Vincent Van Gogh (Art Colouring Book): Make Your Own Art Masterpiece (Colouring Books)

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Vincent Van Gogh: Make Your Own Art Masterpiece by David Jones and Daisy Seal has a stiff card cover illustrated with one of the illustrations based on Van Gogh's famous painting The Cafe Terrace on the Place du Forum, Arles, at Night. The Red and green title is further embellished with a gold foiled outline. There is no colourable pattern on the inside but there is an illustration which you could probably colour with markers on each of the fold out french flaps. It is both glue and stitch bound. The cream coloured paper is a medium weight and the pages are perforated enabling you to remove your pictures and frame them if you so wish. The ink seems fixed so should not transfer to the opposite page when you colour and the illustrations are printed in light grey outlines so that they will beautifully disappear into your coloured artwork. They are also one-sided with just the title, size and detail of the original art and a close up coloured detail on the facing left page so if you remove them make a note in pencil if you intend to look up the original for colouring inspiration.There are 45 illustrations to colour. Some are instantly recognisable such as Bedroom at Arles, Sunflowers and the Cafe Terrace at night. Some of the pictures though you really have to look closely to make out what they are. The reason for this is that the illustrations are broken down to resemble brushstrokes to imitate Van Gogh's impressionistic art style.This is not your typical colouring book of outline drawings. It is very much like a colour-by-numbers book in the way it is broken down, although there are no numbers. For many if not most you will probably wish to find a picture of the original to help you even if you choose to colour it in your own colour choices. It is therefore invaluable to make a note of the picture opposite if you should remove a picture as without the title you may not be able to search online (or elsewhere) for the exact picture, especially those that are difficult to recognise at first. There is a full range of illustrations from easy to incredibly challenging. It is a book that will need a lot of patience to colour.The publisher recommends that you can use pencils and pens including gel pens, crayons, coloured pencils, ballpoints, rollerball and highlighter pens but suggests not to use heavy felt pens. The reason for this I found is that the colour will feather and not take wet media well due to the composition of the paper. This is a real shame as this particular book seems to be just begging to use paints on. Maybe if you use paints such as acrylic thickly with very little water it will be successful. I think its definitely a book that you will have to experiment with to find out which media and techniques work best here, but the end results could be stunning so it is worth persevering with if you fancy doing this.If you love colouring colour-by-numbers type books, jigsaws and taking it slowly colouring lots of little details to build up to make a picture, are a big fan of Van Gogh or just really fancy something different and challenging then this may be the book for you.