March 18, 2012

Fun with Aesop

For the past year in my "spare time" I have been having fun making coloring pages to go along with The Aesop For Children story book. The book was a gift from my sister-in-law who is also homeschooling. (thanks Suzie!) There are so many versions of Aesop's Fables out on the market but I have always loved Milo Winter's drawings and so I love this version the best. I have had loads of fun tracing each one of his wonderful drawings. There are over 100. That is why it has taken me all year. :) This version of the book is also in the public domain over at project gutenberg so it is free to make use of how your creativity may lead you.

I plan to use this book next year to compliment our history study of Greece and Rome. So with the single line drawings I was able to make by tracing the pictures, I have put together some copywork pages and some coloring pages. To boot, I made montessori cards and formatted this charming book into an e-book for easy usage. Now all my boys can have a copy to read from. All my creations from this project are for sale over at Currclick.

The idea for this project was first ignited when Nadene over at practical pages posted about tracing fine art paintings for her daughters. I was intrigued by her process and decided to try it with Aesop. Here is how it is done...

First I snagged a free copy of The Aesop For Children from project gutenberg. I chose the HTML version and selected all the text and pictures and pasted it into a word document. Then I grabbed a picture and printed it. 
Next I traced the picture onto velum. I tried using a lightweight tracing paper but in the next step when I scan the traced image, the light weight tracing paper warped a little and made smudgy lines in the final image. The velum worked great!

This traced picture was then scanned into the computer as a paint file.

With the JPEG images I can use them to create whatever I want. Above is a coloring page from the coloring book, and below is a copywork/coloring page with regular lines.


You will see more of these pages next year.
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10 comments:

  1. BeccaMarch 25, 2012 at 5:59 AM

    Hi Sarah,

    I bought the Coloring Book (love it!). It was perfect timing for us because we were just about to begin a read-through of Aesop's Fables! We began on Friday and used the first page in our coloring book!

    I hadn't had time to hole punch and get the book into a folder, and tonight as I sat down to get the job done, I noticed that page 74 is blank and the Table of Contents goes from 99 to 101. :-)

    Love,
    Becca

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    1. SarahMarch 25, 2012 at 1:42 PM

      I am so happy you are liking the Aesop's Coloring book! And thank you for pointing out the errors. If you send me your email adress I'll send you a corrected copy. I so appreciate you alerting me to this. Thanks!

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  2. Aadel BussingerApril 7, 2012 at 5:44 AM

    These are awesome! You did a lovely job.

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  3. NadeneApril 11, 2012 at 2:48 PM

    Wow - what a wonderful application for this amazing book! I'm sure my youngest would have loved to colour in while I read aloud!

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    1. SarahApril 15, 2012 at 11:04 AM

      Thanks Nadene, your post was the spark to get me going, so I am in your debt. I hope your daughter enjoys the coloring book.

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  4. Traci BestApril 12, 2012 at 9:11 PM

    Wonderful post! Thank you so much for sharing! :D

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  5. JulieMay 22, 2012 at 10:58 PM

    Wow! These are just perfect for us, as we're going to do a light year-long study of Aesop's fables. My girls will love coloring them. Thanks so much for sharing!

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    1. SarahMay 23, 2012 at 6:13 AM

      Julie, what sort of a year long study are you doing? I want to do one too using the pages I have created but I can not settle on how to go about it just yet. I would love to hear your ideas. I hope you will share them. :)

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