Awesome Town Coloring Poster Book

About Melissa Averinos

Melissa Averinos is a fabric designer, painter, and award-winning quilter. She is also a regular contributor to quilt and craft magazines. She lives on Cape Cod with her husband, Stuart, and their two golden retrievers.

Creative Colouring with Hazel

Awesome Town by Melissa Averinos is a book of 16 fun and quirky themed poster designs on 8 pull-out posters (printed front and back). The pages are perforated and you will need to detach the poster to colour it in. The paper is thick with a bit of a tooth (texture) to it so if you use pencils to colour either you will get some white background showing through or need to blend more than usual. Markers should work well, although if you use alcohol markers be sure you dont mind losing the design on the reverse. The ink is dark black and on some the lines are thick to suit the graphic poster style. One of the posters (an owls design) is grayscale with a black background. Each poster measures 77cm (30) x 49cm (19). One side of each poster is fully illustrated, the other side has more of a decorative border to enable you to create your own drawings or add lettering if you so wish.

The designs range from landscapes, cats, suns, mermaids, clouds and owls. It is a nice book and a lovely concept. This would be a great book to do as a family around a table as each poster is large enough that everyone can colour at once and as they are patterns it doesnt matter so much if you are colouring upside down. I previously reviewed Bohemian Adventures by Valori Wells which is another poster book in the same series and of the two I prefer this one by far. The designs are indeed fun and quirky and would appeal to young children and these would look great in bright colours and hung on the wall. I intend to give this book to my young niece to take to school as I feel the children will love to colour these designs. They would look even better with glitter and possibly other decorations added and I think they will love it.

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This is not an ordinary coloring book; you can often remove the pages in those after coloring, but this time you do it first! Each of the eight pictures in here is a large format poster 19 x 30. All are double sided, so you need to decide whether you want the picture or a frame in which to either draw or write. This latter option makes these posters ideal for using as banners for birthdays or other celebrations, and the size makes them suitable for group coloring. The artist suggests that you can use anything to color them in, but this depends on whether you want to color both sides or only one. The paper is not suitable for watercolors if you want to color both, and markers need to be waterbased and a light rather than lingering touch. Most of the pictures have heavy black outlines, suitable for large images which are to be seen across a distance, but some are greyscale, or have greyscale parts. There is a brief hint on how to color these at the front, along with a tip on blending pencils. The posters depict fantastic scenes featuring cats, sea creatures, unicorns, flowers, faces and rainbows and can be as simple or as complex to color as you wish, for there is room to add your own doodles in the larger shapes as well as the blank spaces. In short, this book is something different and a lot of fun.