24 Wall Paper Designs with Small and Intricate Designs details printed one side of the page

This is a coloring book of 24 designs that pertain to the coast, water, and activities common to those areas. The images are licensed from AE Publications Ltd./Shutterstock, Inc. That may mean that you will have seen some of these images before in other coloring books.

While the coloring book is very nicely made and the images certainly pertain to the coast, I was a little disappointed that every single page of the book was what I call wallpaper. These are designs that repeat over and over again with the page. The elements are cute but I am not one to really enjoy coloring 24 pages of this type of designs. In prior books, Leisure Arts had wallpaper designs but interspersed them with full page designs as well. As Leisure Arts is licensing the images, I would have thought they could have found a few designs that filled the page without repetition to include in the book. I’m very surprised that they did not do so.

The other issue I have with the book is that due to the many repetitions of the elements, the coloring areas are extremely small. I had to resort to ultra fine markers (for the larger areas) and Prismacolor Verithins and Uni-ball Signo gel pens in 0.28 and 0.38 sizes. In some cases, the areas were simply too small to get my pens and pencils in. I resorted to coloring a larger area with a single color rather than the separate colors I would have preferred. I placed a dime in the middle of a design I am coloring to give you an idea of the scale of the items. This design is about in the middle of the range. There are others which have much smaller areas to color. You will need a steady hand and good eyesight to color in this coloring book.

While this is not my favorite type of design, I do enjoy some wallpaper repetitious designs. These are well done for anyone who likes really small, intricate elements which repeat many times within the page. Because of the lack of full page designs, I like the book but I don’t love it.

The designs are printed on one side of the white perforated paper. You can easily remove the pages all at once as the binding is stapled rather than glued or sewn. I prefer to remove them one by one at the perforations. The book easily lays flat by pressing down on the page. All of the images merge into the binding but as the designs are all repetitious, nothing of importance is lost when you remove the page.

All of my markers bleed through this paper. My gel pens and India ink artist pens either bled through or left color shadows at the back of the page. My coloring pencils worked exceptionally well with this paper. All soft and hard lead pencils went on thick and creamy and I was able to easily blend both types of pencils. You can either use a blotter page below the page you are working on or, as I do, remove the page from the book before starting to color.

These are the coloring medium that I use for testing. If there is something else you feel I should be testing, please let me know and I will see if I can add it to my growing pile:

Markers: 1) alcohol-based Copic Sketch, Prismacolor double ended markers (brush and fine point), Sharpies (fine and ultra-fine) Bic Mark-its (fine and ultra-fine) and 2) water-based Tombows dual end markers (brush and fine point), Stabilo 88, and Staedler triplus fineliners

India Ink: Faber-Castell PITT artist pens (brush tip)

Gel Pens: Sakura, Fiskars, Uni-ball Signo in the following sizes – 0.28/0.38/0.5/1.0 and Tekwriter

Coloring Pencils: Prismacolor Premier Soft Core, Derwent Colorsoft, Prismacolor Verithins, and Faber-Castell Polychromos