Art of Coloring: Disney Animals: 100 Images to Inspire Creativity and Relaxation
By: Disney Book Group
Rating: 4 of 5
I am a huge Disney fan. I lived near Disneyland for most of my life and, as an adult with children, I purchased annual season passes for many years so we could visit the Park throughout the year. Looking through this book reminded me of my childhood and of my children’s childhood as well. It showed me how pervasive Disney has been in my life. My grandson loves to watch Disney movies during his TV time at our house and I get to revisit all of these characters for a third time in my life.
The book is filled with many Disney Animal characters. The book is divided into three segements: Animal Heroes, Animal Villains, and Side-kicks. Because of the side-kick portion of the book, many of the major Disney characters make an appearance in this book. The designs are based on a wide variety of movies, including 101 Dalmations, Brave, The Aristocats, The Little Mermaid, Peter Pan, Dumbo, The Lion King and much more.
Oddly, the lead-in on the intro page as a reference (by implication) to Steamboat Willie; however, there weren’t any Mickey Mouse designs in this book. Hopefully, Disney will come out with a book the family of characters, such as Mickey, Minnie, Donald Duck and Pluto, that we know from their older cartoons.
What isn’t mentioned in the product blurb is that these designs are done in a doodle style. Because of that, the designs are not only detailed but also have many intricate and tiny elements to color that will probably require special small nib pens, markers, and/or pencils. This coloring book could be a serious challenge for anyone with vision and or fine motor issues.
The book has a nice heavyweight cardboard cover (front and back) which makes for a great solid surface to color on. The designs are printed on both sides of the page and the paper is not perforated. The binding is sewn rather than glued, so removing it takes only a few snips with a small scissor on a few pages. I won’t be doing this, however, as removing pages will make it nearly impossible to re-align the two-pages design spreads.
There are 23 designs which span across 2 pages. In most cases, there are integral portions of the design that will difficult to color as parts are lost in the binding area. The rest of the designs are one page designs but even those have less essential portions that merge into the binding. There are a number of wallpaper style designs of repeating patterns in the book. I usually don’t like that style of design but these are so cute, I find myself wanting to color those as well.
This is what I experienced in coloring in this book and testing the paper with my various coloring medium.
100 pages of various Disney Animals and other Disney characters as well
Printed on both sides of the page
Paper is heavyweight, white (though some backgrounds are black), smooth, and non-perforated.
Sewn Binding. Even though you can release several pages at a time by snipping threads, I don’t suggest it as the two-page designs will be split one from another and it is difficult to line them back up again.
Most designs merge into the binding area
Many designs are spread across two pages. My copy of the book is well lined up on these designs. However, coloring into the binding area is difficult and essential portions of the design cross the binding.
Alcohol-based markers bleed through this paper quickly.
Water-based markers, gel pens and India ink pens did not bleed through this paper.
Colored pencils, both wax and oil based did okay with this paper. I was able to get good color and layer the same color and multiple colors well. The issue I had was with blending. Using my standard pencil style blending stick for my tests, the color didn’t blend well. Rather, it seemed to stick to my blending stick and erase from the page. Hard lead pencils, like Verithins, worked best for coloring tiny elements as I could sharpen the pencil to a very tiny and sharp point.
While I love the subject matter and the actual designs, I dropped the rating on this review to a 4 rather than a 5 based on the issue I had with colored pencils on this paper and the difficulty of coloring into the binding on nearly all pages. With some forethought, the publisher could have lined the two-page spread with the stitching which would have made it much easier to color those designs as that page is, essentially, a single long page rather than two disconnected pages.