Art of Coloring: Beauty and the Beast: 100 Images to Inspire Creativity
By: Disney Book Group
Rating: 3 of 5
The designs in this book are based on the Live Action movie Beauty and the Beast and not the cartoon version that was re-released in 2016. The designs are nicely drawn with a manageable level of detail. The issue for me is the actual content of the designs. I think the book ends up being simply okay when it could have been much nicer.
There are 124 pages with designs on them but most are not character studies. In fact, the most prominent subject is books. There are fully 23 designs devoted to book studies most of which are more in the nature of wall-paper style designs. There are not that many designs of Belle or Beast in the book.
The book does not include any designs of Belle’s father nor of Gaston. It does include Mrs. Potts, Chip, Lumiere and Cogsworth but they are very few. A good number of the few character studies included have the character in solid black silhouette. That means you can’t color the character but simply the space and swirls and twirls around them.
There are 68 repeating wall-paper style designs in the coloring book. Some of these patterns are duplicated. A few have a banner of words added (at the end of the book) but are really a repeat of an earlier page of wall-paper. That means more than half of the book is repeating patterns and, for me, that is way too many.
Given the number of wall-paper designs, it is very disappointing to me that they were not placed on the backside of character designs. It could easily have been done if the publisher had given it proper attention. I would be happy to waste a wall-paper design in order to use markers but the choice becomes difficult when one of the few character designs backs onto another character designs (such as Belle on one side and the Beast on the back.)
The book is part of the Art of Coloring series and has changed format in a number of ways from the earlier books in this series. Beauty and the Beast has a soft cover, is smaller, has thinner paper, has glue binding and has perforated pages. One of the nice improvements in Beauty and the Beast is that the designs are limited to one page they do not spread across two pages as have other books in this series.
The soft cover is okay but I would have hoped for a better value on the book if the quality of the publishing was being diminished. That is also true of the paper which is thinner than that of the earliest books in the series.
This is what I found while coloring in the book and testing my color medium on the paper.
124 Live Action Beauty and the Beast inspired Design pages
Includes 68 pages of wall-paper style repeating designs
Printed on both sides of page; however designs are limited to one page only (no two-page spreads).
Paper is medium weight, white, very slightly rough, and perforated
Glue binding
Many designs extend across the perforations, some into the binding. I was able to break the spine to get into the binding area a bit easier. If you remove pages, you will not lose anything integral to the design.
Alcohol-based markers bleed through the paper
Water-based markers either bled through or left colorful shadows on the back of the paper.
Gel pens and India ink pens left anywhere from colorful shadows to indistinct shadows on the back of the page but even at best, where still noticeable.
Colored pencils worked well with this paper. I was able to get good, deep pigment. I could layer easily (both same and different colors.) Blending was okay though the tooth of the paper was not optimal. I was able to blend with a pencil style blending stick.