by Tomoko Tashiro
on 13 September 2016
Style: double page printing
Pages: 96
Format: Dust Jacket, Glue Binding
Favorite fairy tales illustrated in a delicate and intricate fashion.
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Fantasy Colouring Book by Tomoko Tashiro
I first fell in love with Tomoko Tashiro’s art work when I stumbled across her first coloring book, Fairy Tales in my local bookshop. I couldn’t believe my luck, when I was in another suburb one day and came across her second coloring book, Princesses and Fairies. I was taking no chances with her third colouring book, Fantasy Colouring Book and pre-ordered it.
Despite, living in a Capital city in Australia, the selection of coloring books in store is quite meager, especially from Japanese coloring book creators like Tomoko Tashiro. I had already depleted most bookstores of their selection during my early days of acquiring coloring books.
Cover & Layout
The cover of the Fantasy Colouring Book is similar to the previous books created by Tomoko Tashiro. It features a dust jacket with pinks and blues and a metallic look to some printing (not foil). There are a few little elements that you could color on the front cover, if you wished. On the back cover the whole of the line art is available to color. It features two little birds in a nest of flowers surrounded by a heart and framed in florals and beaded stars. It really is lovely.
The cover art is based on illustrations from the Wizard of Oz and the line art is contained in the book for you to color.
The flaps on the dust jacket feature line art printed on an olive/metallic color background. Due to the fine liens and the background color, you may find it challenging coloring these images if you wished to.
Underneath the dust jacket, the book is protected by a card cover. The same olive/metallic look has been used as a background image. Inside line art is contained within the shape of a spade on the front cover and on the back the line art is inside a club. Very cute, and possibly a reference to Alice in Wonderland.
The book measures approximately 25cm x 25cm (approximately 9.8 in x 9.8in)
A lovely title page featuring a beautiful castle surrounded by trees and stars commences the book. Following, there is an Introduction adorned with flowers and leaves. The text is in Japanese, so I have no idea what it says 🙂
At the rear of the book there is: a page about the artist and other details; a visual index of the illustrations in the book, and text on each story reproduced in illustrative form.
The art work is all printed on white, medium quality paper and appears to be the same as her previous two books.
Illustrations
The illustrations are all based on a particular fairy tale theme. Included in the book are illustrations relating to:
The Secret Garden
Peter Pan
The Blue Bird
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Beauty and the Beast
Manon Lescaut
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Daddy Long Legs
Little Women
The Red Shoes
Twelve Months
Night on the Milky Way Train
Tomoko Tashiro has an incredibly fine hand at illustrating. Her work is so fine, delicate and dainty that I feel like a fat fingered chump leafing through it.
All of her work is drawn in a dull, black fine line weight. The drawings are very tightly packed with small details, finely drawn. This is not a book for you, if you have poor eyesight or health issues that rebel at detailed coloring.
The drawings are gorgeous, and Tomoko excels at bringing fairy tales to life, that still have the charm of childhood but with the complexity of adult life.
A lot of the art within this book is surrounded, embellished or decorated in some way with small stars that sprinkle across the magic fairy dust, I suspect. However, many of the stars are very tiny and may be difficult to color, if using pencils, unless they are hardcore like Prismacolor Verithin.
Throughout the book you will find a lot of flowers, most of the flowers are cabbage roses and some are very small. There are also a lot of leaves. Stock up on the green pencils!
There are 32 pages in the book that comprise double page scenes where the line art does run into the spine. The balance of the illustrations are contained on a single page. A handful or so, of the single page illustrations, have line art very close to the spine. The book does lay down well if you give it some gentle pressure.
There are some illustrations in the book that are pattern style, possibly to provide variety with your coloring. About 14 pages I would attribute to pattern, as they do not enhance the fairy tale they relate to. These patterns mainly comprise, stars, snowflakes or flowers.
This is a beautiful book and has some lovely illustrations in it from fairy tales we know and love. It is a coloring book, that you will need to have fine liners, gel pens and the like for, because the detail is very small.
Fantasy Colouring Book by Tomoko Tashiro Image Gallery
[foogallery id=”10216″]Please click the image to enlarge it.
Where to buy Fantasy Colouring Book by Tomoko Tashiro
International buyers – Â Yes Asia with free shippingÂ
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Other coloring books by Tomoko Tashiro Japanese Editions
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Happy coloring x
Lea
It’s so pretty! I want it but the tiny bits worry me. I already despise some of the pages in Johanna Basford’s Lost Oceans because of how tiny some of designs are.
There’s a lot of itty bitty bits to color, may be a job for gel pens 🙂 Luckily there’s a lot of other pages that have “normal” sized imagery! I don’t think I could manage the stars …I’d probably just wash them and do some posca dots on them 🙂