30 Beautifully Hand-drawn doodle Animals printed on one side of the page

Creative Animals Coloring Book for Adults

By: Juliana Emerson

Rating: 5 of 5

This is my second coloring book by artist Juliana Emerson. The first, Cute Cats is one of my favorite realistic cat coloring books. In Creative Animals, Ms. Emerson has created 30 doodle style animals with some with blank backgrounds and others in various settings. The outline of the animals is very realistic; however, the doodles give the colorist the ability to use many different colors in place of a realistic rendering of the animal.

There are many animal designs in this book, including: lion, koala bear, elephant, cat, peacock and much much more. I am really pleased to see a doodle style book of original designs as so many others are simply licensing that I have already seen and colored before.

My first project in this coloring book was the elephant in a savannah setting. I used my Tombows water-based markers for this design. I find that using the brush side gives a more muted water-color effect to my projects.

I will provide a detailed description of what I found in the book below, but here is a quick overview:

30 Hand-drawn doodle style animals designs
Designs are printed on one side of non-perforated white page
Glue bound
Designs do not merge into the binding
Alcohol and water-based markers bleed through page
Gel pens and Pitt India Ink pens leave shadows of color on back of page
Coloring pencils work well with this paper

The designs are printed on one side of thin white non-perforated paper that is typical for books published by CreateSpace. The binding is glued but there is plenty of room for you to cut a page out if you choose to do so. The designs stop well before the binding. I was able to get the book to lay flat by press down hard on the open spine.

All of the designs have a framing line around the outside. I really like this as it gives me a natural stopping point, saves ink/pencil, and also gives me a more finished looking project when I color. I always try to mention it if an artist includes this feature.

I test my coloring books with a wide variety of coloring medium, which I will list at the end of this review. Here is what my tests found:

All of my markers (alcohol and water based) bleed through and my gel pens and India Ink artist pens either bleed through or leave a distinct shadow on the back of the page. My coloring pencils work well with the paper and behave as expected for their type of lead. The hard lead leaves indents on the back of the page. 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.

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, Caran D’Ache Pablo Colored Pencils and Faber-Castell Polychromos