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Enchanted Forest: 20 Postcards
The postcards are made of thick, off-white card which won’t bleed through unless you use alcohol markers but does bleed sideways a little with some water-based pens. The line thickness is spindly thin and sadly, this is where the problem is. I have very good vision for small, close things, and also have very good fine motor control but the images on these postcards are so tiny that they’re almost impossible to colour and I went over the lines a number of times. I used various fineliners that have 0.3mm and 0.4mm nibs and even these were sometimes too thick to colour the pictures neatly. This is such a shame because I’m a huge fan of Johanna’s images and I just love her books but scaling down the images to postcard size really wasn’t a sensible choice because it’s so limiting. The postcards are beautiful to look at and would be gorgeous to send or display as they are but given that they’re sold as colouring postcards, I expect to be able to colour them and I just haven’t found that possible to do as neatly as I’d like to. I had assumed that the images would include full-size zoomed in sections of the original images so that you can still blend and shade with pencils and use felt-tips or fineliners but because the images have been shrunk they’re just too small to colour (see the photo below of the maze with my fingers on for scale – I don’t have giant hands).
Unfortunately from a mental health perspective I really can’t recommend these. I have perfect vision (no glasses needed yet) and fine motor control and really struggled to colour them and found it quite stressful because I just couldn’t get it to look right. Intricate is an understatement when describing these images – they’re so detailed and tiny and while this makes them really interesting to look at, I would have to say that they’re really not well designed for colouring. You can’t even make copies of them and blow them up larger because the copyright instructions strictly prohibit this. All in all, I’m afraid I’m really disappointed. From what I’ve seen of the Secret Garden postcard book online, they are not full images and are zoomed in sections which is much more sensible and usable and it’s a real shame that they changed the format when publishing these Enchanted Forest postcards. My recommendation would be to get the book of Enchanted Forest which is currently half price on Amazon and over £2 cheaper than this postcard book and contains many more images, none of which are impossible to colour. These postcards would look beautiful framed as they are but for me, they’re just not suitable for colouring. If you’d still like to purchase them or view them online, they can be found on Amazon here Enchanted Forest: 20 Postcards
For the image below I used Stabilo Point 88 Fineliners and Staedtler Triplus Fineliners.
In The Midst Of Madness 