What a long journey this coloring book has gone on! This blog post has been sitting in my drafts for over a year and I thought it was finally time to publish it.
If you’re not aware of the previous coloring books, they have been a series of projects started by Máirín Duffy and Dan Walsh to increase awareness and convey a better understanding of different technology.
For example, ‘The Container Coloring Book: Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?’ is a coloring book where the three little pigs teach you how to keep the big bad wolf from blowing your container-based applications down. The book covers security, management, resource control, namespaces, and much more that people should keep in mind when creating their own applications with containers.
All of the past (and hopefully future coloring books too!) are kept here at www.red.ht/coloring
‘EDA and the Three Dwarves’ was written by Máirín Duffy and then the script was handed off to me when I was an intern in 2020.
I numbered each beat in the script that I could imagine a visual for, which was a lot since this was going to be a comic and not just one picture on each page.
When I drew a thumbnail version of the page I could then add the numbers to keep track of how far I was. This way I knew which parts of the script had visuals.
Below are some of the pages in thumbnail form. There are page numbers 1,2,3,4 etc. at the bottom - as well as the other numbers that correlated with the script scattered on the page. Ultimately after I thumbnailed the whole script I decided that it would be 20 pages total.
After the pages were roughly blocked out I went into Krita and sketched out the illustrations. Sometimes certain pages were easier, or they would need a reference photo, but I drew all the pages in a good amount of detail. You can see how the first thumbnail above on the top left, turned into the first page below.
Snow White is the main character of our story and I wanted the first page to have her in front of her bakery and draw the readers in.
After the pages were blocked out in Krita, I brought them into Inkscape to vectorize them. Below you can see how the sketch transformed to the final!
This was a really great project to launch my Red Hat career, it gave me a great base for knowledge about containers and to familiarize myself with Open Source programs.
Mo and I gave some comments about the process that you can read in this article.
As always, thank you for reading about the process! If you are interested in reading the coloring book or printing it for yourself at home, you can find the PDF here.