Scandia: A Colouring Book Journey – A Review

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Scandia: A Colouring Journey is illustrated by Zeena Shah, and published and kindly sent to me to review by LOM Art. This gorgeous book is filled with Scandinavian style art and is cute, quirky, fun and pretty in equal measure! The book itself is 25cm square, paperback with flexible card covers and the front cover has an incredible flower and leaf papercut design which shows the beautiful turquoise first page through it (I’m extremely tempted to remove the cover of my book and frame it because it’s so beautiful). The spine is glue and stitch-bound but it’s pretty pliable and not very many of the images enter the spine so it doesn’t cause much of a problem. The paper is bright white and thick, lightly textured and perfect for use with water-based pens which only vaguely shadow if you colour over the same area more than once, and coloured pencils which you can build up multiple layers with for blending and shading, alcohol markers will bleed through but this isn’t an issue as long as you put a protective sheet behind your work. This book contains 46 single-sided images which are all drawn in a Scandinavian style and would all make great Nordic jumper patterns. The images are almost entirely of natural items such as food, plants, animals and scenery and they’re all drawn in a cute, cartoon-y style so they’re not overly realistic and are therefore really charming. They have a childlike quality to them (not childish) and are full of imagination from the leafy antlers of a deer to a jumper-wearing bear, the illustrations are all filled with patterns making them very interesting to look at, as well as colour and these would look lovely coloured, removed and framed for a Scandinavian themed room, especially a child’s room as you could use really bright colours for this. The illustrations include mountains, a whale, deer, fruit, birds, a lighthouse, a rabbit, sailing boats, and lots of Scandi-style patterns, it really is beautiful!

In terms of mental health, this is a book that offers great escapism. The images aren’t drawn too realistically so they don’t feel restrictive; you don’t have to use realistic colours to make them come to life, you can easily colour a pink rabbit or some blue fruit and this would look just as good as brown or green. The line thickness is consistent throughout and is medium/thin with thinner lined details and the intricacy and detail level is also consistently moderate to high throughout. This means that this book would be ideal for anyone, apart from those with particularly poor vision or fine motor control. The lines are thick enough that you won’t easily colour over them by accident and the details aren’t teeny tiny there are just a lot of smaller sections because of the patterns Zeena has added to each larger section. These patterns are really lovely and definitely add a huge amount of interest and charm to the images and can either be used to colour within, or to colour over in blocks to create texture. The fun and light heartedness of these images means that they’re great for lifting your mood and brightening your day and because they’re all single pages, they don’t take hours and hours to colour so this is a fantastic book for your bad days when your concentration is poor or when you want a quick and rewarding colouring experience. The illustrations are beautiful and the papercut front cover is such a wonderful, unique touch of luxury that puts this colouring book right up there with the current bestsellers.

I would highly recommend this book to those of you who like Scandinavian art, and those who like to colour all things cute! This is a beautiful book filled with whimsy, charm and fun and I’m absolutely blown away by the front cover which is definitely worthy of framing!

If you’d like to purchase a copy, it’s available here:
Amazon UK – Scandia: A Colouring Journey
Book Depository Worldwide – https://www.bookdepository.com/Scandia-Zeena-Shah/9781910552315/?a_aid=colouringitmom

The image below was coloured using Stabilo Point 88 Fineliners and Stabilo 68 Fibre-tips.