From BBNC Publishers I received The One and Only Coloring Agenda 2017 to review, for which I kindly thank them. This of course is a coloring agenda in the Dutch language, but if the language does not bother you, it’s actually a nice one for everybody, whatever language you speak.
The coloring agenda feels firm (is that a way to describe a book in English?? Haha, not sure, but you’ll get the idea… I hope). I think this one will be my desk agenda for 2017. The size is 21,7 x 14,5 cm and it’s 2,5 cm thick, which makes it a bit too large to put in my handbag.
I love agendas and diaries. Therefore I usually have more than one each year. While I (and now I’m being quite frank) actually seldom use them hahaha. But this one is really cool! I’ve got the last one, 2016, too. So having the one for 2017 as well is a real pleasure.
Details about the One and Only Coloring Agenda 2017
I’ll describe the coloring agenda a bit more. The paper is real nice and very white. The publisher has chosen for the stitch bookbinding method. This means that the separate segments of the agenda have been sewn together with yarn. This provides strength and prevents the pages to let loose. Ideal, in my opinion!
Because the agenda is quite thick, I was concerned that the centre fold would be a problem with coloring, but this was not the case. When it’s completely spread out and flattened as much as possible, one can easily access the utter edges of the page in the centre fold.
Like with most agendas, at least the ones I know, this one also has a couple of standard pages. The first page is for your personal data. Then there’s a calendar of 2017 with all the Dutch and Belgian Holidays.
It contains a year planner as well, with three months per page. I usually use this to keep track of birthdays, I’m not quite the planning type 🙂 . In the back of the coloring agenda there are a couple of extra pages. Two for notes and four for doodles, where you can scribble your own doodles.
These pages are also very nice to use as test pages for testing colors, when you’re coloring in the agenda.
Watch a flip-through
Of course I’ve made a video again with a flip-through, so you can see the whole coloring agenda for yourself.
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Every week has four pages: two with a drawing, spread over two pages, and two pages with the weekdays. For this review I’ve picked a couple of lovely drawings that I’ve colored to show you.
Get to work with color
In the first one I’ve worked with the Lyra Art Pens that I recently bought (here you can read the review I’ve written about these pens). I wasn’t very enthusiastic about working with these pens and fairly quick I switched to using gel pens. Phew, the gel pens did so much better and easier!
The problem with the Lyra Art Pens was that they sort of crumbled the surface of the paper. This caused bleed through to the back of the page. And it made my work look sloppy. In this case the paper wasn’t the problem, since this paper is really nice for coloring with all materials. Mainly thanks to the gel pens my endresult actually looks very pretty.
For the next drawing I wanted to use colored pencils. And it didn’t take long to find a beautiful drawing that appealed to me. I saw this beautiful tree that seemed to call me, I had to color it. This time I used the Tombow Irojiten pencils.
I started out with the tree trunk and the leaves. The leaves are grouped and divided in segments. I decided to give every segment slightly different colors. And soon the idea arose to give the left half of the drawing autumn colors and the right side of the drawing fresh green spring and summer colors.
After the tree I colored the rest and blended most colors to create gradient effects. The paper made it really easy to do this, I didn’t even have to use a blender pencil. For a moment I considered coloring the background black, but in the end I didn’t. What if I ruin my whole work! Now I’m actually very satisfied with the final result.
Third and last drawing
For a third design I chose a very simple one with lots of tiny flowers and ladybugs. On this one I’ve used the Faber Castell Pitt Brush pens. What a relief compared to the Lyra pens! The Pitt Brushes colored very smooth on this paper.
When I took a close look to the design, just before I started coloring, I saw an enormous green field filled with daisies in my mind’s eye. So that’s why I made the background green and only filled the hearts of the flowers with yellow.
This last drawing was colored by using only four colors. Namely black and red for the ladybugs, yellow for the flower hearts and the ‘feathers’ here and there, and green for the background. I really like the outcome and it sure would fit as a pattern for a gift wrap 🙂
All photographs in this review, plus some extra, can be found here, or through the ‘Photo gallery’ link in the top menu.
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Disclosure: This review contains products that I received from a publisher or company. This however does not reflect on my opinion in any way. Also note my Disclosure Promos page!
