Colour My Sketchbook WILD
By: Bennett Klein
Rating: 5 of 5
The animals are set against beautiful lace-type backgrounds. For the most part, the animals are done in grayscale and the background are more like line drawings but are done in lighter tones of gray. All but one of the designs are printed primarily on white background with the lone exception done on a black background.
Because of the way the designs are presented, I will be able to use both my markers and my colored pencils while coloring in this book. I really like this as this is my preferred coloring method (markers for background and pencils for details.)
This coloring book is done as a collaborative effort with Mae Klein (his daughter, I think?) and I noticed that was also true of the recent Dragons coloring book, too.
The artists have once again provided a table of contents with the title of the designs. While they don’t list the animals by name, it is fun to see what they thought of each of their designs, such as Baying Babes for a set of three wolves.
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. 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.