7 of our grandchildren here and one is only 6 months old and very easy to care for. But the other six were more than a handful.

One of the things that we did early on was provide paper, colored pencils, and crayons. A couple of the 5 to 6 year old would spend hours and hours on their drawing projects. For the most part we were able to satisfy their needs with blank copy paper. But then they started asking for pictures to color.

I quickly found three web sites with open outline pictures of characters the kids could relate to that I could recommend for various reasons. There was a fourth site that made new users register and process through more than 12 pages of "vendor selection" before they could apply for membership. Unfortunately I can't find that site now.

Sites for coloring picture (with comments)
1. coloring-book.info/coloring/ lists about 150 characters, each of which has a dozen to as high as 65 coloring book "pages" to print and color. The default borders and good.

2. www.coloring.ws/coloring.html The pages are listed by theme such as seasons, holidays, clowns, flowers, etc. and you don't see thumbnails of the pages until you've gone to the lowest level of the index.

3. disney.go.com/magicartist/coloring/Some kids will like this as it has so many Disneyland characters to choose from. For each character there are 7 coloring pages, one of which you can color on the computer screen and then print out to compare freehand.