Perhaps it's a new way to play with your food, with much less of  mess to clean up afterward.

Weyburn artist and author Leena Honig Love has published 'Colouring Book of Food and Cuisine' on Amazon, with original images celebrating foods many of us love to eat.

She said she began drawing colouring pages in 2020.

“I wanted to create something where the kids at home could have something to do. Can't leave your house, right? So it gets a little boring and you've got to have something to keep your mind going,” she shared. “So I just created that and then from there I decided to publish an actual book.”

Honig Love said her inspiration for this collection of drawings from her own family's love of food.

“My grandmother's full-blood Italian and my mom's half-Italian. So we always cook. Food's always around. It's a big deal. Thanksgiving, Christmas. Everything is just food, food, food. And I love colouring. So I thought I'd just draw up some colouring pages that are unique and different, something other than unicorns and flowers. Kind of like a Salvador Dali kind of feel and roll with that.”  

"There's a lot of people making colouring books, but they're mandalas or a lot of images of women and faces," she noted. "So I wanted to create something a bit different."

The Food and Cuisine book includes drawings of foods like spaghetti and meatballs, with inspiration for the 60 pages coming from things like songs like, 'On Top of Spaghetti'. 

Another one of her sources of inspiration, however, is from a food that not everyone loves.

“There's so much colour in food, and so I just implemented maybe some rainbows and you know, I love pineapples. So I put a lot of pineapple stuff and controversial pizza... like pineapple pizza. Some people don't like that, so I got a charge out of drawing just straight pineapple pizza!”

Honig Love said she was encouraged in the process of creating a colouring book via the Amazon platform thanks to Jennifer LaCharite, a freelance writer and children's author from Weyburn, who now lives abroad.

“Amazon is amazing for publishing,” she commented. “I did all the formatting, I did the cover design, uploaded the manuscript and got it accepted and published, so I'm pretty excited." 

While Honig, also under the pen name 'Leena Love', had previously self-published a romance novel in 2018, she said it was much more costly for her to go through a publisher and she's happy to have taken the time to learn about all of the various facets of uploading files to Amazon. While it was a little more work, it is an inexpensive way to self-publish.

She said one could, however, certainly spend more money if they wanted to have Amazon's help with formatting, and marketing. 

"It's pretty relaxed once you get to know all the formatting and the programs and that's easy to do because you can go on YouTube and there are people who give advice and that's so helpful."

She added she's already working on another colouring book of Halloween-inspired images, like vampires, pirates, and zombies, which she hopes to have published by September.

"I just want to make it fun and playful, even for teens, and I've had kids actually colour it, too, and they like it. I think it's a little difficult for the younger ones, but they don't seem to mind."

Find the Colouring Book of Food and Cuisine on Amazon HERE.

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