Turn Photographs Into Coloring Pages

Hey friends!  Oh, how I have missed you.  No really.  Normally moves are smooth with just a few days of down time for me – but this time around just about put me under.  I would love to recount all the ways it did me wrong, but I’m afraid my brain has entered the let’s pretend that never happened mode to recover.  So moving right along…

One of our most popular posts here on TMH has been how to turn your photos into coloring pages.  You know how kids love to look at photos of themselves?  Well turn that picture into a coloring page and you’ve just made them the star of their artwork. They think it’s so cool.  You can even use it for making your own homeschooling printables.  Since Picnik retired I receive at least one email a week asking if I know any other way to do the process.  Good news – I do!  Catch me after the jump!

How To Turn Photos Into Coloring Pages

For this tutorial we will be using iPiccy, a really fun online photo editing platform that has a pencil sketch feature allowing us to make the coloring pages.  I did an earlier post on how iPiccy compared to Picnik, and found it to be very easy to use.  You don’t need an account or register to use it, just upload the photo and within minutes your kids will be busy playing Picasso allowing you to read that book that’s been collecting dust, or do the laundry, or brush your teeth…

Okay, so when you are the iPiccy homepage it looks like this.  Just click on the “Start Editing!” button.

Now click on the upload photo tab, and upload the picture you plan to use from your computer.

Once the pictures has been uploaded it will be on the editing tab, which is indicated by the little camera on the top tabs.  Here you can resize, crop, or edit the photo.  I left mine alone.

Now click on the little magic wand tab indicated by the red arrow, and then scroll down through the option on the left side and find the Pencil Sketch option indicated by the blue arrow.  It’s fun for the kids to watch this part, click on the button and let them watch the magic happen.

See, fun right?  I love how the graphic on his shirt stands out so well.

You can adjust the intensity by moving the little tab on the Strength bar. I upped the strength on mine just a tad.  Another area you can play with this is on the camera tab under levels.  Just adjust the black/white bar until you have it where you want it.

You can add a little text if you want too.  Just click on the layered paper icon from the top tabs indicated by the red arrow, and then the text button indicated by the blue arrow.  Pick a text by scrolling through the options, and then replace the default text by clicking on it, and type in what you want.

To finish, click on the disc icon from the top tabs (it’s the last one) and save to your computer and then print.

Another fun way to use this is making your own printables for homeschooling or preschool.  I found this picture on Flickr through the creative commons page which has photos with sharing licenses to varying degrees. Click on the see more link under the appropriate one for your use and then search for any photo using key words.

Then I just saved it to my computer and edited with the pencil sketch and text features on iPiccy.

So many fun things you can do with this, and at the very least make your kids day.  For realz, they’ll flip – trust me!

Hope everyone is having a great day, and thanks so much for reading!

~Destri

Giraffe photo via

Tagged as: boredom buster, iPiccy, photo editing