Mermaids in Wonderland: 20 Postcards – A Review

Disclaimer – Please read this disclosure about my use of affiliate links which are contained within this post.
Mermaids in Wonderland: 20 Postcards is published by Harper Design and illustrated and kindly sent to me for review by Marco Chin. This is the second set of postcards by Marcos who previously illustrated the Fairies in Wonderland Postcards, this set is identical in format and therefore much of my review is the same, skip to the second paragraph for information about the content. This set of 20 postcards contains scaled down artwork from Marcos’s original Mermaids in Wonderland book which you can read my review of HERE. Each postcard is printed single-sided with a beautiful seahorse, a dotted stamp area and address lines on the back so that you can send them to family, friends and loved ones. The postcards are not perforated but are removable with a similar glue to that of note blocks which means they can be removed with a nice clean edge ready for sending or displaying, it also means the book lies nice and flat for colouring. The postcards are made of thick, white card which didn’t bleed at all with my water-based pens and only very lightly shadowed with alcohol markers! The line thickness remains spindly thin throughout which is somewhat problematic. I have very good vision for small, close things, and also have very good fine motor control but a few of the images on these postcards are so tiny that they’re almost impossible to colour and you’re certain to go over the edges. This is a shame because I’m a huge fan of the imagery and I just love the illustrations but scaling down the images to postcard size wasn’t the most sensible choice because it’s quite limiting. The postcards are beautiful to look at and would be gorgeous to send or display as they are but given that they’re sold as colouring postcards, I expect to be able to colour all of them and I will struggle to do that neatly with a few of them. That being said, the images are very beautiful and are definitely worth putting the time and effort into to get them perfect and if you don’t colour each section individually and colour over some off the pattern instead then a lot of the problem is alleviated.

The images chosen for these postcards are a good selection from the book and contain a number of beautiful mermaid images, as well as the crab, starfish, dolphins, shells and more, and unusually, 6 of the images have black backgrounds. There is a very good mixture of mermaids and creatures, though I would have liked to see a few more mermaids pictured, given the title, only 14 of the images actually contain mermaids. The riddles from the book aren’t added to this postcard book but a few of the images do contain letter keys which are fairly subtle and certainly don’t detract from the beauty of the images. The colouring book contains 4 removable postcards and these are identical to 4 within this set so if you have the book already you’ll be getting 16 new cards in this set and 4 that duplicate those in the colouring book.

In terms of mental health, I would recommend the majority of these postcards but you will need very good vision and fine motor control to enjoy them because they are extremely intricate and detailed. You will also need pretty good concentration and focus because these postcards take a surprisingly long time to colour given the size of them. They take less time to colour than the images in the book do but they’re still very time-consuming, however, this is great for distraction, each postcard is like a window into the mermaid world and if you let it, you can be really absorbed into it and away from any difficult symptoms or thoughts. All in all, I would recommend this postcard book to those of you with very good vision and fine motor control. The pictures are a challenge to colour because of the intricacy but they will look beautiful coloured and would be lovely to send to people, or frame and you could frame the uncoloured ones very nicely too. The card is lovely and thick and great for pens and pencils and it’s a nice format for these delicate images.

If you’d like to purchase a set they’re available here:
Amazon UK – Mermaids in Wonderland: 20 Postcards
Book Depository Worldwide – https://www.bookdepository.com/Mermaids-in-Wonderland-20-Postcards-Marcos-Chin/9780062565662/?a_aid=colouringitmom

If you love the imagery but these are just too intricate why not take a peek at the original book:
Review – Mermaids in Wonderland Colouring Book
Amazon UK – Mermaids in Wonderland
Book Depository Worldwide – https://www.bookdepository.com/Mermaids-in-Wonderland-Marcos-Chin/9780062465603/?a_aid=colouringitmom

Silent video flick-through of the whole book below.

The image below was coloured with Bic Marking Alcohol Markers and Promarker Alcohol Markers.

Mermaids in Wonderland: A Coloring and Puzzle-Solving Adventure for All Ages – A Review

Disclaimer – Please read this disclosure about my use of affiliate links which are contained within this post.
Mermaids in Wonderland: A Coloring and Puzzle-Solving Adventure for All Ages is published by Harper Design and illustrated and kindly sent to me for review by Marcos Chin. This is the second book my Marcos who illustrated Fairies in Wonderland last year, this book is identical in format and therefore much of my review is the same, for information on the content in this book, please skip to paragraph two. This book is square, the same size as the bestsellers and paperback with a card cover with 2/3 French flaps which open out to reveal a white background mermaid design inside the front cover, and a black background mermaid design inside the back cover. The paper is bright white and medium thickness, it doesn’t bleed with water-based pens but does shadow sometimes so do be careful. The paper is smooth with no visible tooth at all, it is a bit tricky to blend and layer with pencil but if you work slowly and remain patient then it is possible to get some lovely effects, I have had to press harder for block colouring than I’m used to in most books but overall, it’s not too bad. The spine is glue and string-bound this time and the images are borderless so a little of each image is lost into it, the spine does ease up with use and unlike with purely glue-bound spines, the pages don’t fall out when they’re also stitch-bound which is a welcome change! The images are printed double-sided and a large number of them are double-page spreads but there are a large number of single pages too.

The book contains 96 pages and the images contain a number of written riddles with keys hidden throughout the illustrations which spell out the next clue when unscrambled correctly so this is kind of a treasure hunt, set of riddles and colouring book in one. The riddles cleverly arrange each section of images into a ‘chapter’ because they’re each set in a different place and also run from day to night, with a whopping 37 pages having black backgrounds to indicate night time. The images are beautifully drawn and pretty but not girly, they’re very delicate and contain lots of natural elements like sea creatures, plants and corals. The images are set in a variety of places including the sea bed, an underwater hair salon, a dance performance, a carousel, a Chinese dragon procession, an archery lesson, a cocktail party, and more! There is a whole heap of content with a huge variety of things pictured including winged mermaids, hot air balloons, starfish, lobsters, dolphins, whales, crabs, corals, shoals of fish, swordfish, jellyfish, just to name a few! The mermaids also vary throughout from beautiful mermaid ladies adorned in jewellery to dancing and gymnastic mermaids and those flying hot air balloons, the majority are female but there are a few males pictured too. The images are beautifully cohesive and stunningly drawn with a great deal of detail and thought. At the back of the book are two perforated half pages, each with two postcards on them which can be removed and coloured, these are a great addition to the book but sadly, they are identical to four of the postcards that are printed in the 20 set of colouring postcards that accompany this book, this isn’t a problem, it’s just a shame that they aren’t different.

In terms of mental health, this book is really calming and beautiful because it’s so grounded in nature whilst also being wonderfully fantastical. There is a huge amount of intricacy and detail so this is definitely a book for those of you with good vision and fine motor control as the line thickness is also thin, verging on spindly thin at points. There are some large spaces in the images including the hot air balloons, some fish and the mermaid tails if you colour over the scales rather than colouring each individually but mostly the images consist of lots of teeny tiny bits and most aspects are surrounded by a thin border so you will certainly need some fineliners or well-sharpened pencils for this book. Most of the images are of scenes and these don’t have a lot of space for you to add your own drawings or backgrounds, but a few of the images are of centralised illustrations with large spaces left around them where you could create your own backgrounds and scenes if you wished. There are no written hints so this is by no means obligatory and the artwork looks finished as it is but there is space to add your own bits if you wish. I found this book particularly calming and absorbing and the mermaid world really does draw you in and offers wonderful escapism. The illustrations are beautiful and you’re sure to spend hours lost in a faraway miniature land where symptoms of mental illness melt away and dark or anxious thoughts are left at the door.

I would highly recommend this book to all mermaid-lovers and those who like intricate and detailed pages to colour. You will need good vision and fine motor control and pencils and fineliners are a must for this book to be able to complete the stunning images. Get lost in Marcos’s Mermaid Wonderland, you may never want to leave!

If you’d like to purchase a copy of this book, it’s available here:
Amazon UK – Mermaids in Wonderland: A Coloring and Puzzle-Solving Adventure for All Ages
Book Depository Worldwide – https://www.bookdepository.com/Mermaids-in-Wonderland-Marcos-Chin/9780062465603/?a_aid=colouringitmom

There is also a set of 20 accompanying postcards which are also currently available:
Review –
Amazon UK – Mermaids in Wonderland 20 Colouring Postcards
Book Depository Worldwide – https://www.bookdepository.com/Mermaids-in-Wonderland-20-Postcards-Marcos-Chin/9780062565662/?a_aid=colouringitmom

My video flick-through of the book can be found here.

The image below was coloured using Stabilo Point 88 Fineliners, Stabilo 68 Fibre-Tips and Prismacolor Premier Colored Pencils.

Fairies in Wonderland: 20 Postcards – A Review

Disclaimer – Please read this disclosure about my use of affiliate links which are contained within this post.
Fairies in Wonderland 20 Postcards: An Interactive Coloring Adventure for All Ages is published by Harper Design and illustrated and kindly sent to me for review by Marco Chin. This set of 20 postcards contains scaled down artwork from Marcos’s original Fairies in Wonderland book which you can read my review of here. Each postcard is printed single-sided with a beautiful pair of butterflies, a patterned stamp area and address lines on the back so that you can send them to family, friends and loved ones. The postcards are not perforated but are removable with a similar glue to that of note blocks which means they can be removed with a nice clean edge ready for sending or displaying, it also means the book lies nice and flat for colouring. The postcards are made of thick, white card which didn’t bleed at all with my water-based pens or alcohol markers! There does appear to be a strange coating over my postcards which repels the water-based ink I tested as you can see from the patchiness shown in the photo below. I have contacted a fellow reviewer who hasn’t experienced this in her set so it appears there is an issue with my set rather than all of those produced. The line thickness remains spindly thin throughout which is somewhat problematic. I have very good vision for small, close things, and also have very good fine motor control but a few of the images on these postcards are so tiny that they’re almost impossible to colour and you’re certain to go over the edges. This is a shame because I’m a huge fan of the imagery and I just love the illustrations but scaling down the images to postcard size wasn’t the most sensible choice because it’s quite limiting. The postcards are beautiful to look at and would be gorgeous to send or display as they are but given that they’re sold as colouring postcards, I expect to be able to colour all of them and I will struggle to do that neatly with a few of them. That being said, the images are very beautiful and are definitely worth putting the time and effort into to get them perfect.

In terms of mental health, I would recommend the majority of these postcards but you will need very good vision and fine motor control to enjoy them because they are extremely intricate and detailed. You will also need pretty good concentration and focus because these postcards take a surprisingly long time to colour given the size of them. They take less time to colour than the images in the books do but they’re still very time-consuming and the image below took me a good couple of hours to colour. The images chosen for these postcards are a good selection from the book and contain a number of beautiful fairy images, the venus fly trap and the ladybird, and unusually, 11 of the images have black backgrounds and 9 have white backgrounds. There is a very good mixture of fairies and creatures, though I would have liked to see a few more fairies pictured, given the title, 14 of the images contain fairies, though the fairy in the moth picture is ‘very’ well hidden. The riddles from the book aren’t added to this postcard book but a few of the images do contain letter keys which are fairly subtle and certainly don’t detract from the beauty of the images.

All in all, I would recommend this postcard book to those of you with very good vision and fine motor control. The pictures are a challenge to colour because of the intricacy but they will look beautiful coloured and would be lovely to send to people, or frame and you could frame the uncoloured ones very nicely too. The card is lovely and thick and great for pens and pencils and it’s a nice format for these delicate images.

If you’d like to purchase a set they’re available here:
Amazon UK – Fairies in Wonderland 20 Postcards: An Interactive Coloring Adventure for All Ages
Book Depository Worldwide – http://www.bookdepository.com/Fairies-in-Wonderland-20-Postcards-Marcos-Chin/9780062466235/?a_aid=colouringitmom

If you love the imagery but these are just too intricate why not take a peek at the original book:
Review – Fairies in Wonderland Coloring Book
Amazon UK – Fairies in Wonderland: An Interactive Coloring Adventure for All Ages
Book Depository Worldwide – http://www.bookdepository.com/Fairies-in-Wonderland-Marcos-Chin/9780062419989/?a_aid=colouringitmom

The image below was coloured using Faber-Castell Polychromos Pencils and accented with a gold gel pen (from a UK supermarket) and a Clear Glitter Stardust Gelly Roll Gel Pen.

Fairies in Wonderland: An Interactive Coloring Adventure for All Ages – A Review

Disclaimer – Please read this disclosure about my use of affiliate links which are contained within this post.
Fairies in Wonderland: An Interactive Coloring Adventure for All Ages is published by Harper Design and illustrated and kindly sent to me for review by Marcos Chin. I’ve been a lover of all things fairy related since I was tiny and my childhood bedroom was covered from top to bottom in fairies from lamp shades to ornaments, calendars to pictures, I was obsessed. I’ve been on the hunt for a decent fairy colouring book for the last year and all those I’ve seen have fallen a little short because they were either very dark and fantasy-based (rather than pretty and delicate) or they had strange faces, hands or feet. This book however, ticks all of the boxes of what I wanted in a fairy colouring book so read on to find out all about it!

This book is square, the same size as the bestsellers and paperback with a card cover that is partially double thickness as there is a 3 inch flap which opens out to reveal a white background fairy design inside the front cover, and a black background fairy design inside the back cover. The paper is bright white and feels like medium thickness but don’t be fooled, water-based pens shadow and occasionally bleed through so this is definitely a book to stick to pencils on unless you intend to get two copies or not colour all of the images. The paper is smooth with no visible tooth at all and I’ll note here that I appear to have a strange copy as I have really struggled to use pencils on this paper (even my artist’s grade polychromos pencils) which seemed to clump, and blending and shading has been problematic, as has block colouring which I’ve had to press harder than usual for. I’ve contacted a friend of mine who is a reviewer and her copy hasn’t presented any issues with coloured pencils so it appears that my copy is somehow defective as it feels almost as if there’s a coating over the paper because it’s so shiny. The spine is glue-bound and the images are borderless so a little of each image is lost into it, while most spines ease up with use, and so does this one, I also found that my pages are starting to fall out just from trying to flatten the book enough to photograph it so you will need to be careful with this book in order to prevent loosening of pages. The images are printed double-sided and a large number of them are double-page spreads but there are a large number of single pages too.

The book contains 96 pages and the images contain a number of written riddles with keys hidden throughout the illustrations which spell out the next clue when unscrambled correctly so this is kind of a treasure hunt, set of riddles and colouring book in one. The riddles cleverly arrange each section of images into a ‘chapter’ because they’re each set in a different place and also run from day to night, with a whopping 36 pages having black backgrounds to indicate night time. The images are beautifully drawn and pretty but not girly, they’re very delicate and contain lots of natural elements like insects, plants and flowers. The images are set in a variety of places including a wondrous woodland, under the sea, a beautiful garden and a night time party. Lots of creatures and insects are pictured from ladybirds to caterpillars, owls to moths, butterflies to a frog and even some sea creatures. The fairies also vary throughout from beautiful fairy ladies in outfits made from flowers to aqua fairies who have flippers and head fins and others in more patterned clothing, there is a good mix of male and female fairies and children and adults too. The images are beautifully cohesive and stunningly drawn with a great deal of detail and thought. One slight criticism is that on a number of images, the draft pencil lines are still visible in a number of places (see close-up photos below), this is disappointing and it’s a shame that this wasn’t picked up on in the editing process because they’re visible in a number of images, however, they are easily disguised once colour is added to the page so they don’t detract from the finished image. The illustrations picture fairies riding insects, a fairy tea party, aqua fairies swimming underwater, fairy houses, fairies dancing and parading and so much more!

In terms of mental health, this book is really calming and beautiful because it’s so grounded in nature whilst also being wonderfully fantastical. There is a huge amount of intricacy and detail so this is definitely a book for those of you with good vision and fine motor control as the line thickness is also thin, verging on spindly thin at points. There are some large spaces in the images including the sections of the fairy wings and a few flowers and beetles but mostly the images consist of lots of teeny tiny bits and most aspects are surrounded by a thin border so you will certainly need some well-sharpened pencils for this book. Most of the images are of scenes and these don’t have a lot of space for you to add your own drawings or backgrounds, but a few of the images are of centralised illustrations with large spaces left around them where you could create your own backgrounds and scenes if you wished. There are no written hints so this is by no means obligatory and the artwork looks finished as it is but there is space to add your own bits if you wish. I found this book particularly calming and absorbing and the fairy world really does draw you in and offers wonderful escapism. The illustrations are beautiful and you’re sure to spend hours lost in a faraway miniature land where symptoms of mental illness melt away and dark or anxious thoughts are left at the door.

I would highly recommend this book to all fairy-lovers and those who like intricate and detailed pages to colour. You will need good vision and fine motor control and pencils are a must for this book to be able to complete the stunning images. Get lost in Marcos’s Fairy Wonderland, you may never want to leave!

If you’d like to purchase a copy of this book, it’s available here:
Amazon UK – Fairies in Wonderland: An Interactive Coloring Adventure for All Ages
Book Depository Worldwide – http://www.bookdepository.com/Fairies-in-Wonderland-Marcos-Chin/9780062419989/?a_aid=colouringitmom

There is also a set of 20 accompanying postcards which are also currently available:
Review – Fairies in Wonderland Postcards
Amazon UK – Fairies in Wonderland 20 Postcards: An Interactive Coloring Adventure for All Ages
Book Depository Worldwide – http://www.bookdepository.com/Fairies-in-Wonderland-20-Postcards-Marcos-Chin/9780062466235/?a_aid=colouringitmom

The image below was coloured using Faber-Castell Polychromos Pencils and accented with a gold gel pen (from a UK supermarket) and a Clear Glitter Stardust Gelly Roll Gel Pen.