Daily Archives: April 21, 2016

First, let me note that major parts of this coloring book are reprints in whole or in part from other coloring books. Namely, there all sixteen designs from Floral Mandalas Stained Glass Coloring Book (2011), eight designs from 3-D Mystic Mandalas Coloring Book (2011) as well as seven new designs which have not been published before. As I don’t own either of the other two books and generally don’t purchase the stained glass books at all as I don’t care for the vellum pages, these designs are all new to me.

I enjoy many coloring books by Marty Noble and this is no different in that sense. What is different and something that I like all the more, is that the designs are a little less intricate than my others. They are still detailed and fun coloring challenges but compared to the two recent books I have by this artist (Collage Art and Celestial Mandalas), the designs in this book are something I can finish in much less time.

I really like using my various markers on designs with black backgrounds. I like the translucent feel that marker ink adds. It is really just a personal preference because I don’t care for how the black looks next to the way I use my coloring pencils (with a very light touch) and I generally use gel pens as an accent rather than a whole designs (except for postcards where I use them extensively.) I’m sure that others can and do create beautiful work with their coloring pencils on this style of book. For my first project, I chose a mixture of both alcohol and water-based markers.

This is what I found when going through this coloring book:

31 Mandala Designs with black backgrounds
Printed on one side of page
Page is smooth and perforated. Has a different feel from other Creative Haven paper (may be due to heavy black printing rather than actual paper)
Glue Bound
Designs stop well before the perforations due to the black background. You should be able to easily remove pages without design loss
Alcohol and water based markers bleed through to some degree

While I don’t plan to use these medium with my coloring book, I did test a variety of them to see how they worked with this paper:

Gel pens and India ink pens leave shadows of color on the back of the page
Coloring pencils were mixed. The soft lead pencils laid down good color but blending did not work well for me. My wax-based pencils worked better than the oil-based. Hard lead pencils dented the back of the page.

I preferred to remove pages from this book for coloring but if you want to keep it together, I suggest using a blotter page below the page you are working on. That will keep the rest of the book from being damaged by seeping ink or dents coming through.