In the winter of 2017, My wife and I decided to take a leap of faith and return to my hometown in Southern Oregon. The result of this decision ultimately leads to me leaving my position as Art Room Director in Corvallis, Oregon. I took on new work at after school program as a general Youth Development Professional. After being bounced around from a few sites, I finally landed on one that I felt was in desperate need of help. it was after about a month here that I decided to speak up about the " Coloring Pages." Mostly my concern was the amount of what I considered to be "babysitting" that was being done by allowing students to fill out coloring sheets endlessly. Coloring and the skill of learning how to use and create with color is an essential ideal for me. However, once a student has masted coloring within the lines unless it is a therapeutic device, there is little to no benefit creatively for students. When asked what I would prefer to do, I quickly sketched up the outline of a ninja and a mermaid. The Blank Canvas gave the students enough information that they could then use their creativity to do the rest. From there, the kids continued to ask me to make more and more copies, and as they advanced their skills, the continued to ask me to help them make complex characters that would not necessarily fit the template of either a mermaid or ninja. Thus BLANK DUDES came to be. I designed the templated to be an appeal to creativity being used by students to create works they liked and were proud to show others. I also enjoy the gender-neutral term DUDE as it does not make assumptions of what any one can create with them. After the success of Blank Dudes within the program one lazy afternoon, a young girl came to me and asked if I could show her how to draw a giraffe this would be difficult to do using the bipedal form of a human... I went home later that day, and I created the BLANIMAL, a Blank Dude like animal template.