I wanted an excuse to learn Midjourney, and “I’m teaching the kids” is a much better excuse than “I want to sit at the computer all Saturday.”
So that’s what we did. My two sons and I sat down together and learned image generation at the same time, from scratch, all three of us equally bad at it. There is something useful about learning a tool alongside your kids instead of teaching them one you’ve already mastered. Nobody is the expert, and everybody’s first attempts are terrible. When my prompt produced a rabbit with five ears, they got to laugh at me, which I maintain is an important part of a well-rounded education.
The five-eared rabbit problem
If you have used these tools, you know the early frustration. You have a clear picture in your head, say a friendly bunny holding a basket, and what comes back is a bunny with too many limbs, or a basket fused to its ribcage, or something with the dead-eyed stare of a creature that has seen things.
Learning to write a prompt that produces a clean coloring page specifically is its own skill. A coloring page needs bold outlines, clear enclosed shapes, and enough white space for a crayon that isn’t going to stay inside the lines anyway. Most of what the tool wants to give you is shaded, textured, and completely unusable. Getting from one to the other took us a lot more attempts than I expected.
We got better at it together. Nobody had an edge. We were all throwing prompts at the thing and seeing what came back. Some of it was good. A lot of it went straight in the bin, and sorting one from the other was most of the work.
Picking what made the cut
Here’s the part I didn’t plan.
Once we had a pile of candidate pages, far more than twenty-four, somebody had to decide which ones were good. We did that part together, and it was the most fun any of us had on the project.
It also taught us what a coloring page is for. An intricate, beautifully detailed egg with forty separate compartments is a nightmare if you are six years old and your hand hurts. A simple bunny sitting in some grass is a good time.
Every page in Hopping into Color is one the three of us picked, and a few of them are pages my sons made themselves, start to finish. I did the parts that weren’t fun: the layout, the trim size, filling out the KDP forms, resizing every image, numbering every page.
What took so long
Ramirez and Sons LLC was registered in October of 2021. This book went up on Amazon in June of 2023, twenty months between having a company and having anything to sell.
I used to describe that as lost time. It wasn’t. Two things were going on.
The first is that people started asking me to build them websites. Someone hired me, then someone else did, and paying work goes first. All of it was WordPress, which is what I was trained in and what I had built the first version of our own site in, on evenings and weekends. Every hour that went to a client was an hour that did not go to the book.
The second is that I was learning. Image generation got good enough to be worth taking seriously, so I learned it properly instead of dabbling. Then Amazon KDP, which is its own small education. And somewhere in the middle of all that I started writing software: a puzzle generator now on its fifth version, an invoicing system for the business, a donation drive for our school’s PTO, a voice-driven driving log for a learner driver.
None of that was the plan. All of it is the reason the company can do what it does now. The puzzle books exist because I built the engine that makes them, and half of this business is now building things for other people and teaching them the tools.
The clearest proof of it is the page you are on. This site is not WordPress. It is a custom Astro build, and I only got here by teaching myself the tools that made it possible. The tool I was trained in is not the tool I reach for now.
So the books were slow for two reasons. I was busy becoming someone who could make them properly, and the work that pays comes before the work that might. That is the honest reason this book took until 2023, and why the next two did not arrive until 2025.
In practice the books are all me now. The boys are older: one is a junior in high school, and the other starts his first semester of college in a few weeks. They have their own interests, which is what’s supposed to happen. But the name stays, partly because it’s a true account of how this started, and partly because the whole point of it is still to help put two kids through college. The first of those bills has already arrived.
A much bigger puzzle book is underway now, two hundred pages of it, built with a generator I wrote myself, now on its fifth version. It will get there at the speed these things get there.
Hopping into Color: An Easter Bunny Coloring Book is available on Amazon for $6.99.
