Lots of fun under the Sea with more than 50 imaginative designs

Inky Ocean is a great underwater adventure coloring book with more than 50 pages of coloring designs. The designs, by artist Helen Elliston, are a wide range from skulls to mermaids and dolphins to to bubbles. The designs show a wide variety and showcase the deep for a fun coloring experience with some really intricate (though not necessarily small) elements to them. There are a lot of suggestions for activities on the back side of pages. I am probably less interested in that part of the book but it is there for those who really enjoy activities (plus there is a hunt in the book with a key to the answer in the back.)

For the most part, I consider the book to be printed on one side of the page only. The back side of most pages are a tiny design or words suggesting activities. There are a few slightly larger designs on the back page and there are three designs that spread across two pages. For those three, I will ignore the small portion of the design on the opposite page and treat it as if it was a single page design. While I would prefer not to do this, I won’t want to was the page on the front side of any of the three designs.

Most of the designs stop before the bind; however, a number of them do merge into it and as the paper is not perforated, you will lose some of the design if you remove it from the book but not the central theme of the design. The paper is typical CreateSpace (thin) and the binding is glued.

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 for me); and 2) improve the paper quality so that ink doesn’t leak through.