Fantasy Creatures by Meg Cowley

Summary 
Current Price: £3.00
Number of Pages: 110
Size: 28 x 21cm
Paper colour: White 
Paper surface: Smooth  
Paper thickness: Average
Linework: Fine  
Perforated: No  
One sided: Yes
Binding: Glue  
Drawings go into the spine: No
Waterbased pen bleed: None

When Meg brought out her last book The Exotic Colouring Book earlier this year I thought it was her best release yet, full of wonderful animals and supporting a fantastic charity. Yet as soon as I saw the sneak peeks for Fantasy Creatures I immediately knew it would surpass all of Meg's work so far! It's absolutely amazing; definitely one of my top books of 2016. Fans of Selina Fenech's art will definitely love it!

Fantasy Creatures is a compendium of many mythical beasts and legends, all of which are labelled on the reverse of the page and explained in a 'Beastiary' at the beginning of the book. The creatures included are:
*Dragon  *Fawn  *Imp  *Grim  *Kraken  *Siren  *Phoenix  *Centaur  *Dryad  *Elf  *Faerie  *Goblin  *Gryphon  *Hippogriff  *King of the Forest  *Knucker  *Mermaid  *Revenant  *Witch
*Sorcerer  *Wyvern  *Unicorn. 
There's also a Faerie Circle and Rune Stone (which has a secret code for you to crack!). Check out the illustrations here:

The book is CreateSpace published so the paper isn't thick or bleed-proof, but each page is one sided so you can use absolutely anything to colour these pictures as long as you slip a few scrap pages behind. Plus, there's a link included at the back of the book for you to download the PDF for free, so you can print it on your own paper or card stock. 

Each illustration is printed twice, so there are two copies of the 25 illustrations. This is something quite a few colouring book artists have started doing to enable their colourists to have more than one go at the same image- colour it in a different palette or gifting one to a friend.

The cover is a lovely soft-touch feel card that you can't help but sit looking strange whilst you rub it! Just me? Lol. The image linework is all quite fine and the spaces aren't tiny or intricate, so this book should suit most colourists- particularly lovers of fantasy and fairytale. I love the amount of different creatures that Meg has included, many of them unknown to me. I really enjoyed learning about them all and expanding my knowledge of mythical beasts. A lot of fantasy colouring books are quite scrappy, in that they are beautiful but the lines aren't clean enough to be colouring pages if that makes sense. That is not the case in Fantasy Creatures; all the illustrations are very crisp and not 'over drawn' with lots of sketchy lines.

Meg currently has a giveaway running to win yourself a copy! Click here to enter. There will be a a mini/pocket version, a large notebook, small notebook, week per page 2016/17 diary and a week per view 2016/17 diary released soon. 

Here is my finished page, coloured with Spectrum Noir alcohol markers. I had so much fun choosing the colours and taking time to get the skin and hair blends just right.

This book was given to me in exchange for an honest review. You can find it on Amazon here:

Fantasy Creatures Colouring Book: Creative Art Therapy For Adults: Volume 7 (Colouring Books for Grownups)