Color Me Fashionable
And get ready for a new coloring contest!
If you like to color and enter contests, then you are in luck: Dover’s all-ages coloring contests are back and bigger and better than ever!
As always, we invite you to share a completed Dover, Creative Haven, BLISS, or Stay Calm and Color branded coloring page on our contest site, and we’ll award prizes in three age categories: Under 12, 12–17, and 18+. But, now, we’ve pumped up the prizes and first place winners in each of three age categories will receive a $100 Dover gift card, second place winners get a $50 Dover gift card, and third place winners a $25 gift card! We’ve also extended the entry period to two months, so you can take your time perfecting your work.
Our latest contest, To The Nines, begins on February 1 and through March 31. And it’s all about fashion in all its glory. So sharpen your pencils and uncap your markers: you could win using fashion coloring pages from Dover!
There’s nothing like understanding clothing to help you understand a culture. By looking at how clothing conceals or reveals, we learn what people in a particular place and time value about the human body or what must be kept hidden (which could be both things at the same time, of course).
By looking at fabric and color in addition to cut, we can see the art of design put into service to the individual. And in today’s world, we can be as individual as we want. There are no sumptuary laws in this country. In Elizabethan England, for example, regular people weren’t allowed to wear certain colors or textiles. But you can wear what you want, when you want. The only limit is your imagination.
If your imagination runs towards beautiful clothes, then Dover has a series of Creative Haven Coloring Books that will let you indulge your wildest clothing dreams with the colors of your choice.
You can also learn a little something about the history of clothing by coloring. For example, the velocity of fashion has been on overdrive since the early twentieth century, where undergarments for women leapt from corsets to camisoles in a generation. Dover artist Ming-Ju Sun has two coloring books in the Creative Haven line that demonstrate this contrast, Art Nouveau Fashions and Art Deco Fashions.
The embroidery of art nouveau gave way to the bold prints of art deco. Delicate lace and nipped-in waists yielded to a relaxed silhouette, which also provided a blank canvas for designers to show off whimsical fabrics and bold colors.
The fabric design award really needs to go to the creators of the kimono, that deceptively simple robe that shimmers and drapes. The fabrics are endless and in the Creative Haven Japanese Kimono Coloring Book, you can color patterns drawn from nature. If you want or need inspiration, Dover has a wonderful collection of Japanese kimono designs in full color. These nineteenth century images are astonishing and timeless and will inspire all of your moments of coloring and creating beautiful original art.
