You may occasionally get paid to color.

The Story:  In your readings of picture books for storytime and such, you come upon a title that would make a great storyboard.  Sequential, clear reference to objects, illustrations you can recreate in felt.  You've never made a felt story before, but you've been handling them for years and they're just shapes cut out and glued together and sometimes painted.  How hard could it be?  Well, if you'd chosen a simple story, with very easy illustrations to recreate and few of them, it wouldn't be hard at all.  Instead, you've chosen a story with more than a dozen animals to make out of felt, plus two people.  This is going to be quite the project, and so you decide to make the most difficult pieces first, to see if you can do it.  That way, if you can't, you haven't wasted all this time making pieces for a story you can't finish.  You look up various how-tos for making felt pieces, but you don't 100% love any of them, so you make it up as you go along.  And as it turns out, one of those steps involves coloring.  Yay!

Step 1 - Pick what picture is going to be made into felt from the illustration.  Usually, it is whatever animal or object that is referenced in the text of that page spread.  

Step 2 - Decide if a direct copy of the illustration is going to be recognizable and worth doing exactly, or if it is better to find a drawing of that thing online and copy that.

Step 3 - Trace the image from the book or internet.  If you don't have a light desk, which most libraries don't, you should photocopy the page, open a new publisher or word document and make the blank page fill the whole screen, then tape the photocopied page and the blank page to the monitor.  This will let you isolate the image you want from all the background noise, getting a clear line drawing of your object.

Step 4 - Make multiple copies of your line drawing.  You will need one for each piece of felt (or you can group them into pieces that don't overlap; see picture at bottom of post), because you'll need to cut them out separately, and sometimes one piece will overlap another.  If you only have one drawing to work from, you're screwed.

Step 5 - Color one of your copies, and keep each colored pencil/crayon/whatever so that you have your palette of colors.

Step 6 - Take your coloring implements to the craft closet or store and use them to choose which colors of felt to get.

Step 7 - Use a marker to outline what you're going to cut out of each piece of paper, making sure to leave extra room where things will be attached later, and figuring out which pieces are going to be doing the overlapping and which ones will be overlapped upon.

Step 8 - Make the cut.

Step 9 - Put the outline side down on the felt and trace the shape you just cut out using a sharpie or other marker.  This will give you the reverse of the shape you want to end with traced out.

Step 10 - Cut out the shape.  Flip it over.  If you were not exact with your cutting, any messy outlines leftover from tracing will now be on the back of the felt piece where nobody can see them.

Step 11 - Repeat for all the shapes that make up your story piece, and glue them together.  That industrial strength glue you got for fixing toys?  Perfect for felt crafting.  Put it on with a toothpick, and put scrap paper or cardboard down on your desk to reduce the marker stains and glue globs.

Step 12 - Paint or color any additional details on your felt piece.

Step 13 - Repeat for all of the pieces in your story.

The Lesson:  Sometimes, crafting can be fun, and while technically also work, it can also be a kind of zen-like release from the stresses of your other day-to-day work-related responsibilities.  So don't feel guilty about not doing "real work" when crafting.  Sometimes, you just have to get paid to color.

The Resources:  There are a million and a half tutorials on felt/flannel board story making online.  Some of them are cut-and-glue, others are print and iron-on, others are cut one shape and color/paint all the details.  Everyone has their preferences.  The method I used takes a bit more time, I feel, than the others seem like they would, but I like the quality of the pieces better.  I did use google image search quite a bit to come up with clip-art/line-drawing/coloring-page style animals to use for some of the characters where tracing what was on the page would not translate well.  Honestly, google image search and homeschooler/mommy-blogs will get you most any craft project you could think of.