Daily Archives: January 9, 2016

This is a pretty coloring book with filled with designs of things (including pets) that can be found in a home. The designs are all fairly easy to color and are very similar in style to other coloring books by this author. The book includes designs of wine bottles, dogs and cats, mixed drinks, flowers, bathtubs, pillows, and much more. This artist as a clean and stylized look to his designs. There is not a lot of intricate details that require tiny bits of color.

The book itself is really pretty, too. It has a dust jacket which can be colored, inside and out. The outside has a beautiful touch of red foil in addition to parts that are colored beautifully. The publishers missed an opportunity when they didn’t put coloring images on the actual cover of the book.

The designs are printed double-sided on a good heavyweight white paper. What is wonderful is that the pages are perforated for easy removal. There are nine designs which appear to be spread across two pages and which will be divided if you remove the pages from the book. The good news is that all but one of them (the free-standing desk) can easily stand-alone as single page designs. The binding is sewn rather than glued so you can remove a few pages at a time by snipping a few threads.

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There are 60 architectural images in this second volume of Architectural Art from Penny Farthing. Once again, there is a variety of building types. What is different this time is that there are fewer older European style homes and instead there are a number of Asian homes and churches. There are a number of modern designs and even a very geometric design of a building in the girder stage. The designs range from open and easy to color to more intricate with a little more challenge.

I find coloring architectural designs to be vastly different from my usual flowers, animals, and folk art. Every once in a while, it is great to pull out something so beautifully graphic and just spend time coloring the building the way I would want it to look. It almost feels like a palate-cleansing coloring experience that lets me try something so out of my norm. I also own the first book in this series and enjoyed it so well, I bought this one as soon as it was made available.

I own a few books by Penny Farthing Graphics. They are published via CreateSpace which is generally used for self-publishing. The designs are drawn by a variety of artists from all over the world and are licensed via Shutterstock.com (which seems to be a front-runner in design licensing). What we end up with is a great coloring book (although on thin paper) with a large and varied selection of designs.

The pages are printed on thin white paper which is not perforated which is typical of books published by CreateSpace. The designs are printed on one side of the page with the back left blank. The designs stop well short of the glued binding and can easily be removed with a pen knife if you so choose.

My gel pens and markers all leaked through this paper. My coloring pencils went on well but left a shadow at the back of the page, too. Not a problem, though, as I can put a piece of chipboard or a couple of heavy weight pieces of paper under the page I am working on to keep the ink from leaking through.

These are the coloring medium that I use for testing. If there is something else you feel I should be testing, please let me know and I will see if I can add it to my growing pile:

Markers: 1) alcohol-based Copic Sketch, Prismacolor double ended markers (brush and fine point), Sharpies (fine and ultra-fine) and 2) water-based Tombows dual end markers (brush and fine point), Stabilo 88, Staedler triplus fineliners, and Pentel markers

Gel Pens: Sakura, Fiskars, Uni-ball Signo 0.38/0.28 and Tekwriter

Coloring Pencils: Prismacolor Premier Soft Core, Derwent Colorsoft, Prismacolor Verithins, and Faber-Castel Polychromos