Zenescope + Cleverpedia Coloring Book Giveaway

 

Kickstarter has helped launch all kinds of exciting coloring books over the last couple years. One of the most interesting to come along recently was launched by Zenescope Entertainment and has already flown past their original funding goals!

Known for their popular comic book series based on the Grimm Fairy Tales, Zenescope has been publishing comic books and graphic novels since 2005. This series is one of the longest-running independent comic book series. According to Zenescope, this series, plus its spin-offs, is “the largest female-driven shared universe in all of comics.” Their popular first coloring book, released in 2015 and based on these comics, is a #1 best seller on Amazon, has 633 reviews and is rated 4.5 stars.

Now they are working towards a series of stretch goals for their Kickstarter, and I can’t wait to tell you all about the campaign and what you’ll earn if you decide to pledge, plus give you a chance to win a piece of the action right here on Cleverpedia!

Keep scrolling to learn more about the Grimm Fairy Tales Adult Coloring Book, join the crowdfunding excitement, download a free page to print and color, and enter for a chance to win one of five great prizes!

Scroll to the bottom of this article to enter! This giveaway will be accepting new entries until 11:59pm EST on June 27. Five lucky winners will be drawn at random on Wednesday, June 28. Enter today!

Only valid in the United States due to sweepstakes laws. No purchase necessary. Prizes are a combined $186.88 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 Zenescope Entertainment for providing the review copy and prizes 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 these great prizes!

This giveaway will have five winners and there is a total of $186.88 in prizes to give away! Check out the grand prize and runner up prizes below:

Grand Prize

One winner will be selected at random from all valid entries to receive the grand prize, a $62.98 value.

• Signed copy of the Grimm Fairy Tales Adult Coloring Book Boxed Set*, $40 value
• Grimm Fairy Tales Adult Coloring Book, $12.99 value
• Grimm Fairy Tales Volume 1, $9.99 value

* Please note, boxed set will ship in October 2017.

Runners Up 2 & 3

Two winners will be selected at random from all valid entries to receive the first runner up prize, a $35.97 value.

• Grimm Fairy Tales Adult Coloring Book, $12.99 value
• Grimm Fairy Tales Adult Coloring Book: Different Seasons, $12.99 value
• Grimm Fairy Tales Volume 1, $9.99 value

Runners Up 4 & 5

Two winners will be selected at random from all valid entries to receive the second runner up prize, a $25.98 value.

• Robyn Hood: I Love NY #1 Coloring Comic, $9.99 value
• Grimm Fairy Tales: Robyn Hood: Origin, $15.99 value

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! View the prizes in the image above, and pin it to share with your friends on Pinterest!

Check out the Kickstarter!

If you aren’t familiar with Kickstarter, the site serves as a springboard for bringing ambitious projects to life. Creators can share their project on the site to raise donations towards a “funding goal.” Often there are suggested levels of funding, with different tiers of rewards. Kickstarter is all-or-nothing; if a particular project does not reach its funding goal, nobody pays anything to the project. If, on the other hand, a project is successfully funded, everyone will pay into the project and, once produced, receive the set of rewards at the level of funding they donated.

Zenescope Entertainment’s Grimm Fairy Tales Coloring Boxed Set is already one of Kickstarter’s coloring book success stories. It has more than doubled its pledges from the original funding goal of $18,000, with over 350 different people backing the project. Since the project has been so successful, they are even beginning to introduce stretch goals and add-ons.

If you are interested in getting your own boxed set, time is running out! Pledges are only being accepted for a few more days!

Visit the Kickstarter page for the most up-to-date list of pledging levels and rewards, but here are some highlights (not all reward levels are listed here!):

• For just $15, you will receive digital copies of Grimm Fairy Tales Adult Coloring Book, Grimm Fairy Tales Adult Coloring Book: Different Seasons, AND Alice in Wonderland Adult Coloring Book! These three books cost $38.97 if you buy the print versions.
• For just $35, you will receive the Grimm Fairy Tales Adult Coloring Book Boxed Set and an exclusive Red Riding Hood coloring art print.
• For just $55, you will receive the box set, Red Riding Hood coloring art print, and print copies of Zenescope’s 3 earlier coloring books. That’s a total of 5 coloring books, plus a bunch of extras, for just $11 a book!
• Their “Coloring Enthusiast & Ultimate Collector” bundle is available for a pledge of $145 or more, and includes the box set, Red Riding Hood print, and a limited edition exclusive comic.
• For just $8, add on any one of their three currently-published coloring books to any pledge you make, or add all three for $24!

By the way, you might be wondering, what is in that box? I created this handy graphic to explain:

Don’t wait — the Kickstarter is only available for a limited time, so click here to visit the Kickstarter page and back their project now! I’ll wait for you to get back here, don’t worry!

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 that you can print and try out, courtesy of Zenescope and Cleverpedia. Don’t forget to tag us when you share your page on Facebook or Instagram!

Click the image above to get the free page! (You will need to click on a part of the book not covered by the Pinterest icon to go to the free page. To save to Pinterest, click the Pinterest icon!)

First Thoughts: Grimm Fairy Tales Adult Coloring Book

I’ve heard so much about Zenescope’s first adult coloring book, Grimm Fairy Tales Adult Coloring Book, since its release that it was incredibly exciting to finally see a copy in person and try my hand at coloring it!

The illustrations are almost entirely line drawings directly from artwork created originally for their Grimm Fairy Tales comics series. Scattered here and there in the book are two or three wallpaper design pages, which just feature a repeating pattern. Beyond those, though, just about every page features a beautiful, kick-ass female protagonist. Sometimes multiple characters are present, or they are accompanied by ferocious beasts. While a majority of the pages are identifiable for what they are, there are some that I could not figure out (perhaps I don’t know the fairy tale), so that did make me wish for some kind of index.

You’ll notice that a lot of the artwork here is pretty suggestive or “NSFW” — while I did not see any actual nudity, this is something to just keep in the back of your mind if you color with children present. The artwork is universally appealing to both men and women — while most of the Amazon reviews I saw were from women, there are more reviews from male colorists than I see on most coloring books!

The book has a glossy, soft cover and the pages are a medium weight, white paper. The pages are not perforated, so if you choose to remove a page to work on it I would recommend carefully cutting it out with an x-acto knife. The pages are printed on just one side, so you may find that even if you work in the book it might not leak through to the other side. It’s all down to what you color with!

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

Speaking of coloring… here’s my first page from the book! I really enjoyed coloring this illustration from The Little Mermaid. What drew me to this particular image was, honestly, her scaly tail — fish scales are such fun to color! I wanted to try and mimic the blue/green iridescent look of the original illustration.

To color this page, I started with my lighter skin-tone Copic marker in shade YR000 (“Silk”). Next, I added some shadows with a darker tone, E13 (“Light Suntan”). I’ve been saving up my Michael’s coupons and picking up one marker at a time every so often. The Copic markers are just so nice for coloring skin! They dry more slowly than water-based markers, so the end result is smooth instead of having that uneven look of overlapping marker strokes. Now I just have to learn how to use them properly and I’ll be golden!

By the way, if you want to pick up a variety set of skintones to use for coloring, here’s a great set of Copics! The only reason I don’t have this set is because I’ve started buying them individually and am too stubborn to buy it and get overlapping colors. Save yourself a headache and pick up this set before you start collecting them individually!

Next, I moved onto my favorite part, the tail! I used seven or eight different shades of blue and green markers from my set of Tombow brush pens, starting with the darkest parts and moving with a light hand towards the highlight in the middle. The very center of the highlight I left white, but there is a minty green around it. I layered and layered the markers until I was happy with them.

Layering markers like this can sometimes make your paper a little fuzzy on the surface — if that happens, you are letting the marker saturate the paper too quickly, so let it dry and then use faster, lighter strokes. Fortunately, I didn’t have any trouble on this paper. I originally thought the pages were pretty light, but I was happy to find that I really didn’t get a whole lot of bleed through, except in the most layered part of the tail, and of course, from the alcohol-based Copics.

To smooth out the marker strokes in the tail and pull the colors together, I finished the tail with some blue pencils from my set of Caran d’Ache Pablos. On top of all the marker, it also kind of made the overall appearance of the tail kind of shiny, which was great for making it look more like fish scales.

The rocks and water are also colored with a few different shades of Tombows.

What I’m not happy with here is my background! I really am a markers kind of gal, but I thought the Tombows would look too textured/heavy behind her, I don’t have any blue Copics yet, and I wanted her to be the main point of focus here! So, what I did was try to use the Pablo pencils to mimic the watercolor look of the source image. Of course, non-soluble pencils are not watercolors, so it just ended up looking pretty rushed! What I probably should have done in hindsight was use my watercolors or watercolor pencils and lightly blended, but I’m not quite confident enough in my watercolor abilities to do that after finishing the rest of the image.

I guess what I am trying to say here is: believe in yourself! Take risks with your background! But maybe color it before the foreground so that if you mess up too badly you can just switch to another page!!

I colored a few final touches on her face with Pablos and then dabbed a few highlights on with my white Signo Uni Ball gel pen.

Check out my speed coloring video below:

Overall, I really enjoyed this book! There is just so much opportunity to practice shading and texture on relatively close-up figures, not to mention the superb artwork by talented illustrators. There’s something for everyone here — classic stories you’ve heard told and retold since childhood, complicated linework, and an adult coloring book that gives some meaning to the word “adult.” I like it! I definitely recommend you consider making a pledge on their Kickstarter if you definitely want the box set and some of these other goodies.

Okay, I’m sold… how do I get a copy?

If the sample pages I showed above look appealing to you, I definitely encourage you go pick up your own copy on Amazon!

BUT, before you do that, here’s a pro tip: right now, for me, Amazon is displaying a $8.46 price for this book. Pricing on Amazon is a little bit up to the whims of the Amazon gods (read: their highly complex algorithm), but that’s what I am seeing at the time of writing. HOWEVER, if you instead purchase this book as an add-on to a Kickstarter pledge of any size, you can get this book (or either of their other two available titles) for just $8! How cool is that?

For a guaranteed shot at the boxed set, which contains different coloring books from the one reviewed here, go to the Kickstarter and pledge at least $35. And hey, if you happen to win this giveaway, first of all you are super lucky, and second of all, you have a great gift for a friend ready to go!

Don’t forget to share your colored pages! I’d love to see your colored version of the free page, or any other page from the book!

IT’S GIVEAWAY TIME! Enter here for a chance to win one of five great prize packages!

For this giveaway, we will be drawing one grand prize winner, two runner ups, and two secondary runner ups at random from the full pool of entries. No purchase required to win. 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 June 27th. The winners will be drawn at random on June 28th 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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Zenescope + Cleverpedia Coloring Book Giveaway

Thanks again to Zenescope Entertainment for providing the review and giveaway copies!

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