Drawn to the Sea: A Colouring Book of Sea Forms
By: Sabrina Impieri
Rating: 4 of 5
Drawn to the Sea is my first coloring book by Sabrina Impieri. She has a lovely free-flowing design style that suits sea forms. The designs in this book are line drawings of sea creatures and plant life. I find them open and easy to color without an extreme amount of detail or tiny spots to color.
The designs were fairly free-form rather than realistic. I like to see an artist’s interpretation, so this is something I do appreciate. There were a number of designs that used circles or bubbles. There seemed to be three types of use for these: 1) as part of the design (as with my project, I used them to show water without having to color the entire background), 2) some use as a form of pointillism to give the shape of another object, and 3) decorative and without as much meaning. In the first two uses, I would showcase the circles. In the last one, I would try to blend them in rather than bring attention to them if they were too distracting.
In my first project, I used Tombow water-based brush markers to color a crab in the ocean. I really liked the way the designs looked with watercolor and it allowed me to layer colors and blend them to get the effect that I was looking for.
This is what I found in coloring and testing this book:
51 Hand-drawn artistically interpreted Sea Form Designs
Printed on one side of the page
Paper is typical CreateSpace paper thin, white, slightly rough and non-perforated.
Glue Bound
Designs do not merge into the binding area
Alcohol and water-based markers bleed through the page (I suggest you use a blotter page under your work.)
Gel pens and India ink leave colorful shadows on the back of the page.
Coloring pencils work well with this paper both oil and wax based pencils lay down good color, layer and blend well. Hard pencils dent the back of the page.
While I could wish for thicker, perforated paper, it appears that this is the quality that comes from CreateSpace (which is an Amazon company.) What I really like about the CreateSpace is it is a way that independent artists can get their work self-published. That way, I get a huge choice of design styles albeit with not the best paper.
I was provided a free copy of this coloring book for test and review purposes.