Art of Coloring Star Wars: Rogue One
By: Disney Book Group
Rating: 4 of 5
I’m a fan of Star Wars and have been looking forward to both the Rogue One movie and coloring book. I’ll be seeing the movie shortly but I received my coloring book ahead of time. The designs are well done based on what I have seen of trailers and movie stills. The characters look true to life and the creatures and machines are well drawn. The designs span from detailed to very simple. There are many wall-paper (repeating pattern) designs and there are really nice character studies. The designs range from simple line drawings to those where there are heavy lines and heavy use of black (which may be a problem for some.)
Where I have some problems with this book is how it was published. If I could give this book a 3.5, I would do so based on the publishing and the abundance of wall-paper designs. As I cannot, I rounded my stars to 4.
The book is part of the Art of Coloring series and has changed format in a number of ways from the earlier Star Wars book. Rogue One has a soft cover, is smaller, has thinner paper, has glue binding and has perforated pages. Personally, I don’t mind the change (except for the thinner paper) but it makes for a mismatched set. Having said that, I’ve been told by some individuals who are just now buying the older books that they are now being published with soft covers as well. I can’t confirm that as I purchased mine and my husband’s copies earlier on.
The book is sized smaller at 10 7.8 x 7 inches (compared to approximately 11 1 /2 x 8 inches. For those who like to scan and print their pages on better paper, this will make it easier as it should work with most standard scanner/printers.
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. Rogue One has more of a medium weight versus the heavy weight of Star Wars.
The change from sewn to glue binding makes it more difficult to get the book to open flat for coloring. As the pages are now perforated, the lack of ease of snipping threads to remove pages is less important.
The perforated pages is a nice change; however, given that the designs are printed on both sides of the page and many of the designs spread across two pages, the usefulness of the perforated pages is diminished. The only way I think that these larger designs can be printed effectively would be to use a fold-out page. I’ve seen this done in a number of coloring books and hope that the trend will catch on.
One of my issues with designs/publishing is a heavy use of wall-paper designs (oddly with a number of them repeated throughout the book). I would have been okay with this if the publisher had used some forethought and placed the wall-paper designs on the reverse of the more unique designs. There seems to have been an attempt to do this (at least with the character designs) but about half way through the book, that seemed to mostly disappear.
Because of the way the book was put together, for the most part, I will be using colored pencils. I will be willing to give up most of the wall-paper designs if I prefer to use markers on the reverse page but that will be limited to maybe a third of the designs in the book.
This is what I found while coloring in the book and testing my color medium on the paper.
126 Rogue One inspired Design pages (plus designs on title and copyright pages.)
51 pages are of wall-paper style repeating designs
10 of the Designs spread across two pages
Printed on both sides of page
Paper is medium weight, white, very slightly rough, and perforated
Glue binding
Many designs extend across the perforations, some into the binding. Certainly true of the two-page spreads and removing them from the book will result in loss of design. I was able to break the spine to get into the binding area a bit easier but there are still some issues.
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.