Daily Archives: January 2, 2017

LANG – Adult Coloring Book – “Doodle House” – Artwork by Susan Winget – Hardcover – Spiral – Designs for Beginner to Expert – 100 Pages – 9″ x 11″

By: The LANG Companies, Inc

Rating: 5 of 5

I was surprised at how well this Lang coloring book is constructed; however, I was not surprised at all by how cute the designs were. I have seen Susan Winget’s designs in household goods and needlework for years and was really happy to find a coloring book filled to the brim with her designs.

The book is called Doodle House and it appears to be a glimpse at Ms. Winget’s sketchbook. The designs are hand-drawn and have the charming less than perfect look I expect from hand-drawn. I think that it makes coloring them more interesting and I am enjoying this book quite a bit.
Two things that I really like about the construction of the book are the spiral binding and the hard covers. The binding makes it easy to open the book to a flat position for coloring. It also makes it easy for leftys to color with the same easy as rightys. The hardcover gives a good flat surface for coloring on the go.
There are many designs with sayings as well as birds, animals and flowers. While it is not a book dedicated to the natural world, many of the designs lean that way. The designs are quite detailed but not what I would call intricate with tiny spots to color. As I mentioned previously, the hand-drawn nature of the artwork does show less than perfect. There are disconnected lines, a bit of uneven spacing, and even lines of varying thickness. It is that which gives it the sketchbook quality.
This is what I found while coloring in this book and testing my coloring medium on the paper:
100 Design pages featuring hand-drawn artwork by Susan Winget with a focus on nature
Designs are printed on one side of the page
Paper is medium weight, white, slightly rough and perforated
Designs do cross over the perforations but stop short of the spiral binding. If you remove pages from the book, the edge that you will lose does not contain essential elements of the design.
Spiral Binding with hard covers that help the book lay flat and provide a good coloring table
Alcohol-based markers bled through the paper lightly. I was surprised at how little bled through given that the paper is more medium in weight. I would still use a blotter of card stock to protect the designs below my working page when using these style of markers.
Water-based markers, gel pens and India ink pens did not bleed through or leave shadows on the back of the page.
Colored pencils worked well with this paper. It has a good tooth and allowed for applying layers of the same color to get rich pigment. I could also layer multiple colors well and I could blend both oil and wax based pencils easily with a pencil style blending stick.