Flash: Coloring in the Tattoo Style – Chris Garver
Flash: Coloring in the Tattoo Style Video Review
Enjoy the video review above of the Flash coloring book illustrated by well known tattoo artist, Chris Garver.
Flash: Coloring in the Tattoo Style Review
Chris Garver is a well known and experienced tattoo artist. You may already be familiar with his professional work from the reality tv series, Miami Ink or his first coloring book, Color Odyssey. This is the second coloring book by Chris and there is a further coloring book being released next year.
Flash refers to the pre made tattoos that were common in most tattoo shops before custom designed art became more popular. Traditionally, if you walked in to a tattoo shop you would find either hanging on racks or decorating the walls, designs of all sorts, ships, pin up girls, hearts, butterflies and more. It was the custom to point at the image that you wanted and the tattoo artist would then transfer it to you.
Nowadays, tattooists tend to create more custom designed imagery based on their client’s brief, although flash tattoos are still available and used.
Cover & Layout
The cover is beautiful. It features a number of designs of birds, a woman in a quarter moon and some butterflies against a washed blue background. Pre printing on the images makes them stand out on the cover with some line art showing on the birds feathers for contrast. The title and artist’s name are in gold foil as well as the star and hair highlights. The back cover features six thumbnail images from within the book.
You can immediately see that this book is a different coloring book from the previously released Color Odyssey. First of all, this book is a smaller size. It measures 22cm x 25cm (8.8 in x 9.8 in approximately).
Ancillary Pages
The title page of the book is quite fancy with a gold look color used for the title text. There is a small image to color and the publishers logo in color. It is not usual that we see color printing within coloring books and this immediately sets it apart and grabs my attention.
Over page is a colored photograph of flash tattoos and on the facing page an introduction from the artist. On the reverse, author information is set out for you.
Layout
Flash Coloring Book has images printed on one side of the white, medium quality, paper only (unlike Color Odyssey) and the paper is perforated!   All of the illustrations are orientated portrait style and can be easily removed and framed.
Illustrations
The illustrations all reflect flash tattoos that you will see in any tattoo shop. Flash tends to focus on one subject and does not generally have a lot of background elements in it although it does have complimentary elements. The illustrations that Chris has done reflect traditional tattoo design and some Japanese inspired tattoo designs.
You will find beautiful pin ups, dragons, hearts, birds, butterflies, snakes and skulls within this book. I like the variety of the images within the book as there is something for everyone. All are finely detailed and well proportioned designs as is reflective of Chris Garver’s artistic style.
The illustrations have been printed in a dull black ink. The line weight tends to vary depending on the image but the majority is a medium weight making it easy to see and color in. There are some images where a solid black has been used to distinguish between the parts of the illustration.
As flash is generally only a single theme it means that the drawings may be detailed but there is not a lot of foreground or background elements. This makes it easy for colorists that have minor visual impairment to focus on the image, rather than be distracted by an abundance of detail.
About 4 of the images have background detail in them for you to color. The bulk of the images are surrounded with white space making it ideal to add background effects if you wished.
There are a handful of images that fill the whole page. As a consequence some of the elements run over t he perforation guide. This means that if you remove the image from the book, you will lose parts of the image and it may not center correctly in a frame. To avoid that, these images would need to be removed from the spine and not the perforation mark.
the bulk of the images within this book have large areas of space within the elements to color. This makes it suitable for colorists of all ages and skill levels.
Where to buy Flash: Coloring in the Tattoo Style by Chris Garver
Amazon US | Amazon UK | Amazon CA | Amazon JP | Amazon AU
Other Coloring Books by Chris Garver
In early 2017 we will also see a new coloring book from Chris Garver which is called “Animal Odyssey” it will involve a wide array of animals and different scenes. Something to look forward to!
Happy coloring x
Lea
