How to Make Your Own Grayscale Coloring Pages

Whether you are an ardent grayscale coloring fan or someone who is looking to try grayscale coloring for the first time, knowing how to make your own grayscale coloring pages gives you great flexibility with your coloring, as well as helping to save money!

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Grayscale coloring is a little different from ‘normal’ coloring. Instead of coloring between the lines, we color over the whole image. The image is in different shades of gray, and this is what adds contrast, depth and dimension to the coloring. Grayscale coloring gives a high degree of realism (if that’s the effect you are after) without having to know lots of fancy coloring techniques.

Why Create Your Own Grayscale Coloring Pages?

There are many reasons why you might want to create your own grayscale coloring pages. For a start, it gives you the opportunity to create exactly the right page for you. Perhaps you want to use the finished page to make a greeting card or print as wall art. If you create your own, you can create a page to your required measurements.

While you can simply make a black and white version of a photo, there’s a little more to it if you want to make a coloring page as we want to ensure we have good definition and that the light areas are enhanced.

You can also adjust the brightness and contrast when you create your own grayscale page. This means you can create pages which are lighter or darker than the original, which gives a huge amount of flexibility.

How to Create Grayscale Coloring Pages

All you require is a photo and an app to convert the image to black and white.

I am using the free online site ‘Photofunia‘. However apps such as Photopea, Affinity Photo/Designer, Photoshop etc will also do the job well. Many sites and apps that provide filters for photos include a black and white, grayscale or monotone option. However, look for ones that allow you to adjust the settings so you can tweak the results to get the desired effect. One of the things I like about Photofunia is we can pick between soft, medium and high contrast. There are also other features like frames and texture options. Plus it’s all free!

Step One: Choose Your Image

Choose your image – this could be a photo you’ve taken or a public domain image from a site such as Pixabay.

Look for images which are going to be fun to color. The iguana I’ve used is going to be perfect, lots of texture and detail – you will find the original photo HERE. The texture on his skin makes it an interesting project whether you are an experienced colorist or someone starting out.

Choose the size you want, and also check the license agreement (if appropriate). This image is licensed for commercial use – therefore if I wanted to make products with the finished colored image on them, I could do so. This means if I love the finished result, I could make prints, mugs etc for sale.

Step Two: Navigate to Photofunia

Head to Photofunia HERE and select ‘black and white contrast’ under ‘filters’:

Step 3: Upload Image and Crop to Size

Upload your image where prompted and crop it as required. Just pull in the handles to adjust where the image is going to be cropped:

Step 4: Adjust the Settings

You will see we have three contrast settings and further options of adding texture and frames to the image. Try different things to see which effects work best. This will be dependent on the image and your own personal preferences:

When you are happy, download the image and either print or upload it to your favorite digital coloring app ready to color!