DinoZoo Coloring Book

 

Well, plenty of time (too much, I’m afraid) has gone by since my last post and, among other things that have happened since then, the winners of the Jurassic Park 30^th Anniversary Challenge by Threadless were finally announced several months ago. For a contest that started in September 2023, and whose winners should have been notified by November 27^th, it really took a long time (can’t remember when it exactly happened). It took so long that at one point I feared that it might have been called off for some sponsor-related reason. I emailed them in June 2024 asking about it, and this was Luis’s kind reply:

“Hi Josep,

Thanks for contacting us. The Jurassic Park challenge has not been cancelled. All the winners have been contacted at this time but we have not made any announcements because licensed design challenges sometimes have a lot of moving parts. In this particular case there's licensors as well as retail outlets that need to align in dates for the announcement to happen which is why it has taken longer than our standard challenges usually take.

If you have not been contacted by our team regarding your design it means that unfortunately it may have not been selected at this time. If you have any questions please let us know.”

So it was actually worse for me than it having been canceled, as by that point I could be certain that I was not among the winners. Oh well, it was kind of expected. As I probably already mentioned in my previous post, contestants had to reside in one of the 50 states in the US or Puerto Rico to be eligible, so I was out before I even tried to get in, really. I can still use those designs (minus the JP branding, of course) on other print-on-demand sites. Not that I managed to sell any yet, but still, there they are.

It was a bummer, though, to see that none of my favorite designs from other contestants ended up winning. I really, really liked a handful of them. Also shocking to see the actual winners. I kind of like the one one that ended up in 3^rd place, but the other 2…

 Anyway, here are the 3 winners:

 

Congratulations to all of them! If the image above gets taken down for some reason, you can check them out yourself here.

Moving on! All the Jurassic Park imagery and concepts that the contest brought back to my mind, plus the announcement of of yet another Jurassic World sequel to be released in July 2025, gave me the idea to recycle, reuse, modify and adapt many of my old dinosaur drawings to make a coloring book aimed at older kids and adults. I already had some of my pieces on print-on-demand sites like LaTostadora, TeePublic or RedBubble, available to purchase on apparel, posters, mugs, prints, etc. With very little success I must say, but I’ve managed to sell a few (I think I’ve made a little less than $20 in 2 years, so yeah, I’m not exactly crushing it). However, it wasn’t until very recently that I found out there is print-on-demand for books too! Why had I never thought about it before? It turns out Amazon has Kindle Direct Publishing, where you can publish your book online so anyone interested can order it. Copies only get printed when someone buys them, so there are no upfront costs. It’s a pure print-on-demand model, where you get a royalty fee for every sale. You just have to set up an Amazon KDP account (easy if you already have a generic Amazon one), enter your personal data, provide your bank and tax information, upload a PDF file with the book’s content, and create (or provide your already made) front and back covers. The book is then reviewed by Amazon (apparently by both bots and human staff) and published for online purchase if found suitable.

Well, my book is out! It’s called DinoZoo Coloring Book and it contains 51 drawings of dinosaurs and other creatures from the Mesozoic Era, printed only on one side of every sheet of paper to avoid bleed-through, which is apparently very common nowadays. Size is regular US Letter, which I think suits the drawings well. And unlike many of the somewhat similar products I’ve seen on Amazon itself and other platforms, it isn’t either cartoonish to the point of ridicule, nor is it full of AI-generated trash. 51 reasonably realistic, 100% human made drawings. Some I had to update a bit and others are still kind of dated now, since they were originally made a long time ago for another project, but still more accurate than anything else I’ve seen in a coloring book so far. I know, the name is not very original, but I already had the logo from a year ago, when I thought of using it to sell my designs from the JP30 contest without the Jurassic Park branding. It’s simple, easy to remember, and it works for this new purpose.

 

Cover Illustration.

Two of the creatures on the cover were slightly modified to update them according to what we know now (the wings of the Pteranodon were made wider, and now the Titanosaur has only one claw in every “hand”, as it should be), and so were several of the drawings for coloring. Some are even mash-ups from previous pieces, and I added simple backgrounds to most of them, all of which took a lot of work, but I think the end result is pretty cool. Here are some examples. 

 

I tried to include relatively obscure genera (like Eotyrannus, Sinosauropteryx or Wuerhosaurus) along with the usual suspects in dinosaur literature. It’s just a coloring book, but I would be glad if it could inform people young and old about the very existence of certain creatures that are seldom mentioned in popular media. I also wanted to include animals from South America, Asia and Europe, as most popular books are heavy on mostly North American dinosaurs. Hence the presence of Herrerasaurus, Argentinosaurus, Giganotosaurus, Oviraptor and the now seemingly forgotten Megalosaurus, of which I included both a retro, 19^th century-style reconstruction along with a more modern depiction, as with the once ubiquitous Iguanodon.

 

Retro, 19th Century style portraits of Megalosaurus & Iguanodon.

 

Originally it was going to be aimed at kids of all ages, but apparently dinosaur books for children today are way tamer than they used to be in my time. As I said earlier, they are now more often than not full of cartoonish and cute illustrations, and violent scenes seem to be completely out of the equation. I still keep all my books from when I was a kid myself, and back then, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, they all aimed at scientific accuracy and were, compared to what’s available now, pretty brutal, with violent scenes of hunting shown with all their gory glory, like the ubiquitous Tenontosaurus being overwhelmed by a pack of Deinonychus (the actual dinosaur on which the Raptors from Jurassic Park were based on). Turns out things have changed a bit! Since I have at least one scene depicting a meat-eater with its deceased prey (see the Giganotosaurus above), I decided to aim it at children older than 8 and adults just to be safe, although I’m pretty sure younger kids can enjoy it all the same without being left emotionally scarred for life by my barbaric, old-timey vision of dinosaur books.

 

This, however, brings another issue I wasn’t aware of at all, and that’s the existence, and apparent popularity, of coloring books for adults. All this stuff makes me feel very old, but I’m sure coloring books were exclusively for young children back in my time. At some point in the 2000s or 2010s someone figured out that they are useful as a stress relief tool for grownups and a new market for activity books was born. From what I’ve seen, most of them are based around mandalas and other kinds of geometric shapes, but there are also very interesting ones depicting movie scenes, celebrities, swear words (!), and even explicitly violent and sexual content (just this morning I found a coloring book with a portrait of Ted Bundy on the cover). Never saw that one coming, honestly. God I’m old. Anyway, there’s also more standard fare offering animal illustrations for coloring, and I think there’s where my book could find its niche too. Also, adults may find the Lulu version more attractive than the standard Amazon paperback. Yes, my DinoZoo book is also on Lulu, another print on demand store for self publishing that offers higher quality paper and printing, as well as a higher profit margin for authors, and also allows you to sell your book through big book retailers like Barnes & Noble and the like. The Lulu version is significantly more expensive, but it also offers a higher quality and more durable product, which may sound more attractive to adults looking for a sturdy dinosaur coloring book… if they even exist. I hope they do! 

That pretty much sums up everything I wanted to say at this point. I am eagerly waiting for my proof copy from Lulu, which should arrive on the mail this week. I just noticed that I didn’t order a proof copy from Amazon, and I definitely should. It will be really cool to have both versions in my hands and compare. Also, I think I should purchase a few author copies and send them to reviewers on YouTube just to spread the word about it. I don’t have a huge online presence since I don’t really enjoy social media. I’m on several art sites and print-on-demand stores, I have my website on WordPress, I have this very blog, and I’m also on Instagram, although I’m not very active there because of the “not really enjoying social media” thing that I suffer from. Maybe I should get a Facebook profile? Many artists seem to have one. I was there briefly but I shut it down in 2010 because it was such a time waster. And it’s painful enough having to deal with Meta using WhatsApp and Instagram already. But I’ll think about. Contacting online reviewers sounds like a more practical strategy at this point.

Thanks and take care!