This is my first coloring book from Paper and Cloth Studio (four designers Carly, Louise, Bec, and Gemma) but hopefully it will not be the last one. The designs in the book are simply outstanding whimsical, fun, easy to color and just a great coloring adventure waiting to be had. Most of the designs fit well into the winter seasonal theme but a few of them look more like autumn and spring to me. It really doesn’t matter because they are all so very well done and very much to my personal taste.
The book is well made with a separate dust cover. The outside of the dust cover has coloring opportunities as does the small inside flap on front and back. They missed an opportunity to add more coloring fun by making the inside of the dust cover a plain glossy white. The cover is done is black and white with touches of glittery blue and blue lettering as well as the spine being blue, too all very pretty. The inside page of the actual cover (front and back) can also be colored with the right medium as it has some sort of coating on it.
The designs are printed on both sides of the white non-perforated heavyweight paper with many of the designs spanning across two pages. My copy of the book lines the images up just right, so as long as I keep the book in one piece, I will be in good shape. If you want to remove the pages, the best way is to snip the threads though this will remove more than one page. As the vast majority of the designs in this book span two pages, I really don’t recommend removing the pages it will be very difficult to line them back up again once they are out of the book.
All of my markers (water, alcohol, ultra-fine and up) bled through the paper to some degree. I tested both Fiskars and Tek Writer gel pens and they did not bleed through at all. My Prismacolor Premier Softcore and Derwent Colorsoft coloring pencils went on very thick and creamy and my Prismacolor Verithins worked well for small details but were, of course, lighter due to the harder lead. Much as I enjoy using markers, I won’t be using them in this book. I will use a mix of gel pens and coloring pencils so that I can color every page of the book. If you want to use markers, they look great on the page but you will be sacrificing the backside of page you are working on.
