Escape to Wonderland: A Colouring Book Adventure
By: Good Wives and Warriors
Rating: 5 of 5
Escape to Wonderland is the second coloring book I have by Good Wives and Warriors (artists Becky Bolton and Louise Chappell.) It is a smaller format book (at approximately 7.5 x 7.25 inches) but is packed with lots of fantastic deisgns. If you include the title page, there are a whopping 96 pages of designs in this book. The book tells the excerpted story (both in written and design form) of Alice in Wonderland. The characters are imagined in new ways which makes it so much fun to color. I have a more traditional version of Alice and I know I will like this new coloring book just as much as my other one. Some of the designs have intricate and small details that may prove challenging for some individuals.
The designs are printed on both sides of heavyweight cream colored non-perforated paper. Twenty-six of the designs spread across two pages. In my book, these two page designs line up very well and if I press the book flat, I don’t have any lose of design into the binding.
The attached cover of the book is well made and has gold foil, two shades of blue touches. You can color the remainder of the cover (front and back) if you wish. The inside of the cover has fold-outs (front and back) and a white on blue line print which you can also color. The rest of the pages are designs, so you can literally color this book on every page, if you choose to do so. A few of the pages have words on them and those are generally incorporated into the design. A couple of them are primarily the words with a small amount of coloring designs on the page. The binding is sewn rather than glued, so removing pages will require a few snips of threads every few pages. I won’t be taking mine apart as I think it is a lovely little book that tells a story that I want to keep together.
My alcohol-based markers bled through immediately. None of my ultra-fine point water-based markers bled through but you could see the fainest of shadows on the backside of the page when I used really dark colors (both Stabilo 88 and Staedler triplus fineliners.) My India ink artist pens and my gel pens did not bleed through, did not have shadows and, in the case of the gel pens, did not need extra drying time. All of my coloring pencils did well and performed as I would expect for the brand and type (soft or hard lead.)
This series is one of the prettiest of the small coloring books I have in my collection. They are extremely portable and fit in my purse well. I hope to see more coloring books by these talented artists in the future.