Daily Archives: May 17, 2016

Posh Adult Coloring Book: Thomas Kinkade Designs for Inspiration and Relaxation

By: Thomas Kinkade

Rating: 5 of 5

Fairy World Coloring Pages: Beautiful, Magical Mystical Fairies to Color

By: Barbara Lanza

Rating: 5 of 5

This is my third coloring book by Barbara Lanza. The other two are by different publishers and while that makes a big difference in how the book is put together, Ms. Lanza’s artistic style remains constant and is of high quality. As an extra plus, there are ten pages of tutorials about use of color, medium, and coloring methodologies in the front of the book. As Ms. Lanza has written several successful books about drawing and coloring fairies, getting this information in this coloring book is extremely helpful.

This coloring book has 55 fantasy designs. Some are of fairies by themselves while others include flowers and still others have detailed and fairly elaborate backgrounds. The designs range from open and flowing and easy to color to those that will take some time and thought. I believe that there are some re-prints in this book as I have seen some of these pictures before; however, they are not in my two coloring books so I believe they might be from out of print books.

As always, I enjoy coloring Ms. Lanza’s fairies. She gives them an ethereal and flowing quality that I find really appealing. I love trying to match my colors to the concept of a windblown skirt. I am experimenting with the idea of translucent cloth and one of the fairies in my first projects in this book is one such design. I used my various Copic alcohol-based markers as well as a couple of other markers for small details. I added shade and definition with a variety of colored pencils.

This is what I found in coloring and testing this book:

55 Fantasy Fairy Designs

Designs are printed on one side of the page.

The paper is medium weight, white, smooth and non-perforated.

Some designs merge into the binding area

Sewn Binding

You can remove several pages at a time by sipping binding threads without loss of any portion of the designs

I had to break the spine to get the book to open fairly flat.

Alcohol-based markers bleed through the paper. I used card stock as a blotter below my working page to keep the rest of the book ink-free.

Water-based markers leave the slight of shadows on the back of the page. Nothing bled through that would damage pages below.

Gel pens and India ink pens did not bleed through but gel pens needed extra drying time.

Coloring pencils were mixed. I found that both wax and oil based pencils had good color and layered well but blending was a problem on this smooth paper. The color seems to adhere to the original spot and only light blending happens as the very edges. Hard lead pencils did not dent the back of the page.