Coloring book for adults - To Be a Woman

I created this coloring book during my internship at Katoen Drukkerij.

It has a body positivity theme, specifically body hair. At the end of the book, I wrote:
'The theme of this book is body positivity, mostly focused on female body hair. As a hairy woman, I often feel ashamed of my leg hair especially, which is why all the gorgeous ladies in this book have leg hair. I would like my audience to feel seen by looking at my art, and so I hope that this coloring book makes you feel more comfortable with your body hair!'

I designed the pages as spreads, so the ladies are facing each other. Next to this I created borders with differing patterns. If you look closely, you can see that the borders in the spreads often match, but are just a bit different from each other. A coloring book of course needs to be interesting to colour in, and at first I was struggling a bit with placing my illustrations in this context. After some field research I found that most coloring books achieve this by adding geometric patterns, which I incorporated in the borders.

It was really fun to create my own book from scratch, and go through the process of working and communicating with a printer. It took quite some proof prints to get to the final book, but I am super satisfied with the result!

'To be a woman' is available in my Etsy shop!