1: Lady Mechanika Steampunk Coloring Book
By: Joe Benitez
Rating: 5 of 5
I really like the concept of coloring books which bring novels and series of novels to life for those who like to color. While I am not familiar with the graphic novels of Lady Mechanika by Joe Benitez, I will certainly be looking for them in the near future.
Because I don’t know the stories, I can’t say whether the artwork is lifted directly from the books or not. I think so because I have seen that the first novel in the series has a similar cover to this coloring book. In my first project in the book, I decided to give the beautiful lady red hair. That is what is great about coloring books you can color the characters the way you prefer.
In any case, the 40 designs in the coloring book are beautiful and elaborately drawn. They are nicely detailed and have a heavy use of black as a shading/color element in many of the pages. Some of the designs have intricate and small areas to color. The main focus of the design is, naturally, Lady Mechanika. However, there are a number of design pages which feature other characters as well.
This is what I experienced while coloring in this book and testing the paper with my coloring medium:
40 Wonderful Steampunk designs based on the graphic novel series of Lady Mechanika
Printed on one side of the page
Paper is white, medium/heavy weight, somewhat smooth (but still good tooth), and perforated
Glue Binding
Designs stop before the perforations and nothing will be lost if you remove pages from this book.
The book opens fairly flat for coloring though I had to heavily crease (break) the spine.
Alcohol-based markers bleed through this paper rapidly. If I were to use this medium, I would put a blotter page below my working page to keep seeping ink from ruining the design below. I prefer card stock but several sheets of heavyweight paper works well, too. You can also remove pages from the book before coloring. I prefer not to do so to keep the continuity of the series intact.
Water-based markers, India ink pens and gel pens did not bleed through but they did leave shadows on the back of the page. As the book is printed on one side of the page, this didn’t trouble me.
Colored pencils worked well with this paper. While it is somewhat smooth, it still has sufficient tooth (roughness) to grip pigment well. I tested both oil and wax based pencils and liked both with this paper. I was able to get deep pigment with multiple layers of the same color. I was also able to layer multiple colors well and to easily blend colors using a pencil style blending stick.