by Steve McDonald
on 15 March 2017
Style: double page printing
Format: Card cover
Goodreads
"Bestselling author Steve McDonald uses his unique photo-based illustration style to celebrate the fantastic places, flora, and fauna of the natural world around us. Here are inspiring, fun-to-color images of lush jungles, teeming reefs, desert landscapes, fruitful orchards, sun-dappled forests, spectacular waterfalls, majestic trees, tulip fields, animal migrations, and much more. A selection of imaginative natural mandala illustrations rounds out this gorgeous, high-quality adult coloring book, the latest in the bestselling Fantastic series."
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Fantastic Planet Coloring Book Video Review
I hope you enjoyed the video review of Fantastic Planet: A Colouring Book of Amazing Places Both Real and Imagined illustrated by Steve McDonald
Fantastic Planet Coloring Book Review
Steve McDonald burst into the colouring book world with his intricate and highly detailed Fantastic Cities Colouring Book. He followed this amazing book up with Fantastic Structures and then Fantastic Collections. Fantastic Planet is his fourth colouring book in the “fantastic” series of colouring books.
I have all of Steve McDonald’s colouring books, unfortunately they are in that giant “to do” stack that seems to breed colouring books every time I look at it!
Steve McDonald’s art work is based on a photo realism type of art and is very intricate and detailed and certainly not for the faint hearted.
Cover & Layout
Fantastic Planet features a beautiful cover featuring jelly fish in an underwater scene. The colouring has the appearance of beautiful water colors that has produced art work that has both depth and a dreamy feel as well. Only a small corner of the cover art shows as line art.
On the back cover coloured leaves form a mandala type shape to indicate, that as per the book description, some of the scenes will be produced as mandala type designs.
The spine of the book is a navy blue which complements the cover art.
In the Fantastic series of colouring books all of the colouring books have been produced as over sized. Fantastic Planet follows the same format measuring in at 29.1 cm 30.1 cm (11.5 in x 11.8in approximately)
The inside cover, both front and back features coloured thumbnails of the pictures inside. The front cover lists out the locations or describes the subject of each drawing in the book.
Ancillary Pages
A plain text title page commences the book with copyright information over leaf. This is the only place to test out your mediums.
Layout
Illustrations have been printed on both sides of the white, medium quality paper. All of the images are orientated portrait style throughout the colouring book.
Each image stops approximately 1 cm before the spine of the book ensuring that you can color this area and also read the name of the illustration that is printed in this area.
There are no double page scenes within the book.
Fantastic Planet Colouring Book Images and Illustrations
When Fantastic Planet first arrived on my doorstop on a wet and rainy day in Sydney I gave it a quick flip through. I was underwhelmed. It didn’t grab me at all. I thought that I had made a mistake purchasing this colouring book (and mentally processed what I could have bought instead).
The second leaf through of the colouring book made me realise how wrong I was. Paying attention to the beautiful coloured thumbnails at front and back of the book I could finally see the beauty in the illustrations that had eluded me at first glance. Now, I can’t wait to color it in! Sometimes, a colouring book grabs me with love at first sight and sometimes the love has to grow 🙂
As is the style of Steve McDonald the designs are intricate. Using varying line weights of crisp, black the outlines are predominantly shown as either foreground or background, depending on the line weight.
The art work tends to have the appearance of hand drawn art work, not that the lines are sketchy but that the work appears sketched out with pen.
Although each element is not highly detailed on its own the way that Steve McDonald packs so much onto a page the image on the whole becomes very detailed.
Many of the illustrations have areas of open space which in this book is really an opportunity for you to use your fancy colouring techniques and blend and shade to your hearts content. The coloured illustrations at the front of the book can give you an idea of what you can achieve if you are an experienced colorist. However, new colourists can still have a great time colouring the images even in solid colors if they wished but you must be prepared for the amount of detail on each page.
Colorists that have minor visual impairment may find the amount of detailed packed into the page overwhelming and distracting. Tackling a picture may involve just allocating a small amount of time to color in each day to prevent eye strain.
Within the book you will find an array of animals, nature scenes and mandala designs.
Please click on an image to view more detail
[foogallery id=”7793″]Detail Level
Where to buy Fantastic Planet Colouring Book
| Amazon US | Amazon UK | Amazon Canada | Book Depository |
Happy coloring x
Lea
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