I received this coloring book today and was so excited! I was so impressed with the cover but sadly not the paper & ink! I absolutely loved the idea of the cute sayings and many reviews seemed positive however I found this coloring book lacking as far as thick black ink and paper quality goes. I tried several pens, markers & pencils in every brand I have (which is more than I'd like to admit 😉). Every pencil actually looks like I colored the page with a good old fashioned Crayola crayon.. it's almost impossible to layer another color on top of the base color & when I tried to layer colors it beads up worse.. seriously acts like crayons is the best way to describe it. In the past I have had books that were similar but fortunately blenders did the trick! I like the option of blending and again have several blenders but with the thick black ink in the book it makes it difficult to blend without getting black in the blend (if that makes sense). Generally you have to be cautious when blending because this can happen but not to this degree. In this case having it look like crayons I would definitely have blended however due to the ink used for the book & black blends in I wasn't able to do this and have it look like I wanted. If you erase at all the black ink smears.. again I've used several art erasers and Tombow Mono Zero erasers 2.3 & 2.5 (very small round & smaller rectangle).. if you hit the black ink at all it just smears and is impossible to erase. Every pen & marker brand I used (again more than I'd liket to admit 😉) made the paper pucker up as I colored.. like when kids use too much ink with the pen or marker, which was not the case. When it dried it rippled like wet paper does. I always use a thin cardstock under the page as I color.. it almost felt like it was going to rip so that's again an issue with the paper quality. I have so many coloring books and so wanted this to be a great addition but it fell quite short in my opinion. I will say I LOVE the artists designs but the paper and black ink don't quite hit the mark for me so I wouldn't purchase this artist again since it's my experience each artist book is pretty comparable to their works.
As I stated before I love the creative artist and I'm not sure if the paper changed over the yrs with the higher ratings however my advice is if you purchase this book.. keep a sharpener handy you'll be sharpening pencils & blenders a lot, be careful with pens & markers as the page could rips easily & I'd suggest very little to no erasing!

UPDATE: I've added an additional 🌟 to make it a 4 star review. Because I love the creativity, sayings etc this artist presented in this book & I realized I've already purchased other books from this artist that haven't yet arrived.. I tried some new pencil additions that I just received to see if it made a difference.. in the photo of the mountains is hard to really see the beading in the pic.. you can see some of the black edging as it was blended.. the pic of the butterflies is with my new set of Black Widow pencils, KACO pens & PAR KOO pens. I use the TAGAAL pencil sharpener because it gets the pencil tips to the point I need & the Black Widow pencils are amazing so far on this page and do great at not breaking! I'd still caution as to blenders being sharpened to a point so you don't touch the black edging, rippling with pens/markers & in still not loving the paper quality but I'm happier changing the pencils to enjoy this coloring book more!
I also figured out that if colored pencil gets onto the black ink you can use a colorless blender and it takes the color out of it.. so when coloring words if pencil gets in the inside black circle of an a (if I'm making sense) you can use the blender and remove any color you don't want there.

Brand	N/A
Rating	4.7 (10187 ratings)
Price	$4.99
Category	Art Therapy & Relaxation

An Inspirational Colouring Book For Everyone: Be Fearless In The Pursuit Of What Sets Your Soul On Fire