52 Wildly Imaginative Designs with a wide variety most are very intricate printed on one side of paper

This is a wildly interesting group of designs from artist Ann Marie Irvine. They range from fairly simple and easy to color to very intricate with tiny little spaces really almost pen and ink studies rather than straightforward coloring designs. I’ve recently invested in some Tombow dual brush pens and these elaborate designs are the perfect place to use these. I simply watercolor with the brush end over wide swathes of the design. Almost like a decade or so back when colorizing black and white photos was popular.

There is a wide range and that works well because it gives me an opportunity to try different coloring tools with some really fun and imaginative designs. A lot of the designs are heavy on black lines and other elements. Due to the tiny and intricate details, if you have problems with vision or fine motor skills, you might want to take this into consideration as to whether or not to purchase this book.

The coloring book is typical of CreateSpace books. It is printed one-sided of thin white paper though there is an advertisement for the designers website printed on the back of the page. The binding is glued and the pages are not perforated. The designs stop well before the bound edge and the artist has finished the elements of the designs so you are not left hanging with weird edges.

All of my markers bleed through and my gel pens either bleed through or leave a distinct shadow on the back of the page. My coloring pencils work well with the paper. I will use a piece of chipboard or heavy paper behind the page I am working on so I don’t ruin the following page with leaking ink.

I’m starting to add a note to publishers/artists about how the book could be improved in publishing. We should keep in mind that improvements probably will add to the cost of the book, so it is one of those be careful what you wish for scenarios. In this particular case, the publisher is CreateSpace, which is actually owned by Amazon. As so many independent artists use this publisher, I’m hoping that some improvements can be made without too much additional cost.

In this case, the publishing of the book could be improved in two ways: 1) make the pages perforated. Making it easier to remove the page to color makes life easier for many colorists especially lefties who have to color over the hump of the binding (I am a righty but someone pointed this out to me recently and it was a light bulb moment); and 2) improve the paper quality so that ink doesn’t leak through.