Colouring pages appeal to lots of people of all ages and it’s a pretty low-stakes activity to provide. Sitting down with a pretty picture and a set of coloured pens is a good way to take a short time-out in the middle of a busy convention. So when thinking about what craft activities I wanted to organize for Dublin 2019, colouring pages were a no-brainer to put on the list.

Inspired by the lovely colouring book that Worldcon75 in Helsinki put together, I wanted to provide images that had some connection to Dublin 2019, and I wanted to have a variety of artistic styles and levels of complexity represented. Where to get those, though? Turns out lots of artists were involved with the convention in one way or another and happy to share their work.

Preparation

So, where did I find those people? First stop, the design team: Dublin 2019 Design and Branding Lead Sara Felix contributed a line art version of the Dublin 2019 logo, which was used as a colouring page as well as a plate for the letterpress printing workshop by the National Print Museum. Iain Clark was happy to share the line drawings that a lot of his art work for the convention were based on. Here’s my favourite colouring page and the poster from the NPM workshop:

I also reached out to the Art Show team. Art Show Deputy Area Head Serena Culfeather provided some lovely geometric designs, and also reached out to two-time Hugo-Award-winning fan artist Sue Mason, who gave us lovely detailed dragons, unicorns and a super hero girl.

Posting to the Dublin 2019 staff discussion list brought the last set of pictures. Mirkka Ojala is a teacher from Finland, and drew some lovely simple horses and princesses that I was convinced would appeal to the younger crowd.

All in all we had 20 different images. As you can see in the picture above, I added a letter for easy identification to each one as well as the name of each artist and the Dublin 2019 logo. We got 50 of each image printed, making 1000 pages all in all.

During the Convention

We ended up having space both in the CCD Forum, which also had the dealers, fan tables, and displays, and in the Warehouse at Point Square near the Art Show. I split the printed pages in half to start with. For colouring, I got a selection of felt-tip pens, crayons, and coloured pencils. Initially, we put out about five copies of each design in each location. I scheduled volunteers for twice-daily housekeeping in each location, making sure there were enough supplies and things were looking good. On the last day we were running out of copies at the CCD, which was not very surprising given that there were many more people there than at Point Square. Sending most of the spare printouts over solved that problem nicely, so I’d say we were pretty spot on with the number of printouts we got.

Lessons learned

I think we got that one mostly right. The twice-daily clean-up was a lesson I’d taken away from Helsinki two years ago, when I ended up doing most of that job myself and realized that yes, it is necessary, even when most people are good about cleaning up after themselves.