Harry Potter Magical Creatures Colouring Book – A Review

Disclaimer – Please read this disclosure about my use of affiliate links which are contained within this post.
Harry Potter Magical Creatures Colouring Book is published by Studio Press and is from my personal collection. This book is the sequel to the Harry Potter Colouring Book which I’ve reviewed here. Two more titles are set to be released later in the year, Magical Places and Characters, and Artefacts, and you’ll find links to those at the bottom of this review. Grab your wand, bring a lantern, swat up on your incantations and let’s get delving into the Forbidden Forest and the depths of the Great Lake (minus the lantern of course, unless it’s enchanted). This book is paperback with a glossy accented cover and a green spine, it’s A4 in size and glue-bound meaning that a little of some images is lost. The images are a mixture of single and double-page spreads with many of the single pages having a thin border meaning that they’re not lost into the spine. The book contains 96 pages which are printed double-sided. The paper is bright white and thick (they’ve sorted out the paper issues since the first book), and didn’t bleed or shadow when tested with water-based pens, it’s lightly textured and perfect for pencils, you can get plenty of layers for blending and shading! You can see the difference in paper thickness just by looking at the spines of the books (see photo below), the green-spined book is noticeably thicker than my original copy of the Harry Potter colouring book.

The images are drawn by multiple illustrators so they’re cohesive in content but some are drawn quite differently from each other. The images themselves include many stills from the films which are drawn very realistically so it’s very obvious who each character is and they look just like the actors in costume playing them. There are also images based on concept art for the films and a number of patterns are included which do feel a bit like “filler” images but there are fewer of these in this book than the Harry Potter Colouring Book (about 10 versus 15+). A huge number of different creatures are pictured from obvious inclusions of Buckbeak, Fang, and Fluffy the three-headed dog, to less common creatures like Cornish pixies and pygmy puffs. There are single and double-page spreads of film scenes such as Fawkes hatching in Dumbledore’s hand, Hermione meeting Grawp (Hagrid’s giant half-brother) in the Forbidden Forest, the troll in the girls’ toilets holding Harry up by his ankle, and the dragon escaping from Gringotts. All of your favourite magical creatures are pictured, including Dobby the House Elf, Hedwig – Harry’s owl, Crookshanks – Hermione’s cat, and Fawkes the Phoenix, and more menacing creatures like Aragog – the giant spider and all of her children, Nagini the snake, the basilisk, and dementors, as well as some of the more detached creatures like thestrals, centaurs, mandrakes, dragons, trolls and merpeople. At the end of the book are a number of full colour pages of the images included in the book meaning you can either copy the colour schemes in those or pick your own, they’re also great for helping you re-live the magic of the films and get yourself back into the world of Hogwarts – as if any of us ever left!

In terms of mental health, this book doesn’t have an awful lot of impact on it unless you’re a Harry Potter Mega Fan in which case it’s likely to considerably lift your mood and give you hours and hours of distraction and enjoyment. The images take a long time to colour if you want them to look realistic so you will need fairly good levels of concentration. The line thickness varies from very thin to thick but mostly it remains thin so you will definitely need good vision and fine motor control to get the most out of this book. The best part of this book is that it has coloured pages at the back which can be used to copy or give inspiration for colour schemes, you can also easily google the scenes, objects or creatures to find images of them from the films to work out exactly how to colour them so they look true to the film, or you can go it alone and try out your own colour schemes with bright pink robes, purple trolls and sparkly green dementors – it doesn’t have to be realistic, remember it’s a magical world! Some of the illustrations are very intricate and detailed and others are much simpler with larger open spaces so this book does have a variety of difficulty levels to accommodate your good and bad days.

All in all, this is a good book, it’s better than the last because it’s more specific with fewer gaps in content and fewer “filler” images. If you liked the Harry Potter colouring book then you’re sure to like this one and if you weren’t so keen on it then check out the photos of inside this one below before writing it off. The paper quality is so much better and it’s great that you can use pens and pencils in it to really go to town! I would recommend it for any Harry Potter fans but do look at the images below so you can see if you’ll like it. A number of people have stated online that they were deeply disappointed with the content of the last book and I have to say I was a little disappointed myself, I expected more scenes and few, if any, patterned or object-focused images, there are fewer in this book but they are still definitely there so as long as you’re aware of this and are ok with it, you’re sure to love it! Pop on your robes, wrap up in your scarf (house colours of course), hop on your broomstick and fly straight to Hogwarts and get colouring the magical creatures that reside there and beyond.

If you’d like to purchase a copy it’s available here:
Amazon UK – Harry Potter Magical Creatures Colouring Book
Book Depository Worldwide – http://www.bookdepository.com/Harry-Potter-Magical-Creatures-Colouring-Book-Warner-Brothers/9781783705825/?a_aid=colouringitmom

You can pre-order the other two titles here, please bear in mind that some of these are currently only available to pre-order in US English so do check when ordering:
Harry Potter Magical Places and Characters
Amazon UK – Harry Potter Magical Places & Characters Coloring Book
Book Depository Worldwide – http://www.bookdepository.com/HARRY-POTTER-MAGICAL-PLACES–CHARACTERS-null/9781608877997/?a_aid=colouringitmom

Harry Potter Artefacts/Artifacts
Amazon UK – Harry Potter Artifacts Colouring Book
Book Depository Worldwide – http://www.bookdepository.com/Harry-Potter-Magical-Artifacts-Coloring-Book-Inc-Scholastic/9781338030020/?a_aid=colouringitmom

If you’d like to purchase a copy of the Harry Potter Colouring Book it’s available here:
Review – Harry Potter Colouring Book
Amazon UK – Harry Potter Colouring Book
Book Depository Worldwide – https://www.bookdepository.com/Harry-Potter-Colouring-Book-Warner-Brothers/9781783705481/?a_aid=colouringitmom

The image below was coloured using Faber-Castell Polychromos Pencils.