Angela Porter’s Zen Doodle Animal Tangles: New York Times Bestselling Artists’ Adult Coloring Books
By: Angela Porter
Rating: 5 of 5
A note about this line of coloring books. I own a couple of others in this line, which is called New York Times Bestselling Artists’ Coloring Books. This doesn’t mean that this book is a NY Times best-seller, merely that the artist has had books in that category previously. It certainly can become a bestseller but the line title may seem to infer that status before it is actually attained.
Dr. Porter’s hand-drawn designs are a real joy to color and, as hand-drawn, have a original art quality to them that suits my tastes and my coloring abilities. While the blurb at the back of the book refers to imperfections due to hand-drawing, I like to think of them as a realistic approach to design there is very little in nature that is perfect and yet to my eyes, nature creates a beautiful and perfect picture.
This set of designs includes much of Dr. Porter’s distinctive doodle style of design but each of the designs all includes at least one animals. It reminds me of her recent dragonflies coloring book but with a much broader range of animals included. There are reptiles, birds, sea creatures, insects and animals of all sorts including giraffes, cats, tigers, elephants, foxes and more. The animals are generally set in a background or are included as part of more doodle style design. The designs range from rectangular to circular and even hybrids of both together where a circular form is incorporated into a rectangle.
This is what I experienced while coloring in this book and testing the paper with my various coloring medium:
49 Animals Designs in Doodle style
Designs printed on one side of the page
Paper is medium weight, white, somewhat smooth, and perforated
Glue bound but you can remove pages at the perforations
Designs either have a framing line, finished elements, or even a frame at their outer edge
Alcohol and water-based markers bleed through this paper. Water-based are more spots than a full bleed-through. I use a blotter page of card stock to keep ink from seeping into the rest of the book.
India ink pens left an indistinct shadow on the back of the page.
Gel pens did not bleed through nor did they require any additional drying time.
Coloring pencils worked well with the paper this publisher uses in this line. Both oil and wax based pencils provided good color with both a soft and firm touch. They also layered and blended well.