25 More Beautiful Wild Animal Designs in Wild, Volume 2 printed on one side of the page

Colour My Sketchbook Wild 2: Greyscale Colouring Book

By: Bennett Klein

Rating: 5 of 5

I have purchased many of Bennett Klein’s grayscale coloring books and one of my favorites is Colour My Sketchbook Wild. When I saw that Mr. Klein had a follow-on volume, Wild 2, I purchased it immediately and sight unseen. In the Wild coloring books, Mr. Klein steps away from his beautiful and unusual fantasy designs and looks at animals in a much more realistic manner.

I noticed that, unlike the first volume, Mr. Klein’s daughter, Mae, does not seem to be involved in this coloring book. I’ve seen that she has a highly successful coloring book in her own right now. It makes for a difference between the two volumes. The first one had lace-style backgrounds but this one does not. When there are backgrounds in this images, they are more realistically portrayed. Many designs simply do not have backgrounds at all. I like to have the change as it provides a different challenge for me to color.
With grayscale coloring, I prefer to use both my markers and my colored pencils. I use markers for background and first layer of colors and then pencils for details and shading.
The artist has once again provided a table of contents with the title of the designs. While they don’t list the animals by name, Mr. Klein has given a title to each of his artworks, such as: Balanced Beauty (a lovely swan image in yin/yang styling), Butterfly Fly-By (a frog dangling from a branch as a butterfly flies by) and Deco Hive (bees with a highly stylized hive.)
This is what I experienced while coloring in this book and testing my coloring medium on the paper.
25 Hand-drawn wild animal grayscale designs with beautiful backgrounds
Designs are printed on one side of thin, slightly rough non-perforated paper typical of CreateSpace. All of the paper is white; even the one with black background, (it is black tone printed on white paper.)
Glue Binding
Easy to open to flat position for coloring
Designs do not merge into the binding and there is plenty of room to cut pages out if you choose to do so
Alcohol and water-based markers bleed through the page to some degree. Water-based bleed through in spots while alcohol-based bleed through freely
Gel pens and India ink pens leave shadows of color on the back of page. India ink can bleed through if you use multiple layers or apply heavily.
Colored pencils work well with this paper. Both oil and wax based provide good color when I use multiple layers of the same color. I am easily able to blend (using a pencil style blender stick) and layer multiple colors as well. I generally don’t use blender stick with grayscale as I prefer to use lighter color pencils for my blending to mesh the light, medium and dark colors together. Hard lead pencils leave dents through the back of the page.
Because of the bleed through and dents, I suggest (and use) a blotter page below my working page no matter what medium I use. I prefer card stock but several sheets of heavyweight paper work as well.