Beautiful artwork but printing is too dark printed on one side of the page

I really enjoy Selina Fenech’s artwork and have a number of her coloring books, so when I saw her newly released grayscale coloring book Fairy Art, I purchased it immediately. The artwork is everything I could hope for and more. It is simply beautiful and I hope to see more books in grayscale by Ms. Fenech.

However, the printing in the book is simply too dark for me to work with. I admit it could be because I am new to grayscale coloring (I only have three other books in this style) so it may be due to my inexperience.

I did do a comparison of print against my other books and this one is much darker. The problem is that adding coloring can never make the print lighter (unless you are using a solid opaque medium and simply painting over the existing artwork to cover it up.) The images show much lighter in the digital images in the Look Inside feature than they are in print.

I tried three different sets of coloring pencils (Prismacolor Premier Softcore, Caran D’Ache Pablo Colored Pencils and Faber-Castell Polychromos) just in case it made a difference. I used similar style designs and similar colors. While I preferred the Pablo pencils for coverage, I had the same problems. For flesh tones, I had to use creams and the lightest pink I could find in each set and the tones still came out really dark.

I am hoping that my book is an aberration and that others get much lighter printing in their books. If not, I hope this is something that Ms. Fenech can get corrected immediately. If that happens, I hope that someone will let me know and I will re-purchase this book in a heartbeat. I am still coloring in this book and am liking it due to the artwork but I simply can’t say I love it.

The book contains 25 different but two copies of each for a total of 50 coloring designs. The book is glue-bound but has plenty of room to remove each design from the book. The designs do not merge into the binding area. I only use coloring pencils with my grayscale so I didn’t check for other mediums. As the designs are printed on one side, you can always put a blotter page behind the page you are working on and it will keep ink from seeping through. My pencils worked well but differently. The Blue fairy is Pablo, the Purple fairy is Polychromos and the Pink fairy and Bee fairy are both Prismacolor Softcore.