Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: A Coloring Book
By: Lewis Carroll
Rating: 5 of 5
I will provide a comparison between this book (the US version) and the UK coloring book at the end of this review. The pictures and video in this review are only of the US version unless otherwise noted for comparison purposes. I’ve included one photo with both books to show the different colors of the page. The UK book is at the bottom and the US book is at the top of the photo.
This is a beautiful coloring book which presents Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in a wonderful way embracing both the oldest illustrations (apart from this Lewis Carol did himself for a very limited audience) and new and modern images which are all married together to create a new way of looking at an old favorite. The original illustrations from the MacMillan version of the book by Sir John Tenniel are used, along with quotes from the book. While most of the designs involve the characters, there are a number of wallpaper type designs. In this book, I actually enjoy those as much as they have chosen to use characters in a fresh and fun way to create these repetitive designs.
The coloring book is well made with flaps on the front and back of the attached cover with coloring opportunities on all sides. The paper of the cover is slick, so you might have to choose medium carefully for those areas. The cover has a partially colorized version of Alice but the rest of the cover is done in black and red on slightly off-white with touches of beautiful gold foil.
The designs are printed on both sides of the heavyweight off-white non-perforated paper with many designs spanning across two pages. The binding is sewn rather than glued which means you can remove multiple pages by snipping through a few threads. Designs do merge into the binding area and there are two-page spreads in the book. In my book, the pages line extremely well, so I will not be removing pages from the book. I find that lining the two page designs up after removing them becomes very difficult. I can easily get the book to lay fairly flat for coloring purposes.
I test my coloring books with a wide variety of mediums which I will list in the comments section of this review. I went back and performed the exact same tests on both the US and UK versions to be able to give a proper comparison.
All of my alcohol-based markers bled through this paper. My water-based markers were mixed with fine tips leaving color shadows but ultra-fine not bleeding through. India ink pens did not bleed through either. Gel pens did not bleed through but bigger nib pens did require extra drying time. My coloring pencils worked excellently with this paper. The soft core went on thick with great coverage. They blended, layered, and burnished well. The hard lead pencils made good precise lines and did not dent through to the back of the page.
Much as I enjoy using alcohol-based markers, I won’t be using them in this book. I will use a mix of water-based markers, gel pens and coloring pencils so that I can color every page of the book. If you want to use alcohol-based markers, they look great on the page but you will be sacrificing the backside of page you are working on.
Comparison between US and UK version of this coloring book:
The books weight essentially the same, with the UK version weighing 1.11 pounds and the US version weighing 1.10 pounds. They are the same size at 11 x 8 15/16 x 3.8 inches. The images are all the same, though there are minimal cropping differences between the two but nothing that makes a huge difference.
The one real item of note that is different between the two is that the paper the UK copy is printed on is a fairly bright white. The US version is printed on an off-white shade. The inside of the cover of the UK version has black line printing on white and the US is white on an almost cream color. Also, the copyright page is different, of course.
Coloring medium worked as well for both versions of the coloring book.
All in all, unless the color of the paper makes a big difference to you, I don’t see any reason to prefer one book over the other. I would be happy with either book. I purchased the UK version long before there was a pre-order of the US version available otherwise, I probably would have waited to see the quality of and been extremely happy with the US version.