Every Little Thing: A Flat Vernacular Coloring Book
By: Payton Cosell Turner
Rating: 5 of 5
Payton Cosell Turner is the artist for this book. She is also the artistic force behind A Flat Vernacular which is a famed company which makes hand-drawn wall-paper. That history is evident in the artwork in Every Little Thing. It is wonderfully quirky with touches of color in the line work from time to time. Each of the pages made me smile as I first leafed through the book. There are 74 actual pages of almost mirror image style artwork (with a few additional color pages at the front and back of the book for good measure.) I say almost because some are and some are somewhat close more like a continuation of wall-paper which makes sense in this case. This book is going to be a blast to color!
The book is very well made. It has a dustcover that is removable but the inside of it is a little too glossy to color. Not a problem as the actual cover is cover with artwork front and back for you to have fun coloring. The designs are printed on heavy weight white paper that is not perforated. The book is sewn rather than glued and you can fairly easily snip the strings every few pages to remove all the pages from the book if you choose to do so.
Only my Sharpies and Copics bled through on this outstanding paper. My Stabilo 88, Staedler fineliner triplus, and Tombow dual brush markers all worked fantastic. All of my gel pens and coloring pencils likewise did extremely well. If you must use alcohol-based markers, I would suggest you consider the book single sided and sacrifice the mirror of the page you are working on. With some thought, you can still color a full page of each of these designs no matter what. If you do decide to do that, put a waste paper under the page you are working on so the ink doesn’t leak further into the book.
The only suggestion I have for improvement of the physical book would be perforated paper. It would make it easier for people to remove a single page if they choose to do so.