Third in series – Intricate and Beautiful book of Fairy/Storybook Tales Japanese version printed both sides of page

Fantasy Colouring Book

By: Tomoko Tashiro

Rating: 5 of 5

I own the two previous fairy tale coloring books by Tomoko Tashiro. I was happy to see that there was a third book published. This is the Japanese version which was recently released. The wording on the front and the titles of the tales are both in English and Japanese. The rest of the book, including the introduction and short blurbs about the stories (at the end of the book) are in Japanese.

The book has 82 pages of designs (including the title and introduction pages.) Most of the artwork spans across two pages. The artwork in this book, as in the previous ones (Fairy Tales and Princesses and Fairies) is intricate and detailed with many tiny areas to color.
The designs are all new stories (unlike the previous two which had a few duplications.) The stories in this coloring book are: The Secret Garden, Peter Pan, The Blue Bird, The Wonderful World of Oz, Beauty and the Beast, Manon Lescaut, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Daddy Long Legs, Little Women, The Red Shoes, Twelve Months, and Night on the Milky Way Train.
The book has a removable dust cover which is beautifully illustrated. The inside of the dust cover is plain white and the actual book is olive green with white line drawings on it which can be colored if you wish to do so. I was not able to get the book to lay flat easily (due to the glue binding), so coloring into the binding edge will be difficult (something that is common with glued bindings.) As with her first two Japanese versions books, if I could give this book a 4.5, I would do so because of the binding/printing issues. I always round up when I am faced with this issue, thus a 5 star rating.
This is what I experienced while coloring in this book and testing the paper with my coloring medium:
82 pages of intricate storybook/fairy tale designs
Printed on both sides of the page
Paper is heavyweight, warm white, slightly rough and non-perforated
Glue Binding
Designs merge into the binding
Most designs spread across two pages
I had problems getting the book to lay flat on all pages
Alcohol-based markers bled through the paper
Water-based markers and India ink pens left slight shadows on the back of the page.
Gel pens did not bleed through required a longer drying period than normal.
Colored pencils worked well with this paper. I tested both oil and wax based pencils and got good results with it grabbing pigment, layering the same color, layering different colors, and blending using a blending stick.