Cute Santa Helper Kitten Designs – 22 full page and 10 reduced size printed one side of page

Santa’s Furry Helpers Coloring Book

By: Kayomi Harai

Rating: 4 of 5

This is the second of two coloring books I have purchased by Kayomi Harai. She is a self-taught artist who does beautiful paintings of kittens. The designs in this book are line drawing interpretations of some of those paintings. I really like the whimsical styling of the cats their poses and expressions are adorable. They also seem to get into some silly hi-jinks along the way (just as my cats did over the years.)

Unfortunately, once again, the publisher Designs Originals has reduced the size of ten of the designs in this book. It has been done in order to include the coloring information that was used to color the sample of the design. While I like that information, it could easily have been included on the page that showed the sample design and then the coloring page could have been left full size. Because of of this issue, some of the elements in the reduced designs are more difficult to color. Also because of this issue, I have dropped what would have been a five star rating on this book to a four star rating.

There are many pages, at the front of the book, with coloring hints and colored samples of designs as well.

This is what I experienced while coloring in this book and testing the paper with my coloring mediums.

32 Santa Helper Kitten designs 22 full size and 10 reduced size designs

Designs are printed on one side of the page with cute quotes and journal lines on the back of the page.

Paper is medium weight, white, slightly rough and perforated. It is also noted as acid-free archival quality.

Glue Binding

Designs stop before the perforations. Most of the designs have framing lines at the outer edges.

Alcohol and water-based markers bleed through the page

Gel pens and India ink pens leave shadows on the back of the page. India ink pens can spot through as well depending on how heavily they are applied.

Colored pencils work well with the paper. Both oil and wax based pencils provide good color, layer the same or multiple colors well, and blend easily using a blending stick. Hard lead pencils can dent through the page.

I like to use a blotter page below my working page to keep seeping ink and dents from marring the pages below. I use card stock but two sheets of heavyweight paper work well, too. You can also simply remove pages before coloring to keep the rest of the book in good condition as well.