Daily Archives: February 16, 2016

The designs in this coloring book are beautiful and graceful. There is an emphasis on flowers and on creatures of the sea. The bird in the cover art is included in the coloring book but the full design is not. Too bad as I would have loved to have colored it specifically. I didn’t know Chris Garver’s work as a tattoo artist so I wasn’t sure quite what to expect in this book. I was somewhat surprised at the delicacy of the drawings but that certainly has more to do with my perceptions of what to expect than anything to do with Mr. Garver’s beautiful artwork. Some of the designs have intricate and small details (such as the petal flower shaped mandala towards the back of the book); however, most of the designs are open in nature and will not require special pens with small nibs or sharp pointed pencils.

The coloring book is well made with nice, thick paper. The cover is beautifully illustrated with touches of copper foil. The designs are printed on both sides of the white heavyweight non-perforated pages. The binding is sewn rather than glued, so you can remove a few pages at a time with a few snips of thread. Many of the designs merge into the bind or spread across two pages. Fifteen of the seventy five designs in this book spread across two pages. A few of the two page spreads did not line up especially well in my copy of the book, most notably the snake where the fangs were disconnected from one page to the other. Otherwise, most of the pages lined up well and a few of them were one a single folded sheet of paper at the center of the pages that were sewn together. That makes for a great and large designs (albeit with some thread holes in the middle.) I was able to get the book to lay fairly flat by breaking the spine.

Only my alcohol-based markers bled through this paper. That was for all brands and tip types. My water-based markers and India ink artist pens did not bleed through nor did they leave any form of shadow on the back of the page. My gel pens did not leave a shadow but required a tiny bit more drying time than normal. All of my coloring pencils did very well with this paper. I was able to blend not only my soft lead pencils but also my Prismacolor Verithins which are very hard lead. The hard lead pencils did not leave an indent at the back of the page. All pencils went on thick and creamy with very little effort.

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) Bic Mark-its (fine and ultra-fine) and 2) water-based Tombows dual end markers (brush and fine point), Stabilo 88, Staedler triplus fineliners, and Pentel markers

India Ink: Faber-Castell PITT artist pens (brush tip)

Gel Pens: Sakura, Fiskars, Uni-ball Signo in the following sizes – 0.28/0.38/0.5/1.0 and Tekwriter

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