Floating World & Paper Mate Ink Joy Gel Pens -- a Relaxing Friday Review

Disclosure: I was sent these products free of charge. All opinions in my review are my own and I did not receive any other compensation. As always I am providing links to the book for your convenience.

This week has been anything besides relaxing and I have not had much time to color. Perhaps it was working nights due to Hazel's camp schedule. Anyway, I have a beautiful coloring book and some new gel pens to share with you today. The coloring book is Floating World: Japanese Prints Coloring Book by Andrew Vigar. 

This book is more than just a coloring book. It gives information about the beautiful Japanese woodblock prints as well as the artists. Each page has the original print and an image of it to color. You get to decide if you want to color it as the artist did the original one.

 I enjoyed coloring these pages and love that the pages are perforated so they can easily be pulled out and framed. There is also pages about each artist and his print.

Here is the print that this description is about.

I started coloring a few of the pages in this book, but like I said in the beginning it was one of those crazy weeks.

Then we got a set of the new Paper Mate InkJoy Gel Pens and I had to try them (of course Hazel had to try them first).  

I did this beautiful picture using just these new pens.

Apparently trying to copy the print is not much fun to Hazel. She asked me if I was going to just copy the colors in the print. I answered that I was trying to with the color choices I had. Oh, well. I'll be more creative next week!!

The pens worked well. I actually have some of the old ones and I could see the improvements in both the pens and the ink. These pens are not the best for large areas and as you can see in my picture my hand got tired in some of the larger areas that would have been better to use a marker or pencil. However we love the colors. I used every color on the picture above so you could see all of them. They are a great pen with a reasonable price. 

So that is my relaxing Friday review. This book is up to the Tuttle Publishing quality. The pages are thick and good quality and like most of their books there are even lessons built in about the culture and the art. I hope you will check them and the new pens out!!