The Night Voyage Series: Time coloring series #3 Purchase: Amazon
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This third adult coloring book in Daria Song's Time series follows the little girl on a new nighttime adventure when the conductor of her toy train comes to life and helps her distribute gifts across the world.
The Night Voyage is an evocatively illustrated story of a little girl who is swept away on the eve of her birthday by her toy train conductor on a magical journey to distribute gifts around the globe. Taking devotees of The Time Garden and The Time Chamber on an imaginative new adventure, The Night Voyage continues Daria Song's wildly successful series with the beautifully intricate art that her fans have come to love, featuring a world of paper cranes, penny-farthing bicycles, trolleys, cityscapes, and hot air balloon-filled skies.
I received a review copy of this book from the publisher.
Review
Whimsical, intricate pictures make this coloring book a delight. Although the general plot is outlined in text in the first few pages, for the most part the illustrations tell the story without words. To be honest, it’s more a dream sequence than a coherent story, but the suggestion of a plot gives the coloring pages a direction or cohesiveness that I’ve found lacking in some other coloring books.
Paper cranes, wrapped gifts, lanterns, hot-air balloons, and clocks decorate the pages; the main characters are a young girl, her cat, and a mysterious conductor. There’s more variety in the pictures than such a list conveys. I certainly found it more visually interesting than the last coloring book I reviewed, which contained a surfeit of flowers and not much else.
The illustrations are all two-page spreads, which is both a benefit and a drawback. On the plus side, the pictures are more panoramic, rather like a children’s story book. On the minus side, it will take more time to color each one. The artwork is printed on both sides of each page, making The Night Voyage more of an illustrated book to color than a source for frameable wall art.
I was unable to assess the paper quality because I was given access to a digital copy. However, the format size (basically 10″ x 10″) is similar to the coloring books of Joanna Basford (The Secret Garden), so the illustrations, while pleasingly detailed, should be comfortably sized for adults and even older children to color. Given the front-and-back style, I would recommend using colored pencils rather than markers.
If I were in the market for another coloring book right now, I would definitely consider buying this one, along with the previous two books in the same series. I like the idea of a coloring book with a story rather than just individual pages.
Final note: I would have liked to include at least one illustration, but was not able to secure permission to do so. However, you can see several of the pictures at Amazon; just click on the cover for the “Look Inside” feature.
Heather @ Random Redheaded Ramblings
I have her first book and the illustrations are beautiful, I am so pleased that these colouring books are still going strong!
Heather @ Random Redheaded Ramblings recently posted…REVIEW – Gemina by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff
Lark_Bookwyrm
Oh, good—you can answer my question about paper quality, then! Is it thick enough to use markers, or do you need to use colored pencils so it doesn’t bleed through to the opposite side?
Danya @ Fine Print
I love the concept behind Daria Song’s colouring books – they’re so much more fun than the ones that just have random themed illustrations (although I do love my Ryan Gosling colouring book, haha). The photos on Amazon are beautiful, too!
Danya @ Fine Print recently posted…Review: Ghost Talkers by Mary Robinette Kowal
Lark_Bookwyrm
I would love to color one of her books! That was the biggest drawback of reviewing an e-ARC: I didn’t get to actually color in it.