The Time Garden – A Magical Journey and Coloring Book by Daria Song

This book is one of the most beautiful books I have come across.  It’s also different, as far as coloring books go.  Instead of just having a set of random pictures thrown together to fit a certain theme, this book contains a story, and it forces you to use your imagination and creativity to make the story come to life.  The illustrations are simply stunning – very intricate and you can tell a lot of time was put into each one of them.  The story is cute, and the entire thing just feels like a fairy-tale.  Plus, it has a dust jacket that you can color if you want (how cool is that?).  The book has a cute little story in it, and it takes you on quite the adventure!

Here’s what I mean about the really intricate, beautiful illustrations:

I used colored pencils for the pictures that I colored in this book so far, and they work out beautifully.  However, if you would rather use markers or gel pens, I could see those working out pretty well too, because the paper is really thick, so I doubt it would go through.  I’ve also noticed that some coloring books have thin paper which causes the pages to curl up when colored, and this isn’t the case for this book.  There are quite a lot of illustrations in here, and while most of them span across two pages, some of them are single page illustrations, as well.  While I normally don’t care much for illustrations that take up two pages, because it’s a bit difficult to color in the center near the spine of the book, this one wasn’t really all that bad, so I didn’t have much of a problem with it:

Some of the designs are a bit simpler, and some of them are really complex and I find that I’ll probably spend quite a few hours (if not days) working on a lot of them.  However, I find that the overall theme of this book is just calming and quite fantasy-orientated, which makes me look forward to spending a lot of time with this book.  While I might not be the most “artsy” person out there, I love coming up with new ways to fill these beautiful pictures with color and make them come to life.  If you’re looking for a great way to get rid of some stress, I recommend giving this book a go!

Note: I received a copy of this book from the publisher via the Blogging for Books program in exchange for an honest review.