The A-Z of Creative Colouring by Kelly O'Gorman

22/11/2016

Summary
Current Price: £9.95
Number of Pages: 60
Size: 23 x 21cm
Paper colour: White
Paper thickness: Very Good
Linework: Medium (shaded)
Perforated: Yes
One sided: Yes
Binding: Glue
Drawings go into the spine: No
Waterbased pen bleed: None

There are a few alphabet colouring books on the market but not many are designed specifically to be used in a real way other than to colour. The A-Z of Creative Colouring is made to take apart and display your finished letters as decorative names, initials, bunting, banners-- anything you can think of! Most alphabet books have just one print of each letter which makes longer names difficult to create, but this book contains two copies of each consonant and three of each vowel so you're able to colour them all differently and put together most names easily.

The letters are all in capitals and are made up of animals and objects whose name starts with that letter, for example D is made up of Dog, Door, Drum, Duck, Drill, Dominoes, Dragon, Doll, Diamond, Dragonfly, Donut, Dinosaur and Dice, so each letter is packed! As you can tell the design is very child-oriented with cartoon-style illustration, perfect for framing in a child's bedroom or nursery. As you can appreciate, personalised hand-illustrated names are quite expensive when you order them from individual artists, so to have a whole book full with the capacity for more than one name is awesome! Here's a flip through of the entire book.

I mentioned that it has been designed especially for display and not just to sit as a book on the shelf, which is why every single page is perforated and printed on one side. The paper stock is thick and has a light tooth, so you can use anything from watercolour paints to coloured pencils with no worry of bleed-through or heavy buckling- just make sure you use water sparingly. The drawings are all pre-shaded so you don't have to worry about light sources or where your darks & lights go- just follow the shading.

The A-Z of Creative Colouring is just under £10 to buy and is in my opinion a real bargain for the attention to detail and production quality you are getting. Here is my finished page, coloured with Sharpies.