32 Fantasy Designs incl Dragons Elves and more 24 large size and 8 medium size printed on one side of the page

Fantasy Adventure Coloring Book: Dragons, Dwarves, Elves, and Other Extraordinary Creatures

By: Eric Messinger

Rating: 5 of 5

This is a great fantasy coloring book by Eric Messinger. It includes Dragons, Dwarves, Elves and other creatures. The designs are hand-drawn and show the forgotten creatures that (in fantasy world) populated our lands and became the myths that we are familiar with today. The creatures have a fantastic magical quality to them that I find really appealing.

Some of the designs have a bit of gray linear and crosshatch shading but they are mostly line drawing style designs. There is a wide range of fantasy creatures so, for me, it is a really versatile and complete coloring book.
The designs are quite detailed and most have intricate and small parts to color. I would not suggest this book for anyone with fine motor or vision issues because of the intricate areas to color.
Once again, the publisher has printed 8 of the designs in less than full size. They have included a thumbnail color sample and some sample colors used in their design for inspiration. It takes up the bottom 1.5 inches of the page. This information could be printed on a separate page or on the actual color sample page rather than on the coloring page.
As this is something that they are doing with all of their books for about a year now, I know when I purchase one what to expect. While it has caused me to buy many less books by this publisher, I won’t detract a star from my rating as I know that the book will contain these smaller than desirable images.
This is what I found while coloring in this book and testing the paper with my coloring medium.
32 Fantasy designs in a wide variety of characters 24 large and 8 medium size designs.
Printed one side of the page back of page has soft gray design, journal lines, small designs and interesting quotes
Paper is medium weight, white, slightly rough and perforated
Glue Binding
Designs stop well before the perforations and have framing lines at the outer edges
Alcohol-based markers bleed through the page
Water-based markers leave colorful shadows and bleed through in very noticeable spots.
Gel pens and India ink pens leave shadows on the back of the page and can spot through to the back of the page if applied heavily.
Colored pencils work well with the paper. Both oil and wax based pencils provide good color, layer, and blend well using a blender stick. Hard lead pencils can dent through the page.
I use a blotter page of card stock or heavyweight paper (two sheets) to keep seeping ink and dents from marring the pages below. I recommend using a blotter or that you remove pages before coloring.