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Color Me Stress-Free: Nearly 100 Coloring Templates to Unplug and Unwind (Zen Coloring Book)
In terms of mental health, this book is great for calming you down in an effort to become stress-free. The pictures are calming and not too intricate meaning they are perfect for using pencils, felt-tips or even paints or watercolours on, just slip a sheet of scrap paper underneath to protect the subsequent pages. This is a great book for those of you who find intricate images fiddly or too difficult and frustrating to colour. It’s also great for inspiration because at the beginning of each chapter a couple of the pictures are shown coloured in so you can follow their colour schemes or brave it and add your own funky colour combinations. This book is a nice size and you get a good sense of satisfaction because each image is small enough that it doesn’t take hours or even days to complete meaning this book is perfect if you don’t have a great attention span or high level of concentration. Don’t worry though, it’s also good for those of you who can sit and colour all day, it just means you’ll get plenty of pictures completed! The images mostly consist of patterns which are known to be very calming because many of them are repetitive and this really keeps you concentrating and distracted from any negative thoughts. There is huge variety within the patterns from swirling and flowing to sharp corners and harsh lines, geometric shapes to abstract designs, symmetrical to random, it’s all in there. There are a few scenic images but they are much fewer in number than the previous two titles in the series which is great for those of you that preferred the patterned designs but not so great for those of you who preferred the scenes. The line thickness is medium throughout and this book is perfect for those of you who don’t have perfect vision or fine motor control but don’t want to colour simple or basic images. This is a really happy medium between intricate and detailed and simple and basic and would be ideal for elderly colourers and those who struggle with small images or thin lines.
I would recommend this book and the others in the series as a great purchase for those of you who like simpler, less intricate images to colour, those of you using pens that bleed easily, and those of you that maybe don’t have the patience or desire to sit colouring one image for days in order to get it finished. They’re great starter books and contain really good images for practising shading with coloured pencils. These books are lovely and work well on their own or as a set and I look forward to seeing Color Me Fearless when it’s released in March 2016 – I hope to be reviewing it!
You can get purchase a copy of Color Me Stress-Free here:
Amazon UK – Color Me Stress-Free: Nearly 100 Coloring Templates to Unplug and Unwind (Zen Coloring Book)
Book Depository Worldwide – https://www.bookdepository.com/Color-Me-Stress-Free/9781631061608/?a_aid=colouringitmom
And you can pre-order a copy of Color Me Fearless here:
Amazon UK – Color Me Fearless: Nearly 100 Coloring Templates to Boost Strength and Courage (Zen Coloring Book)
Book Depository Worldwide – https://www.bookdepository.com/Color-Me-Fearless-Lacy-Mucklow/9781631061950/?a_aid=colouringitmom
The image below was coloured using Stabilo 68 Fibre-tip pens.
and 
are published by Rockport, a sub-company of Quarto Publishing who kindly sent me copies to review. They are part of a large “Just Add Color” series which continues to be added to and already contains a huge variety of titles and themes including Carnival, Day of the Dead, Folk Art, and Circus . These books are soft-back with a normal thickness card cover, they are lightly glue-bound and the book can be fully opened to enable colouring of the full page but it doesn’t lie flat on a surface without being held. The images are printed one-sided onto beautiful, thick, heavyweight white paper (almost thick enough to be described as card) and the pages are perforated meaning they can be removed easily from the book before or after colouring. I coloured using Staedtler fibre-tips and experienced no bleed-through and only very slight bleeding when using various brands of fineliners but this isn’t an issue as the images are one-sided. The paper is very smooth with little texture meaning coloured pencils lay on even colour easily with little effort or need to change direction to fill in gaps. Each book contains 30 images created by one illustrator (different illustrators for each book in the series) which leads to a lovely cohesive image style within each book. Because each book is created by a different illustrator, the line thickness varies between books, but not within. The books are almost square in shape but smaller than the usual square-booked bestsellers. Each book varies in style and content so I have included sample images as well as a coloured page from each for you to see in the links below. In addition, I give a more detailed description of what each book contains and how your mental health may affect and be affected by the book.
-buy it here from Amazon UK
– Amazon UK
In The Midst Of Madness 