The Mysterious Library: A Coloring Book Journey Into Fables
By: Eunji Park
Rating: 4 of 5
The illustrations are really beautiful. The artist tells the visual story of a young girl who stumbles into a library, gets locked in tight and then finds herself the main character of the storybook world. The story goes on to show the young girl adventuring some very well know stories, including: Little Red Riding Hood, Gingerbread Man, Pinnochio (misspelled in text, i.e., should have been Pinocchio), Jack and the Beanstalk, Cinderella, Rapunzel, Thumbelina, Swan Lake, Florence Nightingale, the Sandman, Princess and the Pea, Aladdin, The Red Shoes, The Pied Piper, Town Musicians of Bremen, The Snow Queen, and Alice in Wonderland
The issue I have with the book has to do with the binding. It is glued and is very tight and hard to open flat for coloring. As most of the designs spread across two pages, this makes it difficult to color the parts of the design which merge into the binding area. While it is not unusual for story books designs to spread across two pages, the tight binding is unusual. It is also out of line with what I am used to from this publisher. Hopefully, this is something that can be corrected in future prints of the book but it is the reason I am detracting a star from an otherwise five star coloring book.
Waves of Color is the publisher for this book. They also published the Color the Classics coloring books by Jae-Eun Lee. What I am excited about with this new book is that the publisher has switched from a very smooth paper to one that is ever so slightly rough. It has great tooth for grabbing pigment with colored pencils. The Lee books were okay but this paper is great in comparison. It is slightly less heavy weight than the Lee books but is still what I consider heavier medium weight based on how wet medium worked with the paper.
There are 62 pages of designs with thumbnails of each designs at the end (along with the title of the story represented.) The designs are detailed and have intricate and small spots to color. I am extremely happy with the quality of illustration in the book though it appears that some of the picture may have been cropped and cut out the very edges of designs. I can’t verify that as I don’t have the Korean book (though I will be looking for it elsewhere for the future) but some of the elements look a tad unfinished.
This is what I experienced while coloring in this book and testing the paper with my coloring medium. I will list, in the comments section below, the coloring medium I used for testing this book and which I generally use for coloring.
62 pages of hand-drawn story book designs
Printed on both sides of the page
Paper is warm white, slightly rough, and heavier medium weight non-perforated paper
Glue binding which is too tight to allow book to lay flat for coloring
Designs merge into the binding
Most designs spread across two pages
Alcohol-based markers bleed through the paper
Water-based markers do not bleed through the paper.
India ink pens do not bleed through but dark colors leave a slight shadow on the back of the page
Gel pens do not bleed through and dry in what I consider a reasonable amount of time
Colored pencils work excellently with this paper. The paper has excellent tooth for grabbing pigment from both oil and wax based pencils. I was able to get great color from multiple layers of the same color, layers of different colors, and easily blended colors using a pencil style blending stick.