Daily Archives: November 2, 2015

This is a very pretty book of excellent hand-drawn nature designs. It is in the kind of square format that many of the artist coloring books are now taking. The cover is quite lovely with touches of red foil on it. The designs center around animals and plants you would find outside in the garden or in the woods. There are mice, birds, deer, rabbits, squirrels, owls and cats. There are many designs of flowers and leaves.

I counted 55 separate designs. Of these designs, 12 of them span across two pages. A few of the pages of these in my book did not line up and were off slight. On the other hand, most of the designs could be considered a single page designs and colored as such. That is my current plan for most of them.

The book is printed on both sides of the non-perforated white pages. The pages are a nice thickness. The binding is sewn in rather than glued. Rather oddly, the last two pages are purposely left with blank pages on the backside of the design. It made me wonder why the artist/publisher did not do this for all the pages as they were aware that it was something the colorist would want.

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I recently purchased a Christmas coloring book by artist Mary Tanana and was curious to see her older offerings. I purchased this book and one other and was really pleased with them though they are very different from Christmas To Color (which has become one of my favorite Christmas coloring books.) In Kaleidoscope Mandala Designs, Vol 1 (there are four volumes at the time I am writing this review), there are 60 very lovely and intricate designs. While I am very happy to color small and intricate areas of a design, there are some individuals who may not have the visual acuity to deal with it, at least not without a magnifying lamp and also ultra-fine points on pencils, pens, and markers.

The designs range from open and flowing to detailed and intricate. They are all in a square form in this book, though many have a circular pattern built into the square. They absolutely remind me of kaleidoscopes. I enjoy coloring mandala-type designs either making the colors consistent or working them in the form of a color wheel. I will enjoy coloring in this book and will be picking up more of the volumes in the near future.

The designs are printed on one side of standard weight white non-perforated paper. The designs stop well before the bound edge (which is glued rather than sewn.) Removing the designs by pen knife or by having the edge removed should be fairly easy.

All of my gel pens and all of my markers (both water and alcohol-based) leaked through the paper. Not a problem with the blank back page. I can slip a piece of chipboard, card stock, or other heavyweight paper (or freezer paper) below the page I am working on and keep the ink from going further and harming the pages below.