Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects and Activities for Dads and Kids to Share (5 page)

When you’ve settled on the tool, it’s time to get creative. Everything is up to you—what do you find funny or compelling? How do you like seeing a story or a joke told? Here are a few things to think about:

In the end, depending upon the subject matter and the tools you use, your final product may look something like this (I went with an imagined conversation with iTunes here):

The best thing about this technique is how easy it can be to build up a store of images—close-ups of different expressions, or generic interactions between regular characters—to the point where you won’t always need to shoot new images when you come up with a new idea. After a while, you’ll be able to simply pull from your archive of shots to build new strips. In this way, any time a new idea hits you and your kid, the payoff can be very quick (while teaching a valuable lesson about planning ahead and being prepared for the future). Plus, you know, it’s fun.

F
rom the moment most children are old enough to pick up a crayon, coloring is a creative pastime they enjoy. And please take special note of that word:
pastime
. How many times, on a rainy day at home perhaps or when you know they are stuck in a waiting room with you, have you been desperate to NOT let your kids be babysat by a video game machine or the television? Coloring can be an absorbing, constructive, imaginative way of passing the time—even for older children. And it can be just as portable as any Nintendo DS or PlayStation Portable (PSP).

But the selection of available coloring books is always either bound by current pop culture or skewed to younger children, and can put older kids off. What if you could make your own coloring books for your kids, filled with images for them to color that come from things they actually love and will get absorbed in? Well, you can, and pretty easily, too. Here’s how.

Because there are levels to artistic ability and interest, I’ll show you two different coloring pages you can make. First, the classic dot-to-dot, then coloring sheets. They are all made from images you can find online or scan into your computer from sources at home.

To start, you have to pick the image you want to turn into the coloring page. For dot-to-dots, it’s going to be a lot easier to select simple images, though if you’re patient and want more detail, you can go for the gusto with more detailed pictures. But dot-to-dots are great for younger kids who are learning about staying within the borders. And they love to be amazed by what they can create by drawing a series of lines between dots.

For this example, we’re going really simple—an image of the sigil of the Rebel Alliance.

(Advisory: If you are reasonably experienced with graphics software and know what a layer is, you can skip down a couple of paragraphs to the one that starts “Select a pen . . .”.)

Assuming you’re a geek, we are going to figure you have some manner of graphics software, probably for touching up pictures from your digital camera. Common (and pretty good) examples of such software include Photoshop Elements (the cheaper, easier-to-use version of the industry standard Photoshop) available on Mac or PC; Pixelmator for the Mac; or GIMP, which works on PC, Mac, or Linux and is FREE FREE FREE. Maybe you haven’t played around with the software that much. If that’s the case, here’s a quick lesson about the first feature you’re going to use.

A layer is a standard concept in image editing software. Conceptually, it’s very simple. Imagine if you took a printed picture and laid a piece of tracing paper over it, and then copied the features by hand on that tracing paper. Well, a layer is just like tracing paper, only it works digitally on the computer, and you can have as many of them as you want.

 

STEP 1
: For this project, you open your base image in the editing software of your choice. Then you add a layer. Most of these pieces of software have a menu actually called “Layer” from which you can “Add a Layer.” Once you’ve done that, there is a perfectly transparent layer of digital tracing paper on top of your image, upon which you can now trace, without affecting the original picture.

 

STEP 2
: Select a pen or pencil tool and a fairly small brush size to make your dots with. Draw black dots all around the edges of the image, at relatively even intervals. Straight lines need only one dot at either end. Curves need more so that, when they are connected, they will better re-create the curve.

 

STEP 3:
These programs should have a separate control window that shows all the layers in the current project. From this window, you can now “turn off” the layer with the original image on it so that you see only the dots.

 

STEP 4
: If you want to go all the way, you can also use the program’s text feature to add numbers next to each dot to give your artist a sequence to follow. Or you can just save this file and print as many of them as your kids want to color, letting them be creative and decide how to connect the dots.

Obviously, older kids and those with more advanced coloring skills are going to be hankering for something a bit more challenging than connect-the-dots. What’s great is that these graphics programs have filters that let you kick out coloring pages by the ream with only a couple of clicks. They require even less work than the dot-to-dots.

Pick an image. For this example, I used a snapshot I took of my classic Nauga (
www.nauga.com/promoitems_nauga.html
) in my office. I opened the image in Pixelmator and then used “Filter-Stylize-Line Overlay” to automatically find the edges in the image and drop everything else out, making a perfect coloring sheet (there are settings you can tweak to get it “just right”).