Outlander coloring pages: The Outlander Un-Official coloring book 2015 Holiday Edition

Dear Outlander fellow fans, 

Regarding the Outlander Coloring book you probably are in some of these categories:

a) The  Outlander official coloring book prominently features in your letter to Santa
b) You started coloring it (did you have problems with Frank's car?, mine looks terrible)
c) You finished coloring it (for real? I am not nearly there)
d) What is The  Outlander official coloring book?
e) Other (In case I forgot an obvious or totally improbable option)

There is no correct answer because I have a present for all of you. I learned some new tricks and converted the beautiful images that "Starz" has shared with us (as a Canadian anchor put it: Outlander is on something called Starz). It is a shame the coloring book has no right to use the  TV series material. Not that I have any, but I hope I am being fair by giving Starz its credit and stating this is just fan art.

I fully disclose here that I am not a professional and that someone else might do a much better job. At least I can say that the idea was entirely mine and the results are good enough to make me want to share them. Note: click once on the color image to enlarge. For the coloring pages, you will find a download link at the end of the post.



What do you think? This is Diana Gabaldon. Author of the Outlander series as the character she plays in Starz Outlander TV series episode "The Gathering" as Iona MacTavish, a wealthy merchant's wife.


Bonus: 
If you have KIDS you might have noticed that your coloring book sparks the little ones enthusiasm to annoying degrees and you end up producing some form of coloring book for them. Well, these pages can be printed (and reprinted, no need for tantrums after a mistake) and you are free to color. Maybe you still will have to get them some crayons if you don't want to share the "good" coloring pencils.


1. Bouton: Claire's Dog in Paris (Outlander season 2) let's start with something easy to sharpen your pencils.





2. The wedding: Jamie and Claire entering the Kirk.  (Outlander season 1)




3. The wedding night: Jamie and Claire  (Outlander season 1)




4. Claire and Jenny at Lallybroch: I love this domestic scene! (Outlander season 1)

5. Claire and Murtagh: looking for Jamie (Who doesn't like to color horses?) (Outlander season 1)



6. Frank Randall and Black Jack Randall: For his fans, I know there is a cave full of them according to one insider.  They are a fun loving bunch not easily shocked. Who else would be a fan of Black Jack. (Outlander season 1).

6.  Jamie and Claire at a party in France (Outlander Season 2): This and the next are my first attempt at converting the images: The lines are harder. 





7.  Claire awaiting in a room. (Outlander Season 2). I like the composition, although Claire looks about to start crying.




8. Jamie&Murtagh: The Parisian can-can (Outlander Season 2)



9. Claire's princess dress. Again the shadows make my task difficult.






Instructions: 
If you want to color these images follow the link to download the PDFs. 
1. If you are not asked where to download it will probably be in your "download" folder. 
2. Make sure to adjust the image to the size of your page before printing: 

Folder PDFs coloring pages click on this link


I hope you enjoy your coloring experience, and I hope I will have material for a new edition or volume II. I accept all kind of suggestions!

Miranda


note: I thank a fellow blogger for her tutorial on how to add PDFs to my blog How to attach PDFs

The dawn of the adult coloring book: The new therapy

Dear ladies (and gentlemen?),

When I was a child my mother would read bedtime stories to my brother and me. It was a time of the day I would cherish.  She chose among her own childhood books and as we grew older she would read increasingly complex stories. One of the books I remember was the epic story The Winter Queen. It had wonderful drawings of Eastern European snowy landscapes. The characters were depicted wearing traditional costumes with rich embroidery. Most were black and white but my own mother had carefully coloured them when she was a teenager. My mother was born in 1940, she must have been coloring the book in 1953-55. 

This illustration is from the book "The Hat" by Jan Brett. When I next visit my home country I will update this pictured with one from my late mother's book if I can find it. But the clothes of the girls are in the stile of the book I was describing.

And here I am in 2015, sixty years later, longing to start my first historical fiction "adult" coloring book. I pre-ordered it about a month ago and I just received an email that reads: “We now have delivery date(s) for the order you placed on September 07, 2015  Gabaldon, Diana -The Official Outlander Coloring Book-…”. Mrs Gabaldon, being the great story teller she is gives her own description:  

"Well… adult coloring books. Evidently this is now a "thing," with so-called adult coloring books being touted widely as aids to meditation, as well as entertainment. I can kind of see that, and certainly I’ve seen several very beautiful books that look like they’d be interesting to color, if one was so inclined. (NB: The "adult" designation apparently merely means they’re marketed to adults, not that they contain R-rated illustrations. (Frankly, I think they’d be more interesting if they did, but probably not a good marketing strategy for a wide audience)” You can continue reading here Diana's page

And it seems we are in the midst of a literary (if it might be so described) boom. In Montreal, were I live, I have already found two stores, one a hardware store that also has nice presents and decoration and one home décor store Zone were adult coloring books were in prominent display, in the later including a tempting array of crayons and pencils. I took some pics to share:  

These are the pics from the store Zone in Montreal. the "Secret Garden"  is by Johanna Basford who is the author of marvellously detailed coloring books. See the detail of her book "Secret Ocean"

You can see pins of her book in my board pins including the Game of Thrones coloring book (yes there is one!) and an adult take on the classics "Grimm Fairy Tales Adult Coloring Book by  Jamie Tyndallet et al.









To my delight I found this big maps of two of my favourite cities: The New York City and the Paris  giant coloring roll. Also available from amazon Amazon_NEW-YORK. I picture myself taking over the dinner table for a me -time project while it snows outside. My beautiful box of color (or colour) pencils and maybe a cup of tea (cartful not to spill a drop!)

It certainly makes a very nice present for all budgets (starting at just a few dollars). You can add a nice box of pencils and voilà, guaranteed to glitter. In fact, last Christmas, unaware of the "it" factor in-the-making I gave a mandala coloring book to my Yoga-enthusiast aunt and she was delighted. She does therapy for teens and she thought it would be a nice addition to her desk's "toolbox" . In addition, it was easy to send across continents. What's not to like?.

Wishing you a relaxing coloring experience!
Miranda

Encouragement for writers by Diana Gabaldon

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

I just had to share this amazing work in progress by Diana Gabaldon (She posted it on her Facebook page today). Even for just the pleasure of reading something written by her, and specially if you are  a writer or want to become one. 

"  you can make any fifth-grader cough up a reasonably coherent essay using the linear model—and no one ever mentions that this isn’t the only way to do it."

MIND GAMES

[Excerpt from THE CANNIBAL’S ART (not published; in progress). Copyright 2014 Diana Gabaldon]

The greatest thing about writing is that it’s just you and the page. The most horrifying thing about writing is that it’s just you and the page. Contemplation of that dichotomy is enough to stop most people dead in their tracks.

Success in writing—and by that, I mean getting the contents of your head out onto the page in a form that other people can relate to—is largely a matter of playing mind games with yourself. In order to get anywhere, you need to figure out how your own mind works—and believe me, people are not all wired up the same way.*

Casual observation (i.e., talking to writers for thirty years or so) suggests that about half of us are linear thinkers. These people really _profit_ from outlines and wall-charts and index cards filled out neatly in blue pen with each character’s shoe size and sexual history (footnoted if these are directly correlated). The rest of us couldn’t write that way if you paid us to.

The non-linear thinkers are described in all kinds of ways, most of them not euphonious: chunk writers, pantsters (_really_ dislike that one, as it suggests one’s literary output is not from the upper end of the torso), piecers, etc. ** All these terms carry a whiff of dismissal, if not outright disdain or illegitimacy, and there’s a reason for that.

Anyone educated in the art of composition in the Western Hemisphere any time in the last hundred years was firmly taught that there is One Correct Way to write, and it involves strictly linear planning, thought, and execution. You Must Have a Topic Sentence. You Must Have a Topic Paragraph. YOU MUST HAVE AN OUTLINE. And so forth and so tediously on…

Got news for you: You don’t have to do it that way. _Anything_ that gets words on the page is the Right Thing to Do.

Now, as a non-linear thinker myself, I prefer less pejorative terms. I like “network thinker.” Consider thinking and writing as a process that lights up your synapses (which it does): a linear thinker is like a string of holiday lights. Red-blue-green-yellow-blue-red-orange-yellow-green-red! And it lights up and then you can wind it around your Christmas tree or your Kwanzaa flag and it’s all pretty.

Well. You know those nets of lights that you throw over your front wall or your cactus or anything else that it would be inconvenient to staple strings of lights to? Those look like this:

Red - Yellow - Blue - Green - Red – Orange
l l l l l l
Blue - Orange - Red - Yellow – Green – Red
l l l l l l
Yellow – Green - Blue - Red - Orange – Red

The logical connections (the electricity, if you will) between any two lights in that network are there. It isn’t random, and in the end, it’s logical. It’s even linear. It just…isn’t necessarily a straight line.

Now, the reason that the educational establishment insists on the linear model of writing is that you can force a non-linear writer to work linearly (or apparently linearly). You can _not_ make a linear writer work non-linearly. (In fact, every time I describe the way I write to a linear-thinking person, they get annoyed. “You can’t _possibly_ do it that way!” they say. By which they mean that _they_ can’t possibly do it that way—and they can’t.)

But you can make any fifth-grader cough up a reasonably coherent essay using the linear model—and no one ever mentions that this isn’t the only way to do it. (Every time I go talk to an elementary-school class for Career Day, I pause mid-way and ask the teacher to turn his or her back. Then I tell the kids, “OK, the teacher can’t see you, so tell me the truth. When you get one of those essay assignments and you have to turn in an outline and a rough draft and a polished draft and a final copy….how many of you just write the final copy and then fake up the rest?” About a third of the class will raise their hands. I think it would be more, but some of them are scared to admit it.
……

• This is why you can read an article purporting to tell you How to Write, and discover that you just can’t write that way. That’s because the writer is not really telling _you_ how to write; he or she is just explaining how _they_ write. Maybe they have the same kind of brain you do—but maybe they don’t.

• ** This is the insidious principle that underlies Politically Correct speech, btw—the undeniable recognition that names have power, coupled with the invidious notion that by insisting on a specific term, the person assigning the name thus controls the person named, by controlling the perception of the named party. Hence the tiresome attempts to rename political parties as “haters,” “tax-and-spend liberals,” etc.

Stupidly annoying as this may be—it works. Frankly, it’s a lot older than the notion of PC; it’s one of the baseline techniques of exorcism and voodoo. As a character in one of my books observes, “Ye don’t call something by name unless ye want it to come.”

The writer Diana Gabaldon in a Cameo appearance on the TV  adaptation of her book Outlander.

 How would you feel to have the chance to be inside your own creation?

Miranda