Fantasy Kingdom & Halloween Grayscale Colouring Books by Alena Lazareva

Summary
Current Price: £5.65 / £6.55
Number of Pages: 64 / 48
Size: 28 x 21cm
Paper colour: White
Paper surface: Smooth  
Paper thickness: Average
Linework: --
Perforated: No  
One sided: Yes
Binding: Glue  
Drawings go into the spine: No
Waterbased pen bleed: None

Alena Lazareva is a Russian artist who has been drawing her whole life, her style firmly set in fantasy and folklore. She has produced 7 colouring books so far, most of which focus on mythical creatures and scenes. Her artwork is hand drawn but not by pen & ink. They have been digitally illustrated by hand, giving them a stunning realism without looking too clinical and perfect as digital art so often does.

Fantasy Kingdom contains 30 unique illustrations of dragons, fairies, mermaids, birds, wizards and more. Most are in portrait layout with some landscape oriented scenes towards the back. Each illustration is contained in a border so nothing goes into the spine or off the edge, ideal for framing and display. Step into the realm of Alena's Fantasy Kingdom below:

Halloween is full of spooky imagery for the upcoming season, including witches, cats, pumpkins, gypsies and gothic scenes. There are 23 illustrations in this book, again each of them bordered and centred on the page. The artwork remains on the beautiful side of scary rather than gruesome (aside from one rather gnarly-looking old witch!) so is for those colourists who prefer gothic fantasy over blood and guts. Creep into this classic style Halloween below:

The books are both Amazon CreateSpace published so the paper isn't fantastic but as the illustrations are one sided it doesn't really matter. The greyscale isn't too dark and still allows you to make the picture your own, looking wonderfully authentic when finished. This type of colouring book is ideal for those starting adult colouring who are daunted by all the blank space in line drawings- all you have to do is follow the grey with your dark and light colours, allowing what is already there to guide you. There's no need to swot up on light sources and how to create highlights and shadows; all the hard work has been done.

Here are my finished pictures from the books. It only took me 20-30 minutes to complete each picture- it really is so quick and easy to colour over greyscale and achieve a wonderful end result. Note: both photos were taken with flash on which is why colours look more intense than in the poor lighting of my videos.

Fantasy Kingdom

Halloween

I was given these books in exchange for an honest review. You can find them on Amazon here:
Fantasy Kingdom by Alena Lazareva
Halloween by Alena Lazareva