Super Cute Friends
A Coloring Book That Brings a Smile to Your Face
Super Cute Friends is a brief, lighthearted coloring book that’s perfect for a quick artistic escape.
Chi Nguyen’s Super Cute Friends is a sweet coloring book whose pages feature animals engaged in both human and animal activities.
These thirty images feature pandas, bunnies, and deer in natural landscapes and backyard environments. Bears reach out to catch leaping fish and tigers bathe in a lake in the pictures, which have the quality of free-drawn sketches with lines of consistent thickness throughout. A mixture of ample white space with intricate sections results in variety when coloring in the areas of each image. Tiger stripes, leopard spots, and flower petals, for instance, are narrow enough for finer colored-pencil coloring, while balloons, bushes, and the bodies of animals with solid fur have wider spaces that can be filled in with crayons.
Some of the images, such as that of a panda playing with a ball and another of a beaver lounging next to a log, contain more open space than not, minimizing coloring time. Others are more detailed and immersive, as with an image of an adorable bunny family hanging laundry that includes myriad clothing items with diverse patterns to engage. But there is one image on each two-page spread, cutting the opportunity for coloring in half; still, the blank page on the back of each picture may allow for the use of watercolor paints or markers that risk bleeding.
Each picture has its own internal consistency, and the book as a whole is cohesive and lighthearted. The animals’ expressions represent a variety of emotions: A beaver with slits for eyes leans against a log, implying relaxation and contentedness; the downcast gaze of a hedgehog drawing a broken heart in the sand speaks to its sadness. A second hedgehog in the latter image throws paper airplanes with full hearts on them at their brokenhearted companion, with lines trailing behind a plane in flight and over one of their outstretched arms to signify movement. In other images, balls bounce, horses dance, and cats scratch for additional senses of movement. Assorted styles of flowers and butterflies adorn the book’s natural settings too. Occasional physical humor appears as well, as in pictures of a lion blow-drying his unwieldy mane and of a joey using an umbrella to protect himself from his mother’s runny nose.
Perfect for a casual escape, Super Cute Friends is an endearing coloring book whose images star whimsical animals.
Reviewed by
Aimee Jodoin
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
