Fun and slightly macabre coloring book based on stories by Neil Gaiman printed both sides of page

The Neil Gaiman Coloring Book

By: Neil Gaiman

Rating: 5 of 5

This is a coloring book of designs based on stories by Neil Gaimans stories for children. The illustrator in this book is Jill Thompson. The stories include: The Graveyard Book, Coraline, Fortunately, the Milk, Instructions and Crazy Hair. Some of the designs are slightly macabre but are quite fun and represent the stories really well. While the designs are detailed in nature, they are not what I consider intricate and difficult to color.

There is a heavy use of black for shading (including cross hatching) and as a pre-printed color throughout the coloring book. As colored pencils (my medium of choice for this book), shows up on black, I will have to be careful when coloring near the bigger patches in the designs.
This is what I found while coloring in this book and testing the paper with my coloring medium.
96 pages of designs based on Neil Gaiman stories(includes title and copyright pages as all pages have coloring elements on them.)
Printed on both sides of the page
Paper is medium/heavy weight, white, slightly smooth and non-perforated
Many designs (including the two page spreads) merge into the binding area.
Hybrid glue and sewn binding with lots of little stitches. If you wish to remove pages, you will have to cut them out. I don’t plan to do so as many of the designs spread across two pages.
Alcohol-based markers bleed through this paper. If you use this coloring medium, it will mar the designs on the back of the page.
Water-based markers, gel pens, and India ink pens did not bleed through the paper but did leave slight shadows on the back of the page.
Colored pencils worked fairly well with the paper. The paper still has enough tooth to get good pigment. I tested both oil and wax based pencils and both worked well. I could layer the same color for deeper pigment, layer multiple colors and blended okay using a pencil style blender stick.