Alphonse Mucha: Make Your Own art Masterpiece by David Jones and Daisy Seal

• Type: Paperback
• No of Pages: 96
• Publisher: Flame Tree Publishing
• Release Date: 25 September 2016
• ISBN13: 9781786640468
• Size: 25.4 x 1 x 25.4 cm
• Price: £10.99 UK/ $16.99 US

Alphonse Mucha: Make Your Own Art Masterpiece by David Jones and Daisy Seal has a stiff card cover illustrated with one of the illustrations from inside the book of one of the beautiful Art Nouveau style ladies Mucha is famous for. The Red and green title is further embellished with a gold foiled outline. There is no colourable pattern on the inside but there is an. illustration which you could probably colour with markers on each of the fold out french flaps. It is both glue and stitch bound and the cream coloured paper is of a medium weight and the pages are perforated for you to remove your pictures and frame them if you so wish. The ink is fixed so will not transfer to the opposite page when you colour and the illustrations are printed in light grey outlines so that they will beautifully disappear into your coloured artwork. They are also one-sided with just the title, size and detail of the original art and a close up coloured detail on the facing left page so if you remove them make a note in pencil if you intend to look up the original for colouring inspiration.

There are 45 illustrations to colour. Most are recognisable as exact outline replicas of the original painting although as the page is square each picture is cropped often showing a close up of the face or to the midriff so there are few that show the full picture. Some also have simplified versions of the background details or bits are left out although most have a background to colour. There are also simpler versions of some of the pictures while others have lots of details.  All this does not spoil the beautiful artwork, I am merely making you aware that there are these differences. The illustrations are beautifully done in a way that gives the colourist a variety of levels of intricacy and details to colour. They look like Mucha’s artwork and are recognisable as such. Some reproductions may have faces etc that do not resemble the original – in this book that is not the case, these do.

The publisher recommends that you can use pencils and pens including gel pens, crayons, coloured pencils, ballpoints, rollerball and highlighter pens but suggests not to use heavy felt pens. The reason for this I found is that the colour will feather due to the composition of the paper. I found that there was a little feathering when I used my Prismacolor Premier pencils (You can see it most in the stems of the flowers below). I used two colours for the skin; a brown ochre for shadow and light peach but found that the colours lay down was slightly darker than usual and needed to be blended with white to lighten them back to the colour I wanted. I have never come across this before in a colouring book and found it a little strange. I think this is down to a combination of the paper construction and cream colour. It took a little getting used to but it by no means spoilt my enjoyment of the book – just be aware that you may need to blend more than usual with a white or colourless pencil if this is your chosen medium. Prismas are also soft core ‘buttery’ pencils so harder core pencils may solve this problem altogether.

It is a beautifully illustrated book and if you love the artwork of Alphonse Mucha you will be very pleased with this lovely book.

I decided to colour this lovely picture of ‘Spring’. It is one of my favourite Mucha paintings as my mother had a mirror of this on the wall as I was growing up. The original though is a full figure length version and this concentrates on her beautiful face down to her midriff. There is also no background with this one so you can add your own if you wish to do so.

Alphonse Mucha: Make Your Own Art Masterpiece by David Jones and Daisy Seal is available from Amazon. co.uk, Amazon. com, Book Depository and The Wordery (Both with free worldwide shipping).

I was kindly sent a copy from the publisher, however all thoughts and comments expressed are my own honest opinion and are not influenced by this fact.