Category Archives: Adult Color Books

I own a number of The Coloring Cafe coloring books and I love to color in them. They are cute and easy to color. I can usually finish one easily in an afternoon. Colorful Blessings is a newer coloring book in the series. What I absolutely love about this coloring book is that it is spiral bound. I can flip the pages around and get the page I am working on to lie perfectly flat.

The designs feature a Bible verse as well as the cite so you can look it up for yourself. I don’t see a translation mentioned in the book so I can’t say for sure which it is. The designs are open and easy to color. I don’t have to finagle small points into even smaller spaces with this book. I can have fun with whatever medium suits my temperament on a given day.

For my first project, I choose to use a mixture of Sharpie and Bic Mark-it alcohol-based markers. I was happy that the paper didn’t feather the ink outside of the lines and will certainly use my markers with this book again (see medium discussion below.)

I will provide details about the book below for those interested, but here is an overview of what I found:

45 Bible inspired cute designs
Designs are printed on one side of non-perforated white page
Spiral bound
Alcohol-based markers bleed through page
Water-based markers and India ink pens leave shadows of color on back of page
Gel pens work well but need a little extra drying time
Coloring pencils work well with this paper

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This is an absolutely beautiful book of grayscale sketches. I’m fairly new to this way of coloring and as soon as I saw this book, I had to have it. I had never heard of Bennett Klein before but I will certainly be following him from this point on. The designs are beautiful and unusual, especially in grayscale where so many of the coloring books available are merely photographs instead of hand-drawn sketches.

The designs are all flowing and almost lyrical in their composition. Women make up a lot of the designs, with unusual hairstyles and poses. There are animals and cultural symbols as well as some fairly hippie-vibe young women. It’s just a great combination of unusual designs that will be a blast to color.

I will go into detail about the book below for those who are interested; however, here is an overview of what I found:

25 Hand-drawn sketches in grayscale
Designs are printed on one side of non-perforated paper
Glue Binding
Easy to open to flat position for coloring
Designs do not merge into the binding
Alcohol and water-based markers bleed through the page
Gel pens leave shadows of color on the back of page
Coloring pencils work great with this paper

The designs are printed on thin, white, non-perforated paper. The back of the page is printed with the Colour My Sketchbook emblem. The binding is glued rather than sewn. The designs do not merge into the binding. If you choose to remove a page from the book, you will have to cut it out but will not lose any portion of the design. I could easily get the book to lay in flat position for coloring.

I test my coloring books with various medium even though I generally use coloring pencils for grayscale. I will list the mediums I used for testing in the comments section of this review. Here is what my tests showed:

Alcohol and water-based markers all bled through the page. Gel pens and India ink pens left easily discernible color shadows on the back of the page. Coloring pencils worked very well with this paper. The soft lead pencils went on thick and blended easily. The hard lead pencils left dents on the back of the page.

I usually use soft lead pencils for grayscale projects. That is what I did with my first project. I used Prismacolor Premier Soft core pencils in usual grayscale order (light on first, dark second, and medium tones last for blending.) I found that I preferred a more ethereal look for the ballerina, so I went over the whole design with lighter pencils, especially 10% cool gray. It muted the entire design and gave me the look I was hoping for.