40 Vintage-style Designs depicting a wide variety of curiosity shop collections printed on one side of the page

The Curiosity Shoppe Coloring Book: A Magical and Mad Exploration of a Most Amusing and Unexpected Assemblage of Novelties and Oddities

By: Chris Price

Rating: 5 of 5

The Curiosity Shoppe is my first coloring book by Chris Price and my first book published by Adams Media as well. I am very happy with the wide variety and style of the designs. I am also pleased, for the most part, with how the book was published. What is especially nice about the book is that the binding is at the top so you don’t have to color over the lump of binding regardless if you are right or left handed.

The designs cover a wide segment of the types of items one might find at a curiosity or collectibles type store. The designs, like others that I have recently come across, are heavy on black and with lots of shading. I have been treating them somewhat like grayscale designs by utilizing the heavy shading as part of my project. For my first project in this book, I used colored pencils to complete the collection of bottles and paintbrushes.

The collectibles are quite fun and include: old-fashioned light bulbs and clamps, Chinese vases, fountain pens, stamps, globes, shells, eggs, teacups, geodes and much much more. I found many items that I either have as small collections or have thought about collecting in the past. Quite a wonderful assortment of designs.

This is what I experienced while coloring in this book and testing my coloring medium on the paper. In the comments section below, I will include a list of the coloring medium I used in testing and which I generally use for coloring my projects.

40 Unusual Collectibles Designs with heavy shading in black

Printed on one side of the page

Paper is cream color, heavyweight, smooth, and non-perforated

Book has its binding at the top of the page rather than at the side

Sewn binding. You can remove a few pages at a time without loss of any of the design by snipping a few threads.

Designs do not merge into the binding area

I was easily able to get the design page to lay flat for coloring.

Alcohol-based markers bleed through the page. I will use a blotter page of card stock or several sheets of heavyweight paper when I use alcohol-based markers to keep the ink from seeping through to the pages below.

Water-based markers, gel pens, and India ink pens did not bleed through the page. Larger nib gel pens required additional drying time.

Colored pencils worked well with the paper. While it is somewhat smooth to the touch, the paper had enough tooth to allow for good pigment, whether I used wax or oil based pencils. I was able to layer the same color, different colors and to blend easily using a pencil style blender stick.