I love colouring with my Ohuhu Alcohol Markers so much that I picked up the Honolulu B set, too. So, of course, I needed a colouring book to go with my markers.

I browsed a bunch of different options on Amazon, and ended up purchasing the Fantasy Creatures colouring book by Phoebe Beck, thinking I’d support a real artist. Besides, the book has overwhelmingly positive reviews, so what could possibly go wrong?

Yeah. Turns out Phoebe Beck is just a single photo and bio, without any online presence or mentions other than a handful of colouring books, so it seems my ‘real artist’ doesn’t exist. She’s just a front for a company/person generating colouring books and passing them off as human work, complete with a thank you note at the back of the book. But I only learned the truth later.

These images are clearly AI-generated. Though the subjects of the pictures are cute, their hands and feet are especially wonky, and several feature weird, dull eyes. Many have scores of extra toes or fingers, sometimes with more than one nail on the same digit. Others have half-baked background creatures or elements that make no sense at all. About a third of the illustrations aren’t even sketched in the same style as the others, and would do better in children’s colouring books.

Several of the images also feature signatures in the designs, though none of the signatures are legible or remotely the same. I can’t decide if it’s because the AI tried to be fancy or if it learned from specific artists who sign their work and tried to replicate signatures. One of the pictures features two signatures in different places, where the work was likely duplicated to fill a larger area.

The backs of the pages are printed solid black, which supposedly prevents bleed-through. Not true either. It’s just ink on regular printer-quality paper, so there’s a good amount of bleed.

Now, I don’t mind AI-generated colouring books, but I expect the creators to be honest about it when they use AI art. Don’t fool people by passing off a book full of illustrations as the work of a real person. Lying is unethical. It’s that simple.

I’ll still colour some of the pictures, but others are just so juvenile that they don’t appeal to me. This isn’t a terrible colouring book, I’m just annoyed that I fell for the scam. I wouldn’t purchase it again, and will thoroughly research any new illustrator I support on Amazon.

Here are some of the pictures.

Meanwhile, if you’d like to support an actual human artist who created a colouring book, consider buying mine! Fly Free: Stained Glass Colouring Book features 20 original artworks of various birds. I painstakingly and lovingly illustrated each one—no AI art here. If you’d like to see more photos from the colouring book, check out this blog post, where I discuss the publishing process and share more specs.

Until next time.

Yolandie