Living Wonders | Color Art for Everyone – Leisure Arts (6705)
By: Leisure Arts
Rating: 5 of 5
This is an adult coloring book filled with gorgeous animal designs. Some of the designs are of a single animals (with lots of fun and flowing details for coloring) and a lot of them offer a montage of animals in a beautiful pattern. The designs are all supplied by GMC Designs/Shutterstock, Inc. I don’t know if that means there are various designers within those companies or not, but there isn’t a specific artist mentioned.
There are 24 different designs. I like many of the designs but a couple (the fox in the forest, the single owl and the koi fish) leaped out at me to color first. The paper weight is nice and heavy – very much a feeling of premium grade paper. The designs are printed on one side of the page (with the back side blank.) The pages are all micro-perforated so removing them from the book will be easy. The print quality of the design is excellent. Interestingly, some of the designs are printed with a heavy ink tone and a lighter, more subtle tone at the same time. It is definitely not a problem with printing but rather part of the design. I will keep my magnifying lamp handy as some elements of a number of the designs are small and intricate.
I have had some bleed through of color with my markers and gel pens. Not as much as with some other brands but certainly enough that I would either remove the page from the book or put some freezer paper or heavy card stock between the pages while I am working.
At the front of the book there is a section on understanding colors. There is a color wheel that explains primary, secondary, and tertiary colors and how they are made. It also explains Warm and Cool colors and gives examples of how they can be used within their family or with a mix (Warm Colors, Cool Colors, Warm Colors with Cool Accent, Cool Colors with Warm Accents, Tints and Shades of Red, Tings and Shades of Blue, Analogous Colors, Complementary Colors, and Split Complementary Colors.) This is a wonderful addition to a coloring book as it gives a lot of information for beginners and gives examples in actual color.
At the back of the book, there is an explanation and illustrations of coloring tips and shading. The examples show Colored Pencil, Marker, and Colored Pencil blended with Marker. The written explanation goes into more detail with suggestions as to other types of drawing tools to use. The shading information shows examples of how you can bring out the various elements of your work by what type of pen/pencil you use and how you use them.
Both the information on the inside front and inside back page seem to be consistent within the various Leisure Arts books that I have seen so far.
I have found that coloring helps me empty my mind of my worries and concerns at the end of the day. Having a single point of focus really seems to relieve my mind and help me relax. I can become so relaxed while I am coloring, I tend to do my coloring at the very end of the day so I can fall asleep almost immediately. This book is lovely and has already become a welcome entry in my craft library.