on May 2016
Style: color inspiration images, double page printing
Pages: 80
Format: Dust Jacket
Enjoy the story of Cinderella in this cute and whimsical style Japanese coloring book. Illustrations spanning the life of Cinders, iconic Cinderella illustrations and post wedding illustrations included.
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Cinderella Story Coloring Book Video Review
I hope you enjoyed the video review above of The Cinderella Story Coloring Book from Japan.
Cinderella Story Coloring Book Review
We have seen Cinderella portrayed in so many of our fairy tale based coloring books, but there are very few coloring books for adults devoted to the tale of Cinderella solely. When I seen this Japanese coloring book The Story of Cinderella I had to have it. Part of me, is always curious and intrigued, as to how different artists represent characters in well known fairy tales. I guess it is this innate curiosity that has led to my shelves overflowing, and my dreams filled with coloring books.
This image features a background in a grey outline and grey shading in the horse’s mane. The balance of the outline is in crisp black
Cover & Layout
The glossy dust jacket features the handsome Prince and Cinderella at the ball surrounded by flowers. If I was imagining a a Cinderella coloring book, I would have instinctively thought that the cover would predominantly feature pink. I don’t know why 🙂 The cover with the predominant use of red surprised me somewhat. You will see from the cover imagery that the characters are presented in cartoonish style rather than realistic imagery, and this is indicative of the balance of the content in the book.
The spine is maroon with text in pale blue.
The cover illustration wraps to the back of the book which features the balance of Cinderella’s ball gown with floral decorative elements. There is nothing for the colorist to color on the cover.
The inner side of the dust jacket does not have any line art on it to color in.
A glossy card cover protects the book and features printed line art in pink of Cinderella meeting her handsome Prince. The back cover features only pre printed pink decorative flowers.
The Cinderella Story Coloring Book measures approximately 24.8 cm x 24.8 cm (approximately 9.8 in x 9.8 in)
Ancillary Pages
The front of the card cover title page has been reproduced as the title page for the book.
At the rear of the book you will find 19 pages that comprise some thumbnails of pages from the book, colored images from the book, text in Japanese and some coloring techniques. At first glance it looks like the line art thumbnail is the “before” picture and the colored image corresponds to the completed picture. This is NOT the case. Rather, it appears to be the story book form of Cinderella, with a mix of both line art and colored images to show the progression of the fairy tale. One of the things that is nice about this book is that it appears to illustrate the whole of the tale rather than the well known snippets.
There are no spare pages in the book to test out your mediums safely. You may wish to use one of the 19 pages at the rear to discreetly see how your mediums will react with the paper and your coloring style.
Layout
The art work for the Cinderella Story Coloring book has been presented on both sides of the smooth white, medium quality paper. The paper is very good but would not withstand wet mediums like markers or very wet inktense without damaging the reverse of the page.
All of the illustrations have been orientated portrait style.
There are only 4 pages in the book where the illustration has been contained within one page. The balance of the art work has been created as double page scenes. Line art does run to the spine of the book. The binding on this book is very tight but after I flexed my muscles more than usual, I was able to push it down. Even with the pushing, there are a few illustrations where it will require a bit of pencil wriggling to color the elements.
This is one of the images where it may be tricky to color the horses hooves as they tend to disappear into the spine of the book
Some illustrations have text in Japanese on them to either indicate a Chapter or something else.
There are 18 pages that have a pre printed black background on them.
Cinderella Story Coloring Book Images & Illustrations
As you can glean from the front cover of this coloring book the style that Cinderella is portrayed in is cartoonish and cute. The illustrations progress in storybook order throughout the book making it a lovely refresher of this well known fairy tale.
You will find imagery of Cinders cast as the servant which lovely illustrations of interiors and life as a maid. The Ugly Stepsisters are not as ugly as you may imagine, although they have been drawn with sharply defined features.
There are gorgeous illustrations of gowns to color in, but many do not have as much detail as I would have expected. It may be that this is intentional, so that the colorist has the opportunity to be creative.
You will also find a lovely range of buildings from castles to houses and cobble stone paths to color as well as those lovely iconic stairs.
In addition to people there are also some delicious looking cakes and snacks to color as well as some lovely animals including horses, a hedgehog and a few cats and dogs here and there.
One of the things that I really like is that there are a variety of men to color in including the handsome Prince.
The line art is lovely and black and crisp and very easy to see. Colorists that have minor visual impairment should have no difficulty here. The bulk of the images although there is a lot of detail on the page, do tend to have large open spaces. This makes it easier to color and less distracting for those with minor visual impairment and those that may have health challenges that make coloring small spaces difficult. There are a few illustrations where you will see small details like flowers, petals or dress detail that may be too fiddly to color but these can easily be color washed if they prove challenging.
A few of the illustrations have been enhanced with a layer of grey shadowing on them to indicated shade.
Please click on an image below to view more detail.
[foogallery id=”5733″]Where to buy Cinderella Story Coloring Book
You can purchase Cinderella from this etailer or from Amazon Japan here.
Happy coloring x
Lea
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