Mysterious Cat and His Friends Coloring Book Review

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Mysterious Cat and His Friends Coloring Book Buy on Amazon JP|Buy from Etailer|Buy from Booktopia
by Kurami Sayo
Style: Contains Extras, double page printing
Format: Dust Jacket

Mysterious Cat and His Friends Coloring Book Review

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Table of Contents

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Mysterious Cat and His Friends Coloring Book Review

I don’t know if you can relate to this or not, but I am super moody with my coloring books. I often take a dislike to a coloring book and that’s it, I don’t want to look at it or give it a chance. You may be surprised that I seen this book in store in Sydney last year. I looked at it. Did not like it, one little bit. Thank goodness, because I had a full load already of ones that I did fancy. I never thought twice about it. I left it there, in store, where I could have bought it for a low price. Months went by and I always seen the little kitty looking at me in the Amazon listings. It seemed smug, so I moved on.

As time passed, I thought I knew kitty so well that I had convinced myself that I already owned kitty. Then I did a stocktake of my goodies and realised that I didn’t own kitty. By the way, my idea of a stocktake is randomly pulling out books and oohing and ahhing over them. It was at that time that I seen a picture of kitty colored. My thoughts on kitty immediately changed. I am sure you won’t be surprised to hear that kitty jumped into my cart super quick. When I unpacked kitty, I realised that it wasn’t a smug look on kitty’s face, it was – contentment. She was home. Seriously, I don’t know why I rejected this book for so long because, of course, I am now madly in love with it and can appreciate the differences it offers. I would also like a real life kitty that looked like the cover art as well.

Cover & Layout

The cover features a thick cream, matte dust jacket with pre printed coloring on the front and back. Our contented kitty, as can be seen from the cover, has a lot of added detail and texture on him (I think it looks like a her) which is consistent with the illustrations inside.

The coloring book proper has a kraft card cover with an illustration of the kitty side on that continues on the back cover. You can color in this image, particularly if you like coloring on kraft card.

Mysterious Cat and His Friends is a tad smaller than most coloring books from Japan that we may be familiar with. It measures 25cm x 23cm.

Ancillary Pages

There is a lovely colored overlay piece of paper that starts the book. It has a colored image of our cute kitty with a lovely pastel background. The line art for the kitty is over page, and this gives you a great idea of what the cat would look like when colored like this.

There are 4 pages at the start of the book that contain text in Japanese with a few little floral elements to decorate the pages. These pages would be a great spot to test out your mediums.

There is an 8 page visual index at the end of the book and a copyright page, printed on the reverse.

Layout

The illustrations have been printed on both sides of the paper. The paper is dull white, medium quality, but at the lighter end.

There are 34 pages that comprise double page scenes. Line art does run to the spine fo the book. The book is quite stiff at this time, but i am hopeful that with some love, that it will loosen up enough to color these areas.

Mysterious Cat and His Friends Coloring Book Images and Illustrations

The art work in this book is just gorgeous. There is a mix of simple line and highly textured, virtually greyscale illustrations. These different artistic styles seem to work for this book as they contain a common thread of the lovely cat.

Throughout the book you will find a variety of animals; fish, sheep, cats, bunnies, cows some with other creatures and some in cute scenes. There are gorgeous spreads with a Halloween theme, dressed up cats for afternoon tea, cats with presents and a gorgeous cat and the fiddle illustration.

Some of the pictures are so intricate that colorists with a minor visual impairment may run screaming from the page. Personally, with these pictures I would just use a color wash if eye sight or hand movement was an issue. I am sure that they would look gorgeous with a wash as they would with more hands on coloring.

This book is completely quirky, not only with the way that the line art has been created using two different styles but also the elaborate use of patterns, textures and doodles to embellish the art work.

The line color is a dull to rich black as each image has an artistic hand drawn feel to it. There are line weight variations as well to denote texture and for finer details that you may find.

Please click on an image to view more detail

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