Chickadee Creative Coloring Books Review & Giveaway

 

Do you ever mix your coloring supplies? Like, do you mix your markers with your pencils, or layer your watercolor pencils with ink or pastels, in pursuit of a different look for the final artwork?

This is something I’ve been doing more and more lately, putting down a base of color with my markers and then shading over top with my pencils. To me, they feel like they serve different purposes; the markers lay down easy, bold color, and the pencils add texture and dimension.

When I received the two books I will be reviewing today from the publisher, Chickadee Creative Coloring, I knew that they would be the perfect opportunity to keep working on this coloring technique!

Keep scrolling to learn more about Wild Women and Creatures of the Deep, download a free page to print and color, and enter for a chance to win an exciting prize package valued at $120!

Scroll to the bottom of this article to enter! This giveaway will be accepting new entries until 11:59pm EST on Sunday, November 19th. one lucky winner will be drawn at random on Monday, November 20th to receive the awesome prize package detailed below. Enter today!

Only valid in the United States due to sweepstakes laws. No purchase necessary. The prize is a $120 value. Winner must respond to an email within three days to claim their prize, or a new winner will be selected.

A huge thank you to the team at Chickadee Creative Coloring for providing the review copies and prize for this showcase/giveaway! Also, this page contains some affiliate links. That means that if you buy anything after clicking my links, at no additional cost to you, you’ll be helping support Cleverpedia. Thank you so much for your support!

Check out this great prize!

One lucky winner will walk away from this giveaway with a $120 prize package from Chickadee Creative Coloring! The winner will be selected at random from all valid entries. Check out everything that’s included below:

• Wild Women Adult Coloring Book
• Creatures of the Deep Coloring Book for Adults
• Amazing Animals Coloring Book for Adults
• Handmade one-of-a-kind reclaimed wood box
• Handmade reclaimed wood pencil holder
• Derwent Coloursoft Colored Pencils, 12 count
• 2 fine China tea cups
• Organic Teeccino Chocolate Chicory Herbal Tea, Box of 10
• Organic Sour Pops from YumEarth, Bag of 14

The more ways you enter, and the more friends you share this giveaway with using your unique entry link, the greater your chance to win!

Download a free page to color!

How better to get a feel for a book than to download a page to color yourself? Here’s a free page from “Creatures of the Deep” that you can print and try out, courtesy of Chickadee Creative Coloring and Cleverpedia. Don’t forget to tag us when you share your page on Facebook or Instagram!

Click the image above (not on the Pinterest button) to get the free page! If you’d like to save this page to your Pinterest coloring pages board for later, just click the Pinterest button that appears when you hover over the image!

Review: Wild Women

Wild Women is a large, spiral-bound adult coloring book full of original artwork by Leia Pastizzo. The book features 24 hand drawn illustrations of women with long, flowing locks, often surrounded by flora and fauna.

The covers are thick, glossy paper featuring full-color examples from the book for your inspiration. The spiral binding makes it easy to open up the book to the page you want to work on, and guarantees that the book always lays flat without you needing to hold it down.

Each of the 24 images is printed on the right side, and the reverse of the page is left blank. The paper inside is thick, 100-pound paper that can easily stand up to markers and carefully-applied watercolor pencils. The pages are perforated, so it is easy to remove the pages to color separately from the book, or to display your finished artwork. Chickadee Creative Coloring printed this book on post-consumer waste recycled paper, so you can feel good about its environmental impact.

Check out some sample pages from the book in the infographic below, and save it to Pinterest by hovering over the center and clicking the Pinterest icon:

Here’s the first page I’ve colored so far from the book:

This was unabashedly fun to color! Her hair goes all over the place, so it’s fun figuring out where the lines criss-cross or turn into a pattern. Since she is a “wild woman” I went for a wild hair color — green! — and never looked back. I’ve gotta say, the end result is definitely striking!

Check out my speed coloring video below:

To color her, I started with her face, using a skin-tone Copic marker. Copic markers blend a little more nicely over large areas, but I haven’t quite got the coloring technique down yet.

By the way, it is a testament to just how thick this paper is that no color reached the page below, even though I forgot to stick another protective piece of paper behind the page I was working on. (Do as I say, not as I apparently do when my brain is preoccupied with filming, haha.) The Copic marker did sink all the way through the paper, because alcohol-based markers always saturate the page, but nothing at all bled onto the page underneath.

This is what the back of the page looked like when I was all done coloring (notice that none of the water-based markers I used for her hair came through at all):

After I finished with her face, I moved on to her hair, going back and forth between a lighter and darker shade of green from my 96 set of Tombow markers. (I love these markers — so many color options, even when I’m doing something wacko like green hair!) For the patterned portions of her hair, I reached for my Caran d’Ache Pablo colored pencils and did a little shading to give them some dimension.

Finally, over top of all that, I thought it would be fun to continue the patterning across the rest of her lovely locks. I used my gold Signo Uni-ball gel pen to add stripes, criss-crossing, curliques, scales, and other patterns. Because of the metallic ink and the dark marker, it really ended up popping, especially in certain lighting!

Overall, the whole process took about an hour and a half from start to finish, including a little futzing around off camera deciding on my final color scheme. I really enjoyed coloring this one, and I can definitely see myself coming back to this book in the near future to go crazy coloring some more lovely locks.

Review: Creatures of the Deep

Creatures of the Deep is a high-quality adult coloring book devoted to realistic undersea imagery. The book is spiral-bound, with a heavy cardstock cover that wraps around the spiral binding for protection. The book features 24 original hand drawn illustrations of sea creatures by Andrew Youngblood.

This certain style of binding is really unique; I’ve never seen another coloring book with the same kind of protected spiral binding with a wraparound cover. Due to the spiral binding, the book lays flat without any effort. The wraparound cover does make it a little awkward to fold the book open fully to a single page, so I found that I kept the book with a pagespread up, instead of folded back like I kept the other book.

Like Wild Women, this book features bright white, heavy, 100-pound paper. It is also perforated for easy removal. And, like the other book, it is printed on recycled paper.

Check out some sample pages from the book in the infographic below, and save it to Pinterest by hovering over the center and clicking the Pinterest icon:

Here’s the first page I’ve colored so far from the book:

This page took nearly three hours to color, but it was so worth it! I pulled up a ton of colorful reference images of the Great Barrier Reef, cranked up the tunes, and colored late into the night. My hand was starting to cramp up a little bit by the end of it (the things I do to create nice coloring videos for you guys… it is hard work keeping the page totally still while coloring!) but I am super happy with the finished page.

Check out my speed coloring video below:

I knew that I wanted to color this one with bright colors in marker first, then go over afterward with colored pencils to add some dimension to the coral and the fish. I started with my Tombow markers, which gave me tons of bright tones. Then, after all the marker was down, I went back over everything and shaded and texturized with my Caran d’Ache Pablos.

It felt a little daring using such bright colors for the coral. In fact, pretty much as soon as I started coloring the coral, I thought to myself, what on earth are you doing? That is wayyy too bright. I’m glad I just kept plugging away, though — the colored pencil definitely makes the image.

Overall, I honestly really enjoyed coloring in both books. Creatures of the Deep was honestly super intimidating for me, since the realistic imagery made me feel like I wanted to get a really exact color palette, and I definitely felt like it wasn’t right when I started to color. The inspiration images on the front and back covers are also just so good! In the end, though, I think that stepping up to the challenge of the realism made that book slightly more fun to color. I enjoyed both books, but I really liked coloring this one especially!

Okay, I’m sold… how do I get my own?

If the sample pages I showed above look appealing to you, I definitely encourage you to pick up Wild Women and Creatures of the Deep on Amazon or through the publisher’s website! They are both constructed in a high-quality way, have great original artwork, and are just a ton of fun to color!

IT’S GIVEAWAY TIME! Enter here for a chance to win this amazing $120 prize package!

In this giveaway, we will be drawing one grand prize winner at random from the full pool of entries. No purchase required to win. Total prize value of $120. Earn an unlimited number of additional entries when you refer your friends, for example in your favorite coloring Facebook groups!

This giveaway will run for one week only, beginning today and ending at 11:59pm EST Sunday, November 19. The winners will be drawn at random on Monday, November 20 from the full pool of entrants, and they will have three days to respond to the winning announcement email before a new winner is drawn in their place.

Sorry, United States entrants only!

Now is the moment you’ve been waiting for! Step right up and click the options below to enter the giveaway — the more ways you enter, the greater your chance to win! Share with your friends via email, social media, and Facebook groups to earn the most possible entries, because each friend you refer using your special link will earn you an additional entry!

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Cleverpedia + Chickadee Creative Coloring Giveaway

Thanks again to Chickadee Creative Coloring for providing the review copies and giveaway prize!

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