Pukka Pad A4 Colour In and Personalise Project Book – A Review

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Pukka Pad A4 Colour In and Personalise Project Book is part of the Pukka Pad stationery range and was kindly sent to me to review. This notebook is A4 in size and exactly the same size, shape and format as their standard project notebooks with spiral-binding, thick flexible card covers, and 5 differently coloured plastic pocket divider pages with tabs that can be written on to label each section (the colours of these are black, bright pink, yellowy-green, pale pink and lilac). All of the pages are lined with the usual thickness lines of this style of notebook. What makes this project book different is the 6 sides of covers that you can colour. At the front of the book are two double-sided card covers each with a different design on, the front of each has the Pukka Pad logo on, coloured in pink on the first, and left blank on the second, the inside covers of each are still uniquely designed and these don’t have the wording on them. The back cover is identical to the two designs on the first of the front covers so you get 6 A4 sides to colour with a total of 4 unique designs. The card the covers are printed on is very thick and one side is quite shiny and the other matte, both textures are equally easy to colour on with alcohol markers and I experienced no bleed-through or shadowing when using either side so you’ll be able to colour all 6 covers using alcohol markers if you wish. The matte sides will be fine to use water-based pens on or pencils if you wish, but the shiny sides are only really suitable for alcohol markers as the surface repels water-based inks. At the bottom of each notebook page is a doodle bar with the same pattern repeating throughout the book, I personally found this a shame because I’m not overly keen on colouring the same pattern 200 times, it would have been better to have them all different if possible or at least alternating between a few designs. The paper is standard notebook paper so it’s relatively thin at 80gsm and sadly, water-based pens do noticeably shadow when colouring the doodle bar on each page. When writing, there is a little shadowing but this is standard throughout most notebooks of this type. The doodle bar itself is a simple mosaic style floral pattern which certainly has lots of scope for different colour palettes, you could challenge yourself to do a different one for each of the 200 copies! The covers are a good variety of images with one being butterflies (2 copies), one repeated flower designs, one the mosaic style floral pattern shown much larger and in full (2 copies), and one a floral, circular, scaly type pattern.

In terms of mental health, this notebook doesn’t offer a huge amount of colouring so as a specific colouring product it’s not ideal, however, as a notebook, that you might need to be using anyway, with added colouring to do, it’s a really nice product and it’ll be really handy for giving you a quick colouring fix. When I was at uni and sat in lectures I’d often draw heaps of simple shapes and then colour them in, it helped me concentrate and stay focused, I wish colouring notebooks had existed at the time because not only would I have had space to write lecture notes but I could also have coloured in without having to look like a teenager with a ridiculous crush by drawing and colouring in hearts all over my book because I couldn’t draw anything else. The line thickness varies across and throughout the images from spindly thin to medium thickness, the intricacy and detail levels vary hugely too from teeny tiny spaces to larger open spaces, you will need pretty good vision and fine motor control but it doesn’t need to be perfect and you could easily do what I did and colour over some of the small sections or background patterns. The doodle strips on each page won’t take you long to colour at all which is ideal for colouring on the go and colouring on bad days, you could colour all of the covers ready for using the notebook for a new term or semester, or you could colour as you go and just fill in sections when you fancy. This notebook once finished will look fabulous and be really personal and it’s sure to brighten up your day and make dull lecture notes a bit more exciting.

Overall, I would highly recommend this project book. There’s not a huge amount of different imagery to colour which is a bit of a shame but it’s nicely produced and the images included are very nice, the project book itself is great as always from Pukka Pad!

If you’d like to purchase one, it’s available here:
Amazon UK – Pukka Pad A4 Colour In and Personalise Project Book

The cover below was coloured using Sharpie Fine Point Alcohol Markers, the notebook page was coloured using Stabilo Point 88 Fineliners.