Happy Easter all! This past week I wanted to do some colouring to get into the spirit of Easter. I went through my colouring book collection, looking for Easter pictures and I found a couple in my Romantic Country series by the Japanese illustrator, Eriy. I got these books for Christmas and hadn’t had a chance to colour in them yet. So this was a great opportunity to try them out. They are such beautiful books and I can’t wait to do a bit more in them.

I don’t want to do a review of these books but I will tell you impressions of these books. All three books in the series are part of the same adorable story, which is split up into chapters. The paper is great quality and the line art is just gorgeous. I believe it has all been hand-drawn using a toothpick. The print isn’t very dark but the lines vary in width.

The two pages I have coloured are from the first two books, Romantic Country: A Fantasy Coloring Book and Romantic Country: The Second Tale: A Fantasy Coloring Book. These were the only dedicated Easter pictures. There was nothing in the third tale related to Easter. While colouring these pages I did find the line art a little hard to cover, so I tried to use blend gel pens with a pencil. I am not sure I did the best job. I was a little rushed to finish them, so I’m not really happy with my results. I intend to do a couple of tutorials in these books to get the hang of being the best method to colour in them. Chris Cheng has some beautiful finished pictures that she filmed videos on, so I will probably do a couple in the near future.

This page is from the first tale and the page is entitled The Witch’s Easter Eggs. It is written “On Easter day someone hides Easter eggs. But the person who does the hiding is actually still a mystery”.

For this picture, I used Prismacolor Premier pencils, white and gold Uniball Signo gel pens and a vary of gel pens from Costco Point & Line Gel n’ Roll Ink Pens. I am relatively happy with most of the eggs. I really wasn’t sure what kind of background to do, so I just added the strings, so the eggs look like they are hanging.

This page is from the second tale and the page is entitled the Easter Witch. It is written, “Hiding Easter eggs all over the country is her favourite act. Watching children joyfully searching for Easter eggs is her one true pleasure”. I assume that the Easter witch has been discovered by the second tale since I think she is a mystery in the first.

I used the same medium as I used for the previous page. I’m not really happy with this page. I tried to use the same technique with the gel pens but I didn’t match the colours very well, so it didn’t turn out as nice. It was still a lovely page to colour though and I look forward to getting in the groove to colour some more.

Did you do any colouring, arts or crafts activities for Easter?