Daily Archives: February 27, 2016

This is a coloring book with 90 pages of designs. What you really get is 45 different animal designs with each one printed twice with a different background color. There might be subtle changes in the two designs but for the most part, nothing of much consequence. The designs are licensed from Shutterstock.com as are many other animal coloring books these days. I have seen and have colored a few of these from other books. What seems to be different is that the doodle pattern is not the same as what I have colored previously so perhaps what is being licensed is the line drawing and Barron’s is having their own artist do the fill-in work. In any case, same images but a different coloring experience for me.

The designs are printed with the same animal front and back. I will list the 45 animals towards the end of this review for anyone interested. The designs are mostly in one or two colors with black lines on white paper in the minority. Backgrounds are mostly dark blue with some gold tone, black, and white. The printing is a variety of the same colors. If you use a coloring medium that bleeds through the page (see below), you will need to choose which side of the page you prefer but at least it will be a decision between the same animal rather than losing a completely different design.

The doodle designs are intricate but in most cases not to the point of having tiny, almost impossible to color elements. There are a couple where the elements get fairly small but I will probably just use a single color over those spots rather than try to do them separately. The animals are mostly shown as head shots with a few exceptions for various birds, a chameleon, and an octopus.

The cover is very pretty with touches of silver foil. The designs are printed on both sides of generally colorful background perforated paper. I really appreciate that Barron has included perforations in this book as most of their previous ones lacked this. If only they would stop printing on both sides of the page. The book is glue-bound rather than sewn but that should not be an issue as you can remove pages at the micro-perforations. I was able to get my book to lay fairly flat by breaking the spine.

My alcohol-based markers all bled through the paper. My water-based markers and India ink artist pens all left shadows of color on the backside of the paper. My gel pens did not bleed through or leave shadows on the back of the page. My coloring pencils worked extremely well with the soft core pencils blending beautifully. I will either remove pages from the book as I go along or use a blotter page under the page I am working on. In the comments section below, I will list the coloring medium I used to test this coloring book.

The animal designs included in this book are: tiger, owl, orangutan, hummingbird, polar bear, horse, reindeer, chameleon, koala, eagle, monkey, octopus, wolf, panther, sheep, cat, walrus, raccoon, camel, elephant, carp, deer, frog, board, lemur, bear, giraffe, otter, panda, antelope, lion, hippo, pug, dove, hyena, bison, turtle, wombat, goat, sloth, fox, beaver, parrot, meerkat, and sphynx.