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Harry Potter Magical Artefacts Colouring Book is published and kindly sent to me to review by Studio Press. This book is the fourth in the Harry Potter Colouring Book series and my reviews of the first, second, and third can be found here. Grab your wand, bring a lantern, swat up on your incantations and let’s get delving into the magical artefacts of the wizarding world. This book is paperback with a glossy accented cover and a pale blue 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! It also held up fine to light use of water when activating the Derwent Inktense Pencils.
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 almost no stills from the film this time. There are a number of images based on concept art for the films and a few patterns are included which do feel a bit like “filler” images but there are fewer of these in this book than the first two (about 4 full page patterns) however, at least 24 pages are images with a centralised object overlaying a repeating pattern, like my coloured page of the sorting hat, and these get quite samey and dull. A huge number of different artefacts are pictured from obvious inclusions of wands, brooms, a time-turner, the Sorting Hat and horcruxes, to many of the items sold by the Weasley twins, book covers, the Marauders’ Map, Delores Umbridge’s cat plates and lots more. There are single and double-page spreads of objects and posters. This time there aren’t many pictures of characters though a few are included 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! I have to say, this book feels quite samey when compared to the previous three and they haven’t been brilliantly represented as specific titles due to the first book containing a real mixture of images and then the following three being specific aspects, many of the most obvious of which had already been featured in the first book. It just feels like it’s lacking, we’ve already had images of wands in two books, we’ve already seen the quidditch balls and different brooms, the collection of images is just quite random and the most obvious wizarding artefacts aren’t pictured well due to being shown in previous books.
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 objects and artefacts in order 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 purple broomsticks, glittery wands and rainbow time-turners – 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, but I’m left disappointed, it feels samey and lacklustre and the image style gets boring quite quickly, I think a trick was missed by creating the first generic themed book, it really took away from the subsequent three specific titled books as the best bits of each had already been pictured. However, if you’re wanting to finish off the set, or you’re just a bit less picky than me then this book may be for you. The paper quality is good and there’s a wide range of objects and artefacts pictured, I just feel they could have been pictured in a better, more exciting and inspiring way.
If you’d like to purchase a copy it’s available here:
Amazon UK – Harry Potter Magical Artefacts Colouring Book
Book Depository Worldwide – https://www.bookdepository.com/Harry-Potter-Magical-Artefacts-Colouring-Book/9781783705924/?a_aid=colouringitmom
The image below was coloured using Stabilo Point 88 Fineliners and Derwent Inktense Pencils activated with water.
is illustrated by Martin Handford (the original Where’s Wally? artist), and published and kindly sent to me to review by Walker Books. Where’s Wally, also known as Where’s Waldo in the US, and all sorts of other names I discovered after a quick Google search, has been a staple children’s book since the 1980’s. Now, we’ve been offered the chance to colour the iconic scenes ourselves. People young and old will love this book, it would be perfect for older children (the spaces are way too small for young kids), parents to colour for, or with, their children, or big kids of any age who are young at heart and fans of Wally. Grab your bobble hat, walking stick, glasses and stripy shirt and let’s head off to find out Where’s Wally?!
is published by Blue Star and illustrated by Mark Coyle and was kindly sent to me by them to review. This book is ideal for any dragon-lovers and it really does exactly what it says, it includes loads of images of different dragons. The book itself is A4, paperback and glue-bound meaning a little of each image is lost into the spine. The illustrations are printed single-sided so there are no issues with bleeding and they are all portrait-oriented designs. The paper is bright white, medium thickness and lightly textured so it’s great for pens and pencils. The images are all drawn by one illustrator so the book has a very cohesive feel, the dragons are pictured alone, in groups, on mountains, flying, in space, and they are all drawn to look like different species, in different poses. Many are winged, some are not, some are fire-breathing, some are three-headed, some are scaly, others are smooth or horned, there really is a very wide variety so it doesn’t get boring at any point despite all 34 images being dragon-themed.
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 
In The Midst Of Madness 