A small press for people
who still color.
Vellumleaf publishes coloring books, and illustrated stories after them. Everything is printed as it is drawn: black line, white paper.
What a page has to be
Every plate is pure black on pure white. No grey, no screentone, no gradient, no solid black fill. That is not a style, it is the rule that makes the page colorable: a shape that is already black cannot be colored, and a shape that is already grey makes every pencil look muddy.
The pages are built with open shapes and room inside them, because a coloring book that is fiddly to fill stops being restful about ten minutes in.
How the drawings are made
The linework is generated with AI image models. It is then curated by hand: every plate is checked for filled shapes, for grey, for strokes cut by the trim, and for hands and faces that read badly at print size. Plates that fail are redrawn, not retouched.
Of twenty-four pages in the first book, two were thrown away and remade, and one more was replaced after the whole book was already assembled because it looked thin next to its neighbours. The book you receive was approved by a person who looked at every page.
Two languages, one book
Every title exists in English and in Spanish. The drawings are language-neutral — only the words change — so neither edition is a translation of the other. Both were written, not converted.
Paper
8.5 × 11 in, the size of a sheet of printer paper, printed white with a matte cover. The bold pages are made for markers and crayons; the detailed ones reward colored pencils and fine-tip pens.