Chalk It Up To Grace: A Chalkboard Coloring Book of Removable Wall Art Prints, Perfect With Colored Pencils and Markers
By: Paige Tate Select
Rating: 5 of 5
Chalk It Up To Grace is the latest premium edition Christian coloring book by Paige Tate & Co. While I have a number of the earlier books, this is the first coloring book I have by artist Shannon Roberts. Ms. Roberts style is both elegant and fun at the same time. She provides an insight into her spiritual inspiration as a Christian in her biography at the back of the book. It’s always wonderful to hear about what God has been doing in the lives of other believers. The designs in this book are a mixture of inspirational Scripture and Christian sayings along with lovely designs that surround the words and bring attention to them.
The book has 30 full page designs and an additional 14 designs which are printed two to a page. The smaller designs are scaled down versions of some of the full page designs. The pages are mostly black with the coloring elements in white. The way the pages are printed is black ink on white paper. While the pages are perforated, you will still have to cut the smaller designs along the cutting lines provided if you wish to remove them from the book. The larger prints will fit into an 8 x 10 inch frame and the smaller ones will fit well in a 5 x 7 frame.
This book, as with the other premium edition books, is printed on a heavyweight paper that is much more substantial than the paper used in this publishers regular coloring books. The book is approximately 10 x 8.5 inches with a beautiful black cover with gold foil accents and pretty partially colored illustrations (and yes, the cover art is the very first page in the book and serves double purpose as a title page and a coloring designs.)
Chalk-style coloring is a fun new way of coloring designs. The black background makes the colors you use pop, especially if you use light or fluorescent colors in your work. Some dark colors can end up a little too dark, so you may want to check your colors to see how they work on black before committing to them. I am using a variety of mediums for each design including alcohol and water-based markers, gel pens, and colored pencils.
This is the overview of what I experienced while coloring in this book and testing my various coloring mediums on the page:
30 Large Format and 14 Small Format Scripture/Saying Based Designs in for a total of 44 coloring opportunities
Printed on one side of perforated, black background, slightly rough heavyweight paper
Designs do not merge past the perforations
Glue Binding
Book can open to fairly flat position though I removed my pages from the book for coloring
Alcohol-based markers bleed through the paper
Water-based markers left shadows of color on the back of the page
Gel pens and India ink pens left indistinct shadows on the back of the page.
Coloring pencils work well with the paper. I tested a variety of both wax and oil based pencils and had good results with all of them for color, layering, and blending. I use a pencil style blending stick with for my tests. My hard lead pencils provided good color and did not dent the back of the page.