Creatures of Legend: Coloring with Arty by Krisztianna

One great find I made at this year’s Comic Con was Creatures of Legend: Coloring with Arty by Krisztianna. Its pages are populated with pairings of an adult mythical creature with a baby version all drawn in a cute/kawaii fashion with large eyes and happy expressions. The creatures range from the more typical wyverns, dragons, and gryphons to the more bizarre flyons and wolpertingers. Flyons are lions with wings and wolpertingers, which hail from Germany, are winged, antlered rabbits. Krisztianna gives a paragraph blurb on the page opposite the line art along with three details: Friendly to Humans?, Most Famous Trait, and Land It Was Most Seen.

Author and illustrator Kristztianna confirmed that photocopies for personal use are allowed, so there is no need to color in the book directly. However at only $6 a copy for 22 creature pages to color, if you find yourself needing to color in the book or your children each want a copy, Creatures of Legend is quite affordable to use directly, or even to buy one copy to keep pristine and the other to color in.

Creatures of Legend is pretty much a must-have for hardcore gamer parents who want their children to be able to distinguish between hippocamps and hippogryphs. The illustrations will appeal to My Little Pony fans as well, featuring the hippocamps, unicorns, winged unicorns, and pegasi, as well as Spike-like dragons, wyverns, and winged serpents. If I ran a more child-friendly game geared towards cuteness instead of death and destruction, I would probably photocopy its art to illustrate the friendly kraken or itsumade the PCs would encounter. At only $6 it makes for an inexpensive gift or token of appreciation, or could even be used to partially occupy younger children during LARP preparations or an RPG session, while still fostering an interest in fantasy. It would also make a great gift to give to enrich a classroom’s library with its introductions to several cultures’ mythic creatures.

A Two-Page Sample Featuring China’s Ki’Rin from Creatures of Legend

Krisztianna also has expressed interest in seeing what artists, young or old, do with Creatures of Legend and has asked that fans tag their uploaded scans of colored creatures with her name, Krisztianna, so she and her followers can enjoy the colorists’ creativity. Future coloring books in the With Arty series will likely appear on witharty.com.

Click to See All 22!

The 22 creatures it includes are: the giant turtle akupara, cat-like basilisks, dragons, feathered serpents, gargoyles, gryphons, hippocamps, hippographys, hydras, the Japanese lion-headed birds itsumade, ki’rin, kraken, Loch Ness monsters (done as plesiosaurs), pegasus, phoenix, sea monsters (limbless sea serpents), unicorns, winged unicorns, the uber-cute wolpertingers, and wyverns, as well as the chimaera. Rather than being a creature with the head of a goat, dragon, and lion, Krisztianna’s chimaera is a goat-headed fish.