Daily Archives: April 3, 2016

The designs in this coloring book are based on the artwork of Harry Clarke. Mr. Clarke was a famous Irish stained-glass artist as well as an illustrator. Much of his artwork that I have seen in the page has included beautiful colors. All of the artwork in this book has been transformed into black and white. The designs are a mix of white on black background and black on white background. Some of the designs appear to be both. The designs have many small and intricate areas that may require sharp points if you attempt to color each one individually. Depending on the design, I may do that with my hard lead coloring pencils or small nib gel pens. I also will use large swathes of color to fill in a number of these tiny areas at one time.

For my first project in this book, I chose the Illustration to ‘Ligeia’ from Tale of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe. For this design, I used alcohol-based markers and colored many of the tiny elements with a single color.

I will provide more detail about the physical book below but here is a quick overview of what I found:

30 Designs based on famous artwork
Designs are printed on one side of heavy weight paper
Pages are not perforated
Glue Binding
Alcohol-based markers bleed through the page
Water-based markers leave shadows of color on the back of the page
Gel pens and India ink pens do not bleed through
Coloring pencils work well with this paper

The designs in this book are printed on one side of heavyweight paper. The description of each design is printed to the reverse of it (on the back of the prior design.) I wish they had put the information on the back of the actual page design so if you remove a page, it will contain information about the design.

The pages are not perforated and the binding is glued. You will have to cut out pages if you wish to remove them (though you will lose the information about the design. I could get the pages to lay fairly flat by breaking the spine but I also found that do so left crease on each page close to the binding area.

The black ink used on this paper is very matte and slightly dull in color. It gives the finished design an instantly aged appearance. It also did well at hiding my brush strokes of marker and did not change in appearance when I colored over it by accident.

I test my books for with various coloring mediums. I will list those in the comments section below for anyone interested. These are the results of my tests:

Alcohol-based markers bleed through fairly easily. Water-based markers leave a distinct shadow of color on the back of the design page. Gel pens and India ink pens do not bleed through. Coloring pencils work well with the paper. The soft lead pencils go on with thick and deep color. They also blend easily. The hard lead pencils also have good color for their style and type and do not leave dents on the back of the page.

I used a blotter page of card stock when working on my first design. I plan on using markers again with this book, so I will continue to use a blotter page and recommend that others do as well.