Daily Archives: December 6, 2015

This is my first coloring book from Paper and Cloth Studio (four designers Carly, Louise, Bec, and Gemma) but hopefully it will not be the last one. The designs in the book are simply outstanding whimsical, fun, easy to color and just a great coloring adventure waiting to be had. Most of the designs fit well into the winter seasonal theme but a few of them look more like autumn and spring to me. It really doesn’t matter because they are all so very well done and very much to my personal taste.

The book is well made with a separate dust cover. The outside of the dust cover has coloring opportunities as does the small inside flap on front and back. They missed an opportunity to add more coloring fun by making the inside of the dust cover a plain glossy white. The cover is done is black and white with touches of glittery blue and blue lettering as well as the spine being blue, too all very pretty. The inside page of the actual cover (front and back) can also be colored with the right medium as it has some sort of coating on it.

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This is a beautiful coloring book which presents Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in a wonderful way embracing both the oldest illustrations (apart from this Lewis Carol did himself for a very limited audience) and new and modern images which are all married together to create a new way of looking at an old favorite. I think it is perfect that this new book is published by essentially the same publishing house, Macmillan, who first published the book in the 1800’s. The same illustrations by Sir John Tenniel are used, too, along with quotes from the book. While most of the designs involve the characters, there are a number of wallpaper type designs. In this book, I actually enjoy those as much as they have chosen to use characters in a fresh and fun way to create these repetitive designs.

The book is well made with flaps on the front and back of the attached cover with coloring opportunities on all sides. The paper of the cover is slick, so you might have to choose medium carefully for those areas. The cover has a partially colorized version of Alice but the rest of the cover is done in black and red on white with touches of beautiful gold foil.

The designs are printed on both sides of the heavyweight non-perforated paper with many designs spanning across two pages. The binding is sewn rather than glued which means you can remove multiple pages by snipping through a few threads. In my book, the pages line up well, so I will not be removing pages from the book. I find that lining the two page designs up after removing them becomes very difficult.

All of my markers (water, alcohol, ultra-fine and up) bled through the paper to some degree. I tested both Fiskars and Tek Writer gel pens and they did not bleed through at all. My Prismacolor Premier Softcore and Derwent Colorsoft coloring pencils went on very thick and creamy and my Prismacolor Verithins worked well for small details but were, of course, lighter due to the harder lead. Much as I enjoy using markers, I won’t be using them in this book. I will use a mix of gel pens and coloring pencils so that I can color every page of the book. If you want to use markers, they look great on the page but you will be sacrificing the backside of page you are working on.