I made a coloring book with no colors in it, built out of public domain natural history plates.
Each page is a grid of numbered squares. You draw one of four marks following a key, a dot, a slash, a cross, a filled square, and the animal comes out of the dark. One pen finishes the whole thing, so there is nothing to dry out and nothing bleeds through.
The 48 animals are traced from plates published between the 1700s and the early 1900s: Audubon’s birds, Haeckel, Clerck’s spiders, 19th century German bird plates, an anatomical skull. The back of the book is a Solutions and Specimen Index that credits every original plate and artist.
Disclosure, because in this room it matters: the plate art was redrawn with AI assistance and then corrected by hand, one plate at a time. The sources are real, the credits are real, the tracing was not all done by hand.
Happy to answer anything about how the grid encoding works or how the plates were chosen.
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