Monstrous Mandalas Halloween Coloring Book Review

 

Nothing quite gets me in the festive, autumnal spirit like coloring.

Or pumpkins. Ohh man do I love pumpkin flavored stuff, and this time of year is like the pumpkin motherlode. But anyway.

I mean, I color all year long, but fall just feels more like a time of year for sitting down for a solitary, crafty activity at your desk or dining room table.

Plus it helps that I have a small collection of Halloween coloring books at my disposal, which are great for really setting that spooky mood.

Today I wanted to introduce you to one of my favorites, a new coloring book called Monstrous Mandalas by Cristina McAllister.

Keep reading for the full review!

Thank you to Cristina McAllister, who provided me with a free copy of her book for this review. Also, this page contains some affiliate links. That means, if you buy anything, at no extra cost to you, you’ll be helping support this site. Thanks a ton!

I came across this book on Facebook about a month ago, and thought it was brilliant!

The artist was posting some colored sample pages and it just looked like so much fun — a literal mix of mandalas and monsters. What could be better than that?

I’ve talked about how much I love themed mandala coloring books, which have real images mixed into the patterns. I feel like it gives you a starting point; a source of inspiration for color combos if your mind goes blank upon seeing an uncolored mandala. Plus it’s just fun to see real-world objects pop from the page; in this case, monsters!

The book is slightly small for a coloring book, coming in at just over 8 inches square with a glossy cover. There are 20 pages of illustrations to color, each one rimmed with a thick black border. I thought the border was a nice touch — overall it makes each page feel a little “darker” than your typical coloring page.

Here is a list of the monster mandalas inside: the Great Old Ones, Vampire, Daikaiju, Balrog, Witch, Wyrm, Medusa, Bigfoot, Mummy, Wendigo, Slenderman, Leviathan, Minotaur, Jorogumo, Zombies, the Grim Reaper, Werewolf, Chupacabra, T-Rex and Alien.

The paper here is a little on the thin side for coloring, like all CreateSpace books, but fortunately the pages are only printed on one side (with a subtle “scary” face printed on the reverse of each spread). The thin pages generally don’t bother me, since I prefer to cut my pages out of the book I am working on unless it has lay-flat binding anyway.

To cut the page out of the book I just used an x-acto knife, using the opposite side of the crease as a guide. My knife is a little dull right now, but it is possible to get a super clean cut out of a book like this with a fresher blade and a steady hand. (I’ve done it before!)

An interesting feature of this book that I really ended up appreciating was the sample pieces of the mandala printed opposite on a “test” page. See what this looks like below:

This was great because I was able to test color combinations and techniques on an actual piece of the design I was working on, before applying them to my actual drawing! I simply cannot express how helpful this was, especially in testing the transition from the green snakes to Medusa’s pale skin.

The test page identifies the monster and gives a description.

I am pretty light on my markers and didn’t experience any bleed-through on the test sheet that reached the page behind it. But if you are less sure of your materials or have a tendency to hold the marker down on the page for an extended period of time, I recommend protecting the pages below with another sheet of paper.

Here’s the final piece I came up with:

I had sooo much fun coloring this!

It definitely took a while — I spent 4-5 hours on it over the course of two days, listening to audiobooks all along.

But I love my Medusa!

To color this page I used a combination of my Caran d’Ache Pablos and Tombow dual-ended brush pens.

I think the combination ended up working really well! Everywhere you see shading (mostly in the intersections of the snakes, but also at the corners of the green spiky shapes in the middle) I first shaded the gradient with a dark blue pencil, then colored over it using the Tombow markers.

There is also some gradient shading with a green pencil under a lighter green marker, like on her scaly cheeks and at the intersection of her snakes and her head.

Also, to make some of the shapes more solid and to make the streaks of the marker less noticeable (mostly her face), I used a technique I learned from Peta Hewitt in this YouTube tutorial. In her case, she uses it to achieve a deep, even black background, but it worked just as well at removing the streakiness from markers in my image! First, I laid down a heavy layer of a solid color in pencil, as close as possible to the color I wanted in the end. Then, I colored over it with the same color marker. It’s like magic!! It completely takes away the darker color you get when you overlap markers in a larger area! Of course, definitely time-consuming (you can see I didn’t do it in the snakes… whoops) but the results are so worth it. As an added bonus, the color doesn’t seep through the page as much, either.

I did run into one minor downside while coloring. As I colored, the page definitely started to curl a bit. This didn’t really interfere while coloring (I generally color loose pages on a clipboard, so they more or less stay put) but it does come through in my photos, for better or for worse. This definitely isn’t a make or break problem for me — I love the images too much! And you likely won’t experience it at all if you are using dry medium. But if you want to try out the technique with layering colored pencil and marker that I mentioned above — or just want to color with markers — you will want to keep it in mind.

Overall I am so happy to have this book as a part of my coloring collection! It’s easily my favorite Halloween coloring book. Why don’t you grab yourself a copy right now?

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