I’ve always really loved the comic book-esque style that SheVibe goes for in their graphics. Even before I ended up being in one of their pieces of artwork (something I will never get over tbqh), I’ve always loved spending time just looking at it— check out @shevibestudios on Instagram if you want to browse, btw. I’ve known SheVibe has had a colouring book series for a while and always been a little bit tempted, and with my nesting partner and I trying to find more at-home date night in activities, I thought it was the right time to give one of them a try.
While my partner chose the Fantasmic book from the #NSFW Coloring Book—“it has girls with dicks” was her reasoning, which is fair given she is a woman with a penis—I do want to highlight a few other colouring books that SheVibe has published. If you’re really into the cover art that SheVibe produces regularly, there’s the Totally SheVibe Coloring Book, if you want to colour pictures of couples only there’s the Totally Naughty Coloring Book, and if you’re specifically looking for depictions of plus-sized or larger bodies, there’s the Totally Curvy Coloring Book. Fantasmic is the most expensive of the colouring books, but not by a huge amount, at $20 to Totally Naughty and Totally Curvy’s $19 and Totally SheVibe’s $18.
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Content
There are 39 different sets of lineart in the Fantasmic #NSFW Coloring Book, all of which fit into a sci-fi or fantasy theme. I grew up in a comic-con attending and Star Trek uniform owning family, so I’ve always had a big love for both sci-fi and fantasy as genres. That’s followed me into adulthood, where I’m now a Mass Effect ship-model collecting and Dungeons & Dragons playing[ref]Yes, I frequently make ‘both kinds of dungeon master’ jokes[/ref] man, with plenty of SFF elements to a lot of my sexual fantasies. It’s definitely more heavy on the fantasy than other subtypes of SFF— there’s 19 sets of lineart I’d consider fantasy, 8 sci-fi, 2 vampires, 2 superheroes, 7 that are a bit ambiguous in terms of of flavour of SFF of if they do have speculative elements, and 1 steampunk. There’s also a good mixture of pieces with detailed backgrounds and those without—I am exceptionally lazy and prefer backgroundless pieces, while my partner enjoyed colouring in detailed sci-fi settings.
I do think there could be a lot more diversity in the illustrations. I don’t want to be too harsh, as this book was published 5 years ago, but I do think it’s worth noting that while there’s depictions of both F/F and M/F couples, there aren’t any M/M interactions, or even depictions of men without a woman also being present. There also isn’t a huge amount of body diversity, with all figures being pretty slim.
Book Quality
My partner and I have mostly been photocopying pages to colour, rather than colouring directly out of the book. This is for a few reasons—it allows us to both colour the same linework and compare, it allows us to start over if we decide we don’t like our colouring, and it means we can very proudly put our drawings on the fridge (and then have a panicked scramble to take them down before work Zoom calls). However, I know a lot of people prefer to colour directly into books, so I did a test of a couple of different art supplies on the pages. I found markers bled though the pages, which is an issue as the pages are double sided. Obviously not all markers are made the same, but I’d still recommend sticking to pencil or crayon if you want to colour directly in the book. While the pages are still thin enough that I did see a little bit of the colour on the opposite side of the page, this doesn’t show through once the opposite page has been coloured.
Overall
My partner and I had a ton of fun with the Fantasmic #NSFW Coloring Book. While I would prefer if the paper was a little heavier and there was a bit more diversity in content—if SheVibe ever do another book in this series that’s something I really want to see—I still really enjoyed it. While I used it as a date night activity, I can also see people enjoying it within the context of CGL, or just as a fun solo activity.
Buy the SheVibe Fantasmic #NSFW Coloring Book for $20
This product was sent to me by SheVibe, in return for a fair and impartial review. Affiliate links were used in this post.
