Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: Magical Creatures Coloring Book
By: HarperCollins Publishers
Rating: 5 of 5
I have had a lot of fun with the first book in this series and am just as pleased with the second one. While there is more of a focus on the Magical Creatures, a good number of designs are also of characters and scenes.
Once again, the book is well made and the designs great as well. There are a color pictures on the inside of the front and back cover to give you some idea of color and setting if you choose to go realistically with your coloring. The scenes are set in New York in the 1926.
The designs are a nice mix of detailed and open and easy to color (notably some of the character designs are quite open and free of details.) There are a few designs that have intricate and small areas to color.
This is what I found while coloring in this book and testing the paper with my various coloring medium. In the comments section below, I will list the coloring medium I use for testing and for most of my coloring projects:
78 Pages (including title page) of Fantastic Beasts Magical Creature inspired designs based on the movie
Printed on both sides of the page
Paper is heavyweight, white, slightly smooth and non-perforated
Binding is hybrid glue/sewn. If you wish to remove pages, you will have to cut them out. I do not plan on doing so as so much important detail will be lost especially on the two-page spreads.
Designs merge into the binding area
Seventeen designs spread across two pages. On my copy, the pages line up well.
Book can be opened fairly flat for coloring by breaking the spine, though it is still difficult to color into the binding area
Alcohol-based markers bleed through this paper rapidly. If you use this medium, you will definitely mar the design on the back of the page.
Water-based markers did not bleed through; however, Stabilo 88 and Staedler fineliners left the faintest of shadows on the back of the page.
Gel pens and India ink pens did not bleed through or leave shadows. Some gel pens required additional drying time.
Colored pencils worked well with this paper. I got fairly good pigment from both oil and wax-based pencils. Layering the same color for deeper pigment worked well as well as layering multiple colors. Blending with a pencil style blending stick worked pretty well though my Tombow Irojiten did not blend as well as my other pencils (perhaps due to their hardness.)