Daily Archives: October 14, 2016

Color At Home: A Young House Love Coloring Book

By: Sherry Petersik

Rating: 5 of 5

I’ve read the Young House Love blog for years and was happy to find out that Sherry and John Petersik were collaborating with illustrator Joan Borawski to develop a coloring book based on interior design. I’ve found their blog to be both fun to read and an inspiration for changes I have made around both my current and last house.

The designs in the book are wonderful. They are clean line drawings that are fun and easy to color. In addition to the actual coloring pages, there are also some hints for interior design and some exercise pages for trying out some of those hints. Most of the designs are detailed and a few of them include intricate elements to color. The designs show a wide variety of rooms, a couple of outside views, as well as some furniture and other design collage style pages.

The book is printed on both sides of the perforated page and 15 of the designs spread across two pages. What is great is that the designs stop right at the perforations and pick up on the next page at the same spot. It makes it easy to color the whole design without having to struggle coloring into the binding area.

I have a couple of coloring books by this publisher and the paper, binding, and the printing of this book are quite different from those. While I like the prior books, this one steps up a level in publishing. It’s a real pleasure to color in.

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

61 pages of designs inspired by Young House Love (not including title, intro or exercise pages.)

Printed on both sides of the page

Paper is heavyweight, white, slightly smooth, and perforated

Sewn binding. You can remove pages in whole by cutting the binding; however, I would simply remove pages at the perforations.

Designs do not merge past the perforations.

Alcohol-based markers bleed through the page. They are the only wet medium that I tested which did bleed through the page.

Water-based markers, India ink pens and gel pens did not bleed through or leave shadows on the back of the page. Gel pens did require additional drying time.

Colored pencils work well with this paper. Even though the paper is slightly smooth, it grips color really well. I was able to layer and blend easily with both wax and oil based pencils.

In addition to the copy of this coloring book that I purchased on Amazon, the publisher sent me a sample advanced reader copy of this book.