Daily Archives: June 14, 2016

One Calm Day: Adult Coloring Book

By: Siri Carlen

Rating: 5 of 5

One Calm Day is the US version of Siri Carlen’s original Swedish coloring book, En Dag. In it, we get to see a typical lovely day as experienced by this gifted artist. The day starts when the sun rises and before the girl in the story awakens. It follows her throughout her day, beginning at 6am one day and ending at 5am the next. We get to see the day from two vantage points we get to see her and then we get to see what she sees.

I like the concept of the book. It is really different from my other coloring books. I really appreciate that the drawings are all done by hand and are original artwork. The designs have a nice level of detail and I found them easy to color as well.

The book is printed with the designs on the right hand side of the page and a short blurb about the day is printed on the left hand side of the page. For me,, that equals designs on one side and lets me use whatever coloring medium I choose though they can leak through onto the wording.

This is what I experienced in coloring in this book and testing the paper with my various coloring medium:

47 Designs depicting an average day in life

Designs are printed on one side of the page with words on the reverse side.

Paper is heavy weight, white, very smooth, and non-perforated

Sewn Binding you can cut threads to remove several pages in whole at a time if you choose to do so

Almost all designs merge into the binding area

Opens fairly flat for coloring by breaking spine. I still had some problems coloring into the design areas closest to the binding.

Alcohol-based markers bleed through this paper.

Water-based markers, gel pens, and India ink pens do not bleed through the paper. Some gel pens required a little extra drying time.

Colored pencils did not work as well on this paper. While I was able to get nice color from both oil-based and wax-based pencils, I wasn’t able to get good results from blending. The color smeared more than blended. I used, as usual, my standard blending pencil.

Hard nib medium, such as gel pens and hard lead pencils, left dents on the back of the page.

If you choose to use alcohol-based markers, I suggest using a blotter page under your work to keep ink from seeping through to the design below.

Doodle Dogs Coloring Book for Adults

By: Happy Coloring

Rating: 5 of 5

I own most of Amanda Neel’s coloring books and really appreciate her artistic ability. In her previous dog coloring book, Lovely Dogs, she portrayed a realistic version of various dog breeds. In Doodle Dogs, she takes a different approach by creating a realistic outline of the dog and then filling them with beautiful doodles. That allows me to go experiments with colors to create a dog of my own imagining.

The designs are quite detailed and have intricate spots to color. Other than using an ultra-fine point marker, I didn’t have to use anything special to color the designs.

There are two types of designs in the book. One is a head portrait and the other is a full body portrait. The head portraits have elaborate doodle style frames around them. The full body designs have backgrounds included and a simple line frame around the outside of the design. There are a variety of breeds included but, unfortunately, no listing of which are in the book.