by Roald Dahl
Published by Puffin on 1 September 2016
Style: single page illustrations
Pages: 96
Format: Card cover with fold out, Glue & Stitched
Goodreads
Willy Wonka's chocolate factory, Charlie's glorious golden ticket, the BFG's magical dream jars and many other classic Roald Dahl scenes are all inside this beautiful, intricately illustrated colouring book.
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Roald Dahl’s Marvelous Colouring Book Adventure Review
I grew up with Roald Dahl books! I just love the nostalgia that a lot of these colouring books brings out. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was my favorite of the Dahl books and later the Willy Wonka movie, brought to life with the legendary Gene Wilder. I guess I loved the book and movie so much because because I <3 chocolate! If you haven’t seen the original movie before, a little teaser is below.
It must be an incredibly difficult task to create a coloring book from such a prolific author’s stories. Do you select just one story and bring it to life or a mix of things?
In Roald Dahl’s Colouring Book Adventure the publishers have decided to give us a mix of Roald Dahl in a gorgeous colouring book featuring illustrations depicting his well known stories.
Cover & Layout
The white glossy cover features a cascade of books and sweets. The title and hat are in royal purple, which I always associate with a favorite chocolate brand! The golden ticket and some other elements have lovely gold foil highlighting. The back cover features line art of Willy Wonka.
Willy Wonka – Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
The cover of Roald Dahl’s Marvelous Colouring Book Adventure has fold out flaps with royal purple art work of sweets. Sadly, there is no line art on the inner and back covers.
The spine is a lovely shiny gold but the white text is difficult to read against this background.
The title page recreates the cover art for you to color. Copyright information has been printed on the reverse of this page.
Danny the Champion of the World
A gorgeous nameplate page follows. It is heavily colored in solid black in parts but this dark background seems to scream at the colorist to color all the sweets in bright and vibrant colors to make them stand out. The nameplate page features a variation on the “This book belongs to” saying instead “this book has been coloured in by”. It’s a cute touch and really acknowledges that this book is for coloring fun. A massive list of Roald Dahl’s works follows. It really is astounding what this man created in his lifetime.
A part introduction to the coloring adventure follows, that has been decorated with an abundance of sweet jars. Makes me hungry to look at it. Other than these ancillary pages that have been printed on both sides, the balance of the book imagery is printed one image per page.
Esio Trot
The paper is white and a medium quality. As the images have been printed on only one side of the paper, if you wish to use markers then you could do so. Just insert a few pieces of scrap paper or card behind the piece that you are working on, to avoid bleed through to the next page.
Illustrations
The colouring book has been illustrated by Lee Teng and Leo Brown. It must be an extremely difficult task to illustrate images for a coloring book for such a renowned and loved author. I think that task would be further complicated by having two different artists, with no doubt, different artistic styles illustrating this book. It is not known, which artist illustrated which image in the book, or whether it was a collaboration by both on each illustration.
On the reverse of each illustration a thumbnail image of the preceding image is displayed together with the book name and a short description. This gives a lovely continuous visual index of the images within the book. It also serves to remind us of those lovely stories that Roald Dahl produced.
James and The Giant Peach
The images all celebrate a particular Roald Dahl story book, as set out at the start of the book, and as such they are diverse. They range from simplistic to far more detailed and realistic illustrations. In total, there are 45 illustrations to color in.
There are images, of course, for Charlie and the Chocolate factory featuring Willy Wonka and an abundance of sweets. There are images from all the “Charlie” series of books as well as, Danny the Champion of the World, The BFG, The Enormous Crocodile, Esio Trot, Fantastic Mr Fox, George’s Marvelous Medicine, Matilda and many more. There are space themes, beautiful scenes from nature, whimsical gypsy vans and a scary crocodile. The images all contain something wonderful to color whether it be a crocodile, an interior, carousel pony, tortoises. It does have something for everyone if you like nature, buildings, people, interiors and exteriors and patterns.
The illustrations have all been inked in a crisp, black. Depending on the type of illustration the line weight does differ. All varieties of line weight are present throughout the book ranging from fine to heavy, to solid black in some instances.
The Twits
Most of the illustrations fill the entire page with imagery. Only a few images offer the colorist the opportunity to add elaborate background effects.
As the bulk of the art fills the page, most of the line art runs to the spine of the book. You will need to push the book firmly to relax the spine to color in these areas.
There is a lovely range of detail in the book. There are many images with lovely large spaces ideal for colorists that have visual or motor issues. Other images contain smaller details and may have you reaching for the fine liners. There are a number of images that would be brought to life with beautiful blending and layering. Other images would look just as nice in solid color. The book is suitable for all ages and both children and adults could happily find something to color within its pages.
Roald Dahl’s Colouring Book Adventure Video Review
Enjoy the video review of Roald Dahl’s Colouring Book Adventure below:
Where to buy Roald Dahl’s Colouring Book Adventure
| Amazon US | Amazon UK | Book Depository |
Happy coloring x
Lea
Cute!
There are some cute pics in there and some really detailed ones. Nice variety of images all round and not what I expected from the cover image. Happy coloring x
Nice, although I have to admit I prefer Quentin Blake’s illustrations that always accompanied Roald Dahl’s books- I wish he would illustrate a colouring book! A hardback story-book format would be just lovely, one to accompny each of the original books But I suppose this is more of a modern take on the classic stories- something a bit different. I agree the purple looks like Cadbury’s!!!
The purple has me completely trained to think of Cadburys chocolate (which I love!). Quentin Blake doesn’t seem to offer any coloring related products on his web shop, which is a shame. Some of those illustrations would be a lot of fun to color in. Happy coloring x