Joanne O'Callaghan

Colour Melbourne is unique. A colouring book made entirely by children. Artists aged between three and 10 years old have made this creative and VERY ORIGINAL book.

By pre-ordering your copy of this 80 page book ($20), we can raise the funds needed to publish Colour Melbourne. There are also many other rewards to choose from. 

Click 'Pledge Now' to pre-order your book or one of the other great rewards

We have a talented and enthusiastic group of 52 young artists who want to share their heartfelt, inspired drawings with you and other children.  Colouring books may have grown in popularity for adults, but children love to draw and colour too! Colour Melbourne will show you how much children can draw, love to draw, and how they see the world around them.

Experience Melbourne through a child’s eyes. Bring the city alive with colourful hot air balloons, stripy football jumpers, polka dot fashion, delicious ice-creams, and buildings of all shapes and sizes. Hand-drawn pictures highlight much loved Melbourne landmarks such as Flinders Street Station, Federation Square, the Royal Exhibition Building, Melbourne Cricket Ground, and the National Gallery of Victoria. There are also parks, picnics and penguins. And, of course a tram or two! Colour Melbourne celebrates children’s creativity and marvelous Melbourne.

This book is truly UNIQUE. We believe Colour Melbourne to be Australia's first colouring book made by children (and perhaps a first worldwide... we are still searching).

Supporting Others

We are working toward independently publishing Colour Melbourne and, with your help, we will be able to do just that and MORE!  We would love to supply copies of Colour Melbourne to children in hospital in Melbourne through The Royal Children's Hospital Foundation.  And, if you are outside of Melbourne, there is the option for you to buy and donate Colour Melbourne books to your local hospital.

We also want to help The Resilence Project, an organisation helping young Australian's be mentally healthy. The Reslience Project delivers emotionally engaging programs to schools, sports clubs and business’s and provides them with evidence based, practical strategies to build resilience.  With your help we can provide copies of Colour Melbourne to Victorian school children participating in their programs. 

Behind the scenes working with the artists and developing this book are Colour Melbourne duo Julie Kennedy and Joanne O’Callaghan (you can read more about us below).

The Artwork

Below we share some of the incredible drawings included in the book.

And here are some of our child artists:

With this book we want to give children the message that:

• Their drawings are valued
• Drawings are as varied and individualistic as people
• The process of art making is as important as the end product
• There is no one way to draw something and that drawings don't need to look a certain way
  
  

As you can see, there are no computer drawn images in this colouring book - all the images are drawn by freely by hand, by children. There are also some pages for you to draw things you love about Melbourne. 

Our graphic designer JACKIE CASE is an artist and graphic designer.  Jackie has also successfully published her own book, Flying Penguins, about creativity. GINGER CLARK created the great video that you’ve hopefully just watched.  And a huge thank you to AMBER DAWSON for her help in the art studio. We are enlisting the support of friends and family to spread the word about the project and our Pozible campaign. 

Features of the book

We are passionate about producing a quality book that reflects the wonderful ideas and countless hours of effort the 52 children have put into this project.

Colour Melbourne features:

•  80 pages of unique hand drawn pictures by 52 artists aged 3-10 years old
•  Five themed sections: Creatures Big and Small, Friends and Faces, In the City, Feeling Hungry, Sports, and Transport
•  Blank pages to draw things that you love about Melbourne
•  25 objects of interest to try and find in the book
•  120gsm art paper that helps to prevent bleeding from felt tip markers
•  Fuctionality: Our book is 21cm wide x 26cm high, making it cafe and aeroplane friendly!
•  Suitable for colouring with almost any colouring medium: pencil, crayon, gel pens, ink, felt tip markers, and pastels

Colour Melbourne will be self published and this campaign is to raise the funds needed to complete the book. This campaign gives our supporters the ability to pre-order the book and enables us to finance the design and production of the book. We are also offering our supporters the option to donate books to children in hospital.

The $12,500 that we are hoping to raise will be put toward design and printing costs and will meet our current shortfall for the project (see breakdown below). If we are fortunate enough to raise additional funds, we will use these funds to print more books, donate copies to hospitals in Victoria and beyond, and to assist in distributing the book to bookstores and other outlets.  We would love for Colour Melbourne to be made widely available for sale.  Beyond this we would invest any further surplus funds into creating the next book in our series (dreaming BIG!). 

• Design and printing of 80 page book on 140 gsm art paper         74%
• Pozible fees, GST on books, and bank charges                                18%
• Packaging, postage, and deliveries                                                     8%                                      

                                                                                   TOTAL                  100%

New York, London, Paris, Munich... 

It is the nature of children to dream, and we have been dreaming... BIG DREAMS!  

With your help Colour Melbourne, just might be the first in a new series of colouring books made by children. Colour Sydney, Colour Perth, Colour Brisbane, Colour Beijing, Colour London, Colour New York, Colour Paris - tell us which city you would like to see next in the series.

Behind the scenes are...

JULIE KENNEDY

I worked as a primary school teacher and a solicitor before opening Pip Dot Art Studio, a creative space for children in Melbourne. After teaching children aged three to 10 years of age both in Australia and overseas on and off for the past 20 years – I am now doing what I truly love. My passion for the arts is expressed at Pip Dot Art Studio where I enjoy facilitating children’s creativity and imagination through workshops. I have endless ideas and love how the studio enables me to implement them. 

Colour Melbourne highlights my love for Melbourne and children's natural ability to produce and engage in art. Children are always so proud of the things they’ve made, so you can imagine how thrilled they are to have their work published in a book for other children.  You can see examples of the art my students are creating on my Pip Dot Art Instagram. 

JOANNE O'CALLAGHAN

I am fascinated by the wondrous collaboration of art, design and words. I loved colouring-in as a child. I vividly recall winning a colouring competition when I was eight years old.  I won the largest box of chocolates I had ever seen, filling an entire shelf in the family fridge!  My father, a hobby artist, did give me a few ideas to enhance the picture.

My writing career began during a sabbatical from my corporate career, and (incredibly) I am now one of Hong Kong’s best selling children’s authors. My third book, Found in Hong Kong, was published in late 2015. I am enchanted by Hong Kong, where I lived with my family for twelve years. Now a resident of Melbourne, I am equally as inspired by the city my family now calls home. I have set my sights on creating stories set in Australia and I am working on a number of collaborative projects—including Colour Melbourne.  You can see my work on my website. 

There has been something of an avalanche of colouring books for adults to reach the market during the past two years. This book is truly UNIQUE. We would like to provide children with engaging and wonderful colouring books too! We have yet to find a colouring book that has been created by the hands and imaginations of children. 

Standing out in a crowded market is a challenge. We have an active community of art students and families who are supporting us, and we are endeavouring to build on this grass roots foundation to guide this project to success. 

We are well progressed with the artwork completed, the book designed, a prototype made, and a printer selected for this project. We have built some buffer into our timeline to allow for any unforeseen delays. Should there be any delays we will be sure to keep you informed.

WATCH THE COLOUR MELBOURNE STORY UNFOLD

Watch the story of Colour Melbourne unfold by following us on Instagram - Colour Melbourne.