46 Designs with most having inspirational sayings and quotes printed one side of the page

Spiritual Refreshment for Women: Everyday Blessings Coloring Book (Color Yourself Inspired)

By: Compiled by Barbour Staff

Rating: 5 of 5

This is a coloring book of 46 different designs by a team of designers (Traci Bixby, Elisa Paganelli, Carol Robinson, Emma Segal, and Nicky Storr) which focuses on Biblical blessings. The translation used for this coloring book is the New Life Version. This puts the quotes into everyday, modern language. The basis of the book is definitely Christian and I appreciate it for that reason as well as the fun and easy to color designs. The book is printed 8 x 10 inches with perforated pages so it should be easy to remove pages for framing should you wish to do so.

The designs are very pretty but for me, the pages with quotes and sayings are what are most important. The book is divided pretty much into thirds with 16 designs with inspirational sayings, 15 designs with Biblical quotes, and 15 stand-alone designs. With the sayings and Bible quotes, the words are very much front and center. They are the focus of the design and the other elements are there to support them.

The designs have a nice level of detail without being intricate. Except for some of the fonts on words, I didn’t need special nibs or pencils to color the design. I will probably leave the tiny spots on the words white rather than try to color them with a tiny nib gel pen or an extra sharp pencil such as Verithins.

For my first projects, I used alcohol-based markers and I plan to also use colored pencils with this book as well. I found that the designs an hour or more to finish but mostly because I was stopping and contemplating the words as I was coloring.

This is what I found as I colored in this book and testing the paper with my various coloring medium. In the comments section below, I will include a list of the coloring medium I use for testing and which I generally use for my coloring projects.

46 Various Designs with a fairly even mix of Sayings, Bible Quotes, and Designs without words

Printed on one side of the page

Paper is medium weight, white, slightly smooth and perforated.

Glue Binding

A few designs cross over the perforations but nothing essential to the design will be lost if you remove a page from the book.

Alcohol-based markers bleed through rapidly on this paper

Water-based markers and India ink pens bleed through in tiny spots with the exception of brush end Tombows which did not bleed through at all.

Gel pens left colorful shadows on the back of the page.

Colored pencils work very well with this paper. I tested both oil and wax-based pencils and had good results with both. I was able to layer the same color to a deep pigment, layer multiple colors, and blend easily using a pencil style blending stick.

I used a blotter page below my working page to keep ink from seeping into the the page(s). I use card stock for this purpose. You can also remove pages from the book before coloring to keep the rest of the book in good shape.