Daily Archives: March 14, 2016

This is a coloring book of 31 owl designs. The designs are cute and range from easy to color to fairly intricate. The designs are all licensed through Shutterstock.com so you may have some of them in other coloring books in your collection. I recognized some that I have colored in the past; however, in this book they are presented differently i.e., instead of single small owl designs, I found a collage of owls that made the images seem fresh and new. There were a number of designs I had not seen before, so all in all, I was still happy with the coloring book

For my first project in this coloring book, I choose a grouping of owls on branches. I decided to color these as white owls with lots of colors highlighting their white heads and feet. I used a mix of alcohol-based markers (Sharpies and Bic Mark-its) in ultra-fine points which worked great for the small details in the design.

In coloring the design, I discovered two areas that I could not identify as part of the designs. As usual when this happens, I ignore it or try to incorporate it into the design. In this case, I simply ignored them. I also keep a black gel pen handy as I find more and more that there can be stray lines that need ending or details left undone. I use the gel pen to correct any of these types of details.

I will provide a detailed explanation of what I found in this coloring book below; however, here is a quick overview of what I found:

31 Owl Designs (licensed through Shutterstock.com)
Designs printed on one side of heavyweight perforated paper
Glue Binding
Designs merge into the binding and well as the perforations
Alcohol-based markers bleed through the page
Water-based markers, gel pens, and India ink pens do not bleed through
Coloring pencils work well with the paper

The pages are a heavyweight of bright white paper that is micro perforated. The designs are printed on one side of the page only. Almost all of the designs merge into the binding and cross over the perforations. The part of the design you will lose in removing the pages are not essential to the quality of the design but I wish the publisher had sized the image properly so that it stopped before the perforations.

The paper is also acid-free which means that it will not turn colors with age and all the work you put into coloring the designs should be safe provided you use the proper coloring mediums. If you prefer to keep your book together, you can get the book to open flat by pressing hard and breaking, or hard creasing, the spine of the book.

My alcohol-based markers bled through the page easily. My India ink Pitt artist pens, gel pens or water-based markers did not bleed through. Coloring pencils work well and according to their type (hard or soft lead.) The soft lead put down good color and blended well while the hard lead did not leave indents on the back of the page.

If you are using alcohol based markers, you can put an extra page of heavyweight paper or card stock under the page you are working on just in case some color leaches 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) Bic Mark-its (fine and ultra-fine) and 2) water-based Tombows dual end markers (brush and fine point), Stabilo 88, and Staedler triplus fineliners

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, Caran D’Ache Pablo Colored Pencils and Faber-Castell Polychromos