Enchanted Forest, Swedish edition

A while back I purchased my second Johanna Basford book, Enchanted Forest. Most Swedish bookstores only carrry the Swedish edition but I never thought this would be a problem. 

The Swedish edition is published by Pagina, the same publishing house marketing Hanna Karlzons Dagdrömmar. Dagdrömmar has ecxellent paper quality and is overall a lovely book altogether, not only illustration wise but as a physical book as well. 

Enchanted Forest however, was a huge dissapointment. My Secret Garden is from the US but published in England and printed in China. It has to this day the best paper of any of my books. I can safely use any water-based media without so much as a shadow of bleeding, and it even holds some water on my Inktense pencils without getting all wobbly. So naturally I was expecting the same quality from the Swedish edition of Enchanted forest. The photos speak for themselves... you can clearly see the designs not only from the next page but from the next spread, so 2 pages apart. There is also near-bleeding jsut from Staedtler fineliners (and I'm a light handed colorist.)

I contacted Pagina about this and they said they'd look into the matter but I haven't heard from them since. I am keeping my Swedish Enchanted Forest as a training copy of if someone wants to borrow a book to try out colouring... and for myself I ordered the English version which again has excellent paper. A shame that quality varies so much locally! 

Bleeding :(

Visible design from 2 pages over

Welcome Spring!

March is a particularly difficult month for me. Having lived in Hungary for several years I got used to Spring arriving in early March, with the trees starting to turn green at the turn of March/April. In these parts of Sweden March is still very much a winter month, although the snow is mostly gone and you can start seeing some fresh green moss for example. Still the temperatures are barely above freezing and there will be several minus degree days yet. Therefore I tried to colour the moth of March as cheerful as I could, with all sorts of pastelly colours. 

Mad sketching skillz!

I also included a small freehand drawing project. Since March 15 marks the anniversary of the Hungarian revolution in 1848, which is one of three Hungarian national holidays, I added the symbol of this holiday to the calendar: a cockade in the Hungarian colours red, white and green. I had never drawn such an item before so I started with looking one up on the internet. There I traced the outlines onto a bit of tracing paper that I then transferred onto a sketch pad where I experimented a bit with colours and shading. I finally transferred the sketched outlines onto the calendar page and proceeded with colouring it in. Considering my drawing skills and particularly the fact that I haven't practiced drawing for many years (or let's be honest, I have precticed drawing NEVER), I'm really quite pleased with the end result! It looks so much nicer in real life too. 

The tree is coloured in Faber-Castell Pitt Artist brush pens, and the cockade in Polychromos.

A double page from Secret Garden

I spent several weeks on these pages. They are blended with the Caran d'Ache colourless blender pencils that I demonstrated in the video in the previous post. (If you clock on the picture a larger version will appear.)

How it all began...

I guess the story of how I came to love adult colouring is one of learning humility and open-mindedness. I had seen adult colouring books, notably Secret Garden, popping up around Swedish bookstores in the summer of 2015. I remember being utterly provoked by such a stupid idea. I couldn't for the life of me understand the point of taking someone else's artwork and adding colours to it. I viewed this as almost immoral or at the very least a completely meaningless pastime. 

Then in August my sister, who had no idea of my sentiments towards adult  colouring, sent me my birthday gift. It contained a copy of Secret Garden and an assortment of coloured fineliners. I nearly fell out of my chair laughing and was convinced that she really missed the mark this time. However I did want to give it a go just to see what all the fuss was about. Like I said, this was in mid August of last year and I have hardly stood up from my colouring ever since.

I was, to put it mildly, hooked from the start. It was instantly relaxing, gratifying and just pure fun. I soon dug out long forgotten art supplies I had from another life when I tried to draw and sketch with very little luck. Then I discovered the mind-boggling selection of adult colouring books on Amazon and other bookstores and, well, the rest is history. I have never been so glad to be proven wrong in my life!

My very first attempt at adult colouring. Secret Garden and Staedtler Triplus 0.4 roller pens