[vldmrs]

I've noticed that my son spends way too much time on YouTube or playing Minecraft and one of the few offline activities he enjoys doing on his own is coloring. And since he comes to me every time he wants a new coloring book and we spend about 10 minutes together searching for each picture, I made a website with a collection of coloring books for him. The site is very simple, but to be honest, I haven't had so much fun with the process of creation for a long time.

https://colorango.com/

[082349872349872]

At one pre-funding startup (in the days when 14400 was an excellent remote connection) we had a LAN set up in the basement of the founder with the largest house. Their daughter liked to "work" alongside us, so (partly to protect our unattended keyboards!) I bought a colouring-book program for her to use.

One evening, when her mother called down that it was her bedtime, she replied:

— Can't mom, busy working! click click click

— What are you working on?

— click I have to turn it all orange! click

Upon hearing that, we knew she was one of us.

[dleink]

What's she up to?

[082349872349872]

I'll have to get back to you on that...

[Galanwe]

This is absolutely amazing.

The pictures are very detailed and done with taste, there is no ads to be seen, the website is well organized.

This rivals any high end coloring book I've seen, you are very talented! My kid will be thrilled, thank you so much for creating this!

[linsomniac]

My wife has been using ChatGPT to generate coloring pages for our Little Free Library and they've been coming out amazing!

[TechDebtDevin]

One of my 1000 unfinished projects was a e-reader app for android that generates coloring book pages, or illustrations for young kids who are in that weird age group where there are no more pictures in their books, but they still enjoy illustrations. I have a gifted niece who is way ahead for her age at reading but still enjoys pictures/coloring so I planned on making it for year. Don't know if I'll have the chance to finish, but I'm sure Kindle will integrate this into their new color kindles (and probably every other e-reader) at some point.

[tartoran]

I also recommend printing out puzzles, mazes, riddles from https://krazydad.com/ You can download pdfs, staple them together and let your kids sink their time in.

[thot_experiment]

Interesting, what AI are you using to generate these? Are these straight from the net or is there a post processing pipeline? If so, what are you doing?

[tkgally]

Not the GP, but inspired by your question I tried asking ChatGPT to create similar coloring sheets. The results seem suitable for coloring. Here's one prompt: "A simplified line-drawing coloring sheet of a dog flying an airplane. The drawing is in clean black lines on a white background, with minimal details and clear, bold outlines."

Later: The prompt worked with Imagen 3 on Gemini Advanced, too:

https://g.co/gemini/share/fd023da84cb2

[hmottestad]

The Gemini one has a prop that should have 4 blades but only has 3.

All my attempts with GPT-4o have failed. Always ends up with areas where the black lines become fuzzy.

[chookharel]

Really awesome! As I haven’t seen a way to contact., any way to get a unicorns and cats categories?

[ihateolives]

Yes, unicorns please!

[vldmrs]

I’ll be sure to add unicorns, thank you!

[curious_mind]

Awesome!! I love the images for the card on the home page, very pleasing.. I would try with my daughter who loves Unicorns and Princesses.

[boredemployee]

damn I wish u did it 10 years ago! I really struggled with it, was so hard to find coloring images for my daughter. now shes 14 so I don't think she will care much :)

[e3bc54b2]

Well done! My niece is going to love this!

Is it possible to get all PDFs at once? Hopefully per section? That will really help to print all at once and get her a single book to go on for couple of weeks.

I thought I could do `curl | grep | xargs curl`, but the site returns 520.

[vldmrs]

I'll think about it.

But I've noticed that if I print out some coloring books for my son, they stay on his desk for a long time and he rarely colors them.

But if I print him one coloring page, he almost always finishes it.

[e3bc54b2]

I suppose each kid is its own :)

My niece tends to finish a book start to end within a week or so, hence why I thought of asking. Another reason is I don't get to see her too often, and it is easier to hand over a book a visit, color a page together to get her started, and then she does the rest.

[bsenftner]

20 years ago I met a young woman in her mid 20's. She's setup coloring book pages with google ads by the thousands, in pretty much every language. Her income from that was around $8K a month, and this was late 90's?

[grepLeigh]

Similar story, but for the mobile era: I knew an indie app developer who built a portfolio of early mobile apps. His top-earners were a coloring book app, bead animal patterns, and a no-essay college scholarship app. Those three allowed him to pay himself and a partner salary and drop contract/client work.

[tecleandor]

Just to be a bit picky, I guess it was Doubleclick or some other thing instead of Google Ads, as Google AdWords started working in 2000

[thinking_monkey]

Amazing! My son also colored a lot but he'd pick only a few pages out of every coloring book so I got the idea to find some online; one-page things to print but the ones I found at the time claimed to be "coloring book pages" but were actually more black-lines-on-white-background actual artwork. Much too complex for simple coloring. Your site would have been the find of the decade!

[twinofficer]

Very valuable for me, too (dad of 3). Thanks for curating!

[cannibalXxx]

what a fascinating friend! i just showed my son and he loved the idea. These are the tools we need for our children's good development and growth

[justmarc]

Beautiful work and presentation! Keep it up!

How about a digital-coloring version too, that kids and adults can use on say a tablet, or even a phone?

[vldmrs]

Some people love doing that but your idea doesn’t resonate with me personally - I prefer holding my pen and drawing or coloring on paper

[thijser]

Great site. Feature request: two essential categories for our family are missing: princesses and unicorns.

[nujabe]

Very nice! I’ve been thinking of some activities for my 3yo and will try coloring and see how he likes it.

[enstyled]

Love this, thank you for creating it!

[marapuru]

Great stuff! I tend to generate some colouring pages on the fly but these look great.

Can you add dinosaurs?

[vldmrs]

Thank you, dinosaurs are in my TODO list

p.s. - my son is an expert at dinos, not sure why I haven’t added them

[marapuru]

Cool, hopefully it will be in your top downloads ;-)

[qup]

When I shared this on Facebook Messenger, it didn't pull in anything more than the title, like a blurb about the site.

I think that's easy to implement, if you care.

I love this project.

[AndrewVos]

Wow, you and I should be friends - this is my project: https://color.vos.lol

[penjelly]

the whole thing is beautiful

[revorad]

This is so nice, thank you for making it!

[ms7892]

Thank you for creating this.

[bnrdr]

Great job, that’s a nice simple idea that has value for lots people.

[ccforyc]

Penguins live in the Antartic. Great idea and web site.

[timcobb]

Awesome that it's offline, too! Amazing work.

[parthianshotgun]

The hands and feet on some of them are downright disturbing. I would not want my child coloring in AI generated slop, there's something fundamentally disconcerting about that.

[emeril]

nice site though some of those are def heavy on the ink/toner with the black backgrounds!!! :)

[Mainsail]

This is incredible! Nice work.

[robertlagrant]

Amazing!

[pratibha_simone]

Cannot love it more!!!!!

[_s_a_m_]

Such a cute website <3

[mocmoc]

This is amazing