in this video i'm going to show you a quick and easy way to use free public domain images
available on the internet to create your own coloring books to self-publish on the amazon kdp
platform and hopefully make sales and hopefully make money so if you're interested in becoming a
self-publisher publishing books on amazon making money online by creating and selling books then
follow along as i show you how to make these types of books now if you've not been to this channel
before then welcome my name is paul miles and i do videos on how to make it keep it and great
and that's your money i'm talking about if you do like videos like that then please do give it
a thumbs up hit the subscribe button and smash that notification bell to receive notification
of when i produce more videos like this now chlorine books they're extremely popular
on amazon and sell very well and make a lot of publishers good money but one of the issues of
creating coloring books is creating the interiors that's the pages that people actually color in now
this is obviously a lot easier if you're an artist and can create these yourself
but if not you have to look at sort of trying to outsource the creation of these interiors or use
other methods and that's what i'm going to show you today and i'm going to show you a particular
type of coloring book where the images inside are related to famous artists i'll show you an example
so if we go over to amazon i've just searched for van gogh coloring book got 115 results so not a
huge amount of competition there and we can see decent best-sellers ranks which means these books
sell very well now if we have a look at this book in particular we can see what the interior looks
like and we've got these pages here which are basically images of van gogh's paintings converted
into these black and white line drawings that people can then color in and as i've said they're
very popular here's some more examples this is a book of japanese prince now this picture here is a
famous print i'm sure many of you may have seen before by an artist called hokusai
and if we just scroll down and have a look at the sort of images that are in here this one's
actually quite a fancy book because it's got color images inside but we can see we've got these black
and white lined images again for people to color in now you can see if you just tilt your head
you can see there's another image there and here's one one of my favorites and that's william morris
because these are quite easy to create in fact these are one of the the easier ones to create
in terms of coloring books and if we just have a look inside i'll click on one of the pages
and just enlarge that and you can see again it's not exactly black and white so i hope you
can see it but we've got these black and white line drawings so i'm going to show you how to
create the interior of one of these and show you a really good way of creating a good-looking cover
for one of these books now where do we get our images from well this site here at rawpixel.com
they have these public domain images which are categorized by artists as we scroll down here
or categorized by subject area botanical animals artists etc so these are in the public domain if
we go to wikipedia it says a public mind consists of creative work with no exclusive intellectual
property rights however and this is my disclaimer i'm not a copyright or trademark lawyer so any
image that you use from an online source i suggest you check that you do have the correct licensing
agreement for it and that means doing your own due diligence a lot of people do ask me for advice can
i use this image can i use that image i can't give advice on that it's actually part of the business
and it's part of something you must do yourself when i get an image from a public domain site and
such sites can be things like pixabay and unsplash i always run them through google image search
just to make sure that they're as well as no evidence of any copyright or trademark on them
and in particular to make sure they're not listed on sites like istock or bigstockphoto that type
of thing where there's a license on a particular image i always say if in doubt don't use it and if
in doubt and it's an image you really want to use then i suggest consulting a copyright or trademark
lawyer but this site says they're all public domain and normally images that don't have a
copyright were either created before there was copyright law or the copyright has expired on
them so when you click on one of these images and we'll go to this william morris page here
you can see we've got this huge selection now these are particularly good images because
there's not many colours in them and they have a good contrast which makes for good
black and white lined images for our colouring pages and if we click on one of these here
we can see we've got our william morris sort of pattern and over on the right hand side
there is information about the licensing if we click on view license that takes us to this
creative commons page where it says no copyright the person who associated work with this deed
has dedicated the work to the public domain by waving all of his or her rights to the worldwide
whatever under copyright law as i said what i normally do and i've done it in this case is
just take the image go to google image search and just put the the image in there and i've
done that with this particular image and we can see here there doesn't appear to be any
of these images listed on any um stock photo or stock image sites so it looks like we're all good
to go with this in a bit i will show you another very interesting website where you can get other
public domain images from but for the moment we're going to download this particular image now
it says here read download because i've downloaded it already and i normally just choose the web size
image we don't want loads and loads of pixels to be dealing with so i've downloaded that now
the next step is we've got to convert this from a raster image those are usually png and dot jpg
images and we need to turn it into a vector image and that's a dot ai or dot eps or dot svg file now
if you have software like adobe illustrator you can do that with the image trace function i've
already done a video in the past where i've used that image trace function to create a
an image for a colouring book and i'll leave a link to that video in the description below
so if you've got adobe illustrator you can you know follow the the method that i used in there
you can do image trace in inkscape as well now we'll also need vector editing software now i'm
going to be using affinity designer you can use as mentioned inkscape which is free gravit designer
the basic version is free or you can pay to get the pro upgrade or there's vectornator
and that's another vector imaging software now the issue with affinity designer i mean it's
fantastic it's probably one of the most versatile pieces of software for creating books and it's a
one-off payment it's currently i think it's around about the 50 or 60 dollar mark they were running a
special offer where it was half price um i don't think that's the case anymore but still at that
price it's well worth the money the only issue is they don't have an image trace function so we need
to use third-party software so we're going to use vectorizer at vectorizer.io relatively inexpensive
for 10 credits that means you can upload 10 images it says here it's two australian dollars eighty
which is about two us dollars and that would be enough to do ten images you'd probably want to do
it you know in a coloring book you know probably have like 20 to 30 images so it probably cost you
five to six dollars to do that which i think is a good investment when you open vectorizer all
you need to do you can see i've already done it here you just drag in the image and upload it it
uploads automatically and then it will convert the image as we see here on the right hand side
into a vector image on the left is the raster image on the right is the vector image and
you can do a lot of changes now the only thing i suggest is just making sure you've got the photo
option here top left hand corner clicked on now there's not many other changes you need to make
now we can from here enlarge our image what we want is an image that looks good but with as few
colors as possible so depending on the type of image you're going to need to experiment
a little and you can do this with the slider here by changing the number of colors or over here on
the left hand side just clicking on the number of colors so you could just have an image with two
colors and you can see what we've got is something like this which is ideal for what we want to do
so i'm just going to go ahead and download that and it will download it as a vector image a dot
svg image now i'm just going to drag that across into affinity designer and here we have the image
now what we want to do is convert this into a black and white lined image so i'm just going
to draw a bounding box around the whole of this image i'm going to go over to the color tab top
right hand corner here click on the fill button and again you're going to have the equivalent of
this in inkscape or adobe illustrator and then i'm going to move this slider over to the right hand
side and you'll see our whole image disappears that's because we've set the fill setting to
white then we click on the stroke button or stroke box and then click on the stroke tab again top
right hand corner now what we want to do is make our stroke appear and so we're going to just use
a slider to increase the width and lo and behold our image appears like so and you can see already
we've got something that looks good that would be ideal for people to colour in now this probably
is a little bit on the the busy side there's a lot compressed there onto the one page so what
we're going to do next is command c or control c to copy now i create all the interiors of my books
and i've done this for all of my books in keynote or powerpoint now some of the more traditionalists
out there will say oh you can't possibly use that to create the interior of a book you've got to
use professional software like adobe and design or affinity publisher well that's nonsense i've
created all my books in keynote and powerpoint that's the interiors and they're selling very
well and bringing in a nice income and it's very simple to use and it's very difficult to make any
errors and it's got a very small learning curve so anyway so we've copied this image so we're going
to go over to keynote and command v or control v just to paste now as i said there's probably
a lot there on one page so i'm going to do just one corner just drag this like so
to make it bigger and i think that would look perfect on our page now this is going to be an 8.5
by 11 inch book so this page actually has bleed so the dimensions of the page would be off the
top of my head 8.625 by 11.25 so that'll be our first page now we're going to go and create our
second page so if we go back to affinity designer now i did download from raw pixel a couple of
other images and i'll show you what those were now one was that image we saw on the cover of
that book by hockeyside now i left this not as two colors but a few different colors here because
you'll find that with some images if you use too few colors it'll just simplify the image too much
and you just have a few lines and a massive white area so again you just need to experiment
with this setting here so you know the 24 colors 12 colors you just want to simplify it
so that it doesn't look too complicated and so for the same for this left click on the mouse drag a
bounding box over the whole image go to color go to fill move that over to white ignore these lines
here i don't know why those appear but that's okay we'll soon change those click on our stroke button
click on the stroke tab and then increase the stroke width like so now i don't know why that
one is brown but we'll change the color of that to black little rascal then there's another one there
so we'll just again change that to black like so and there you can see again we've got a good image
that would be perfect for a coloring book now before we send our image to powerpoint we're going
to need to rotate this through 90 degrees so we go to layer transform rotate left reduce the size of
that don't worry about the way it looks at the moment so just keep our bounding box around our
whole image command c ctrl c to copy go to keynote and just paste and we can adjust the size of it to
fit our page like so you don't need all of it on the page but that would look pretty good so that's
our page number two so now we're going to go back to finity designer i'm going to drag in another
image many of you may recognize this chat it's vangoff and again you can see i've reduced the
number of colors in vectorizer so again same old process bounding box fill color to white stroke
increase the width you can see again that looks pretty good command seek control c to copy keynote
third page paste and we can adjust the position of this and just the size like so so now just as an
example here we've got our three pages now you you'll want to spend a bit more time than than
i've done here this i'm just doing this quick for the sake of this video and you may want to just do
a book of one particular artist like van gogh or william morris or you could do a book of i don't
have famous paintings so now in keynote all we need to do is click on file export to pdf i'll
send this to my download folder and then we'll have a quick look at it and we can see here if i
drag it into place what it would look like so this would be page one of our coloring book we've got
page two of our coloring book page three of our coloring book we'd do that for the number of pages
we want in a book you know 40 or whatever 40 to 60 and then we'd upload that to the kdp platform as
our book as our pdf for the interior of the book so now men said i'd mention one more site and this
is met museum.org and this is the metropolitan museum in new york they have an online site
and they have public domain images and you can see here on their own home page we've got this
open access artworks more than 375 000 high-res images of public domain works so we click on that
and you can do a search for a particular artist so we'll put in van gogh see what comes up and you
can see here you've got these images here that we can use now some of these won't be suitable i mean
you know like this one here this one a bit dark but certainly something like this may be suitable
and again it's got the public domain bit there it tells you that you can 3d copy modify and
distribute this image even for commercial purposes but i would still suggest checking on google image
search and doing your own due diligence because you're ultimately responsible and so you could
download this image and then upload that to vectorizer or load it into adobe illustrator
and convert it into a vector like i've shown you and then create the interior of your coloring book
now if this has sparked your interest and inspired you into creating colouring books then i suggest
watching this video next where again i show you how to create the interiors for a coloring book to
publish on kdp amazon i hope you found the video useful thank you very much for your time it's very
much appreciated do make sure you you click the subscribe button and until next time and goodbye