Daily Archives: December 15, 2015

Attached to this review will be a silent flip-through of the entire coloring book so you can make an informed decision as to whether or not it will work for you.

Rather than discuss how this coloring book is like or different from TV series or to compare any of the Dr. Who actors and casts, I will discuss only how I feel about it as an adult coloring book.

I really like the designs in this book. While the publisher of the UK book mentions 45 designs, if you include the three title pages, you get three more. Each of the Dr. Who’s are represented in the book and are shown in an interesting silhouette style design with their heads literally filled with pertinent elements from their time as Dr. Who. The designs are well drawn with clean black lines. Some designs are fairly open and easy to color while others are more intricate and will be a little more challenging but still a lot of fun.

The book is well made. The designs are printed on one side of cream colored non-perforated paper. On the back of each page is a thumbnail version of the design along with a quote that is applicable to the design and which Dr. Who it pertains to as well as the name of the episode and the year it was filmed. The cover can be colored as well and has lovely blue foil touches to make it look extra special. The publisher missed an opportunity by not providing designs on the inside of the fold-out, attached cover; however, there are two flaps you can color if you wish where the printing is white on blue background. The binding is sewn rather than glued, so removing pages is a matter of snipping threads. While a good number of designs merge into the binding, it will not matter if you remove the page by cutting the threads as you will retain the entire page. If you decide to cut the page out instead, you may lose portions of those designs.

None of my gel pens bled through to the back of the page. My colored pencils all worked well on the surface of the paper and behaved as expected for the type of lead. All of my markers bled through the page to some degree: water and alcohol based, ultra-fine, fine, and even brush tips. I would recommend putting a waste sheet of some sort (chipboard, freezer paper (aka butcher paper), card stock, etc.) under the page you are working on to keep ink from possibly getting on the following pages. I am personally using chipboard as I can use it over and over again and I can easily buy it at an office supply store.

My review is of the British release of the coloring book and the book is published by Puffin which is a branch of Penguin Random House UK. I am also ordering the US version which is being published by Price Stern Sloan and whose release is currently scheduled for February 2016. I will be doing a comparison of the two books but the comparison will be in the first comment area below rather than in the text of this review. A glitch in the Amazon system is not allowing me to edit my reviews once a video or photo is attached. It is also possible that the reviews for both books will be merged into one listing after both are published. This happened with the recently published Animorphia and Lost Ocean coloring books. In that case, my comparison will be more lengthy.

In summary, I really like this book as a colorist. It is a subject matter that I enjoy and I will be having a lot of fun with it. While the paper could have been improved and perforated pages would be appreciated, I didn’t detract for those because the way the book was published made it less essential and more of a preference for my use of the book.