Colouring book about breaking boundaries

A NEW children’s book is encouraging kids to colour outside the lines.

Titled Outside the Box, the book is the first release by local author Xander Savage, who said the idea grew out of another artistic pursuit.

“I’ve been making gender-neutral greeting cards since the start of the year as a release from my work as a nurse at Ballarat Base Hospital,” they said.

“I was designing covers for them, and my daughter Shiloh wanted to colour them so I made a colouring book for her.

“They’ve been my sanity projects from work, but this is something for my kids, really.”

The book comprises 35 images inspired by with ideas from Savage’s three children, including a corgi in space and a mushroom on roller skates.

Having stemmed from creating gender-neutral works, Savage said the book was consciously written to carry those themes.

“If you look at the cover, you’ll see references to the trans and non-binary flag,” they said.

“The images were designed to be coloured in a way to represent non-binary birthday cards or Transgender Day. There was definitely always a queer undertone to them.”

Savage said the project allowed them to be creative in the presence of their children, while developing a less kid-friendly book in their alone time.

Their next work, Proud, will be an erotic colouring book of queer slurs, and is slated for release later this year.

Outside the Box released through self-publishing outlet IngramSpark, which Savage said helped them gain confidence in releasing further works.

“The next project will be even more of a personal statement and take ownership of some of the queer insults out there,” they said.

“But before I could bring that out, I had to see whether it was going to work in this self-publishing format, for what I wanted to do.”

“Outside the Box proves to me that it can.”