Christmas on Holly Lane

Forty calm Christmas pictures to print and color, all set in one small snowy village.

A stone cottage on Holly Lane, its kitchen and its fireside, and the village down the hill: the first snow, the tree coming home on the old truck, the bakery window, the Christmas market, stockings on the mantel, Santa over the rooftops, paper everywhere on Christmas morning, and lights out on Christmas night. Clean, bold black lines, big clear spaces, and nothing spooky: it is Christmas all the way through.

Why a printable book

The complaint buyers make most often about printed coloring books is thin paper: markers bleed through and spoil the picture on the back. This book is a PDF, so every picture has a page to itself with nothing behind it, you choose the paper that suits your pens, and you can print a favorite as many times as you like: one to practice on, one to keep, one for whoever is coloring beside you.

What is inside

• 40 pictures in five parts: The First Snow, Making Things, Out in the Village, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Each part opens with color notes for its pages (how to make a window look lit, how to color fire, where to leave the snow white).
• Pick a page for tonight. Every picture is sorted by how long it takes, from a short sitting of about an hour to a project for several evenings, so you can choose by the time you have.
• Printing and paper: which paper weight suits pencils, felt-tips, gel pens, alcohol markers and watercolor; inkjet or laser; how to trim a finished picture to fit a standard 8 x 10 frame.
• Choosing colors: one picture colored four ways (classic red and green, Nordic, candlelight, frosted pastel), each with its six colors named, plus how to build a set of your own.
• Making a winter page glow: one picture, four decisions, shown before the first color goes on, with the same scene in morning, early evening and late night skies.
• A test page to try every pen on your paper first, with a bleed square to check the back.
• 8 gift tags and 2 folding cards to color, cut out and give.

What you download

• Christmas on Holly Lane, the whole book (60 pages), in US Letter and in A4.
• Pictures only (45 pages), in US Letter and in A4: just the 40 pictures, the tags, the cards and the test page, so picture 12 is page 12 and printing one page is quick.

Every picture is the same size on both paper sizes, 6.7 x 9 in (171 x 228 mm), with a thin frame and its title underneath. Print single-sided at actual size on any home printer or at a print shop; a black-and-white printer is all you need.

Good to know

• Drawn for adults and older teens; younger children can color alongside. No people's faces appear, so every scene is yours to finish.
• American spelling (color, coloring) throughout.
• This is a PDF download. No physical book is shipped.