Tiffany Glass Coloring Book

Your browser does not support HTML5 video.  This review is taken from my blog where I review adult colouring books from a mental health perspective, more images from inside the book can be found there. I received a copy of this book from the illustrator, I was not obliged to provide a review.This book is a new format, design and style from what we’ve come to know for Jessica’s art in the Tangle book series but it is no less beautiful, it’s just different. The book itself is 23.1 x 25.4cm, paperback with flexible card covers and a partially coloured black and white design from inside the book. The spine is glue and string-bound and can be a little tricky to get completely flat but with perseverance this will become easier. The pages are a mixture of single-sided (25 images) and double-sided printing (42 images) and it seems quite random as to where these are placed, the images are also a mixture of single (63) and double-page spreads (4 comprising of 2 spreads) and many have black backgrounds (23 ish). The paper is bright white, lightly texture and medium thickness, it worked well with my Derwent Inktense Pencils and didn’t overly warp when activated with water and this didn’t shadow or bleed. Water-based pens don’t seem to bleed or shadow and pencils work well for blending and layering, alcohol markers can be used on the single-sided images as long as you place a protective sheet behind to catch any bleed-through. The images themselves are all inspired by Tiffany lamps and therefore have a real stained glass feel as they’re designed to have light displayed through them to show each section, therefore the images are mostly quite heavily lined with lots of sections making up each design. Each of the designs contains at least one dragonfly for you to find, sometimes these are the centre of the image and other times they’re hidden, they give a really cohesive feel to the book because even though each page is filled with different content, it’s still tied together with the Tiffany lamp and dragonfly theme. The designs vary a lot in size and content and Jessica explains in the introduction that she has deliberately created illustrations with much simpler designs for children or beginners and all different levels in between up to very complex detailed designs. There is a really good mixture of designs and pretty much all of them are heavily nature-inspired, just like the real Tiffany lamps. The images don’t contain actual lamps with fixtures and stands, they’re all designs inspired by lamps and therefore the artwork has been altered and adapted to fit a flat page rather than all of them being circular or curved which is nice.In terms of mental health, this book is lovely, the natural images are great for calming you down and helping you zone out. The different levels of difficulty are ideal for those of us with fluctuating conditions because you can do simpler images on your worse days and more complex images on your better days when you can focus. The line thickness varies throughout and ranges from spindly thin to thick and mostly stays around the thin range. The intricacy and detail levels also vary hugely from large open spaces to much smaller, finer details and again, it remains mostly around the quite detailed level and therefore you’ll need fairly good vision and fine motor control to enjoy the majority of the images. The printing is ideal for those who like to use wet media or mixed media as you can colour the double-sided pages with pencil or carefully with water-based pens and the single-sided pages with watercolours, alcohol markers and paints if you wish. You can really challenge yourself to work on making the images look like sections of lamps with light shining through them if you wish or you can just colour them as normal colouring images, either option will look equally beautiful. The single-sided images could even be carefully removed from the book once coloured and framed or gifted if you wanted.Overall, this is a lovely book, it’s not as niche as you might expect and the illustrations are all drawn in Jessica’s beautiful signature style and will look incredible once splashed with colour, whatever medium you fancy using!