| Amily Shen, a renowned Taiwanese artist, has created an adult coloring book that is very different from the other ones I've seen on the market. While this particular book is inspired by or based on the Alice in Wonderland movie, you don't have to be a fan of the movie (I dislike it) to appreciate this new approach to coloring. There is a warm, brief introductory text that explains you'll have the opportunity to color and personalize Alice's Adventure. This paperback book has 80 pages that feel like light cardstock to me. I haven't tried them with markers to see whether they would bleed through as I prefer colored pencils. Many spreads of pages have no text at all and are just large coloring pages, a few pages have less than 50% coloring because they have a paragraph updating the story in a simple, charming way. A few pages have prompts asking you to fill in some details on outlined shapes or to sketch additional pictures (to add onto what's printed already) of your own if you'd like. I prefer coloring to sketching, but there were few enough sketching pages that I didn't feel put off by their inclusion. |
You can see by checking out the cover pictured above that the illustrations vary between more natural (bottom half of the cover) to more tiny details for pattern (top half of the cover). I enjoy this mix as I've seen some coloring books which have distinctly one style or the other. Another unique feature I noticed is that the dust jacket (which is what you see pictured at top left) is removable. The inside of the dust jacket is printed like a coloring page with a white background, and the actual cover of the book is printed with black line drawings and a pink background, so you can color the book itself and really make this personalized by using the dust jacket as a standalone coloring page. See the picture below where the dust jacket is folded out to the left:
** In the interest of full disclosure: I received a copy of this book for free from Blogging for Books in exchange for an honest review. I'm not required to give a positive review. I was rather surprised I liked this one as much as I do! FYI: None of the links in this post are affiliate links.