This beautiful book is one that I wanted for a while and I finally got it. It has quickly become one of my favourites. If you like colouring fantasy and you looking for something gorgeous and dark then you must add Jasmine Beckett Griffith Coloring Book: A Fantasy Art Adventure to your colouring collection.

This is the first colouring book that has been published American free-lance artist Jasmine Beckett-Griffith. She also since published Jasmine Becket-Griffith Halloween Coloring Book: A Spine-Tingling Fantasy Art Adventure and most recently Mermaids Coloring Book: An Aquatic Art Adventure. Both this book are on my Christmas list as I just fell in love with her style.

Jasmine Beckett-Griffith Coloring Book

The drawings in this book have all been replicated from her original artwork. Jasmine is known for her amazing paintings of big-eyed girls. They are beautiful, quirky and often a bit dark. She based them in themes of fairies, vampires, Disney princess, mermaids, mythology, animals and holidays.  Her artwork has also been used for art prints, books, oracle desk, games, clothing, dolls and more. All of these products can be purchased from her website, Strangling. Many of the items purchased from the website will be signed by Jasmine herself.

This book has 96 pages, which contains 55 drawings. The pages are one-sided and the backside of the paper just has text giving the name and description of the original artwork across on the following page. The paper is high quality and is printed on 150gsm paper, which can handle a variety of mediums. Most of the drawings are one whole page, however, there are a few pages that have 4 smaller drawings. The line art is really a variety of Jasmine’s work. There are fairies, mermaids, fairytale characters and much more.

What I love about this book is that all of the drawings are based on her original works. The paintings are easy to find on her website. They are a great resource if you want to use the same colours or get some guidance on shading and lighting. I also loved that she has included those mini drawings, as I did start with a couple of those before I moved on to a whole page.

Below I have included all of the line art that I have coloured so far. I intend on coming back to this book. So to see up-to-date coloured work, without the commentary, see my Gallery for this book. If you want to see these pictures as I colour them step-by-step, see my Instagram.

This next one called Iris Enchantment and again I used nearly the same colour scheme as the original. This one is also a mini, which is beside the precious picture I coloured. I used Prismacolor Premier pencils for this one as I thought it has more of a range to do the skin. The grey skin was extremely difficult to do. I used more than 10 pencils and it’s still not perfect. The purple flowers were also a bit difficult to replicate as well, as they had many creases and a variety of shades. I really love how to turn out in the end.

Since its nearly Halloween I had to colour in Halloween Twilight. I used Faber-Castell Polychromos pencils and a white Prismacolor pencil. I didn’t use the same colour scheme as the original as I really wanted to do a purple dress. I was really happy with the Polychromos pencils for the pumpkin but I didn’t enjoy them while colouring the rest of the picture. I did use a blending pencil but I still found the pencil a bit hard for this paper. I even ruined the tooth in a couple of parts. I think this was more due to my harder hand than anything to do with the paper. I also got a lot of pencil dust on the skin, which was too hard to remove. I’m just happy its done.

Keeping with the Halloween theme I had to also colour in Skelton Magic. I switched back to my Prismacolor pencils and really enjoyed how they worked for me on this paper. I didn’t use the same colour scheme, but I still stuck with Halloween colours and the original as a reference. I imagined that the little witch was reanimated the skeletons, so I added some magic coming from the wand. I just love this one.

I need a break from Halloween so I moved on to Mermaid Eclipse. I went with a completely different colour scheme to the original, which was all red, purple and black. I used this digital picture of an eclipse as a reference for the background and this mermaid tail by Finfolk Productions for the mermaid. I used Prismacolor Premier pencils and my trusty white Uniball Signo pen. She came together well.

I was nearly going to put this book down to start another Halloween picture in another book. Marco convinced me to take on this fairytale picture of Red Riding Hood’s Picnic. I used the same colours as I was feeling a bit lazy. I’m happy I did because I think I couldn’t have created the same effect if I took it on by myself. I really enjoyed doing this one, but I was getting a bit burned out towards the end. I used Prismacolor Premier pencils again.

I hope you enjoyed my review. If you would like more information on this book or Jasmine’s other books and products see her website, Strangeling.

See my inspiration board on Pinterest by other colourists and Jasmine’s original work.

If your looking for a tutorial or speed colouring from this book see these channels:

• Faithfulgirl1978
• Shine Bright Design
• Amie’s colouring tutorials
• Whinnipoohwawa
• Dede Willingham
• Crazy For Coloring
• Yvonne Döring

You can buy this book from the following retailers:

• Strangling (signed by Jasmine)
• Amazon
• Book Depository
• Booktopia
• Amazon UK