How to Stop Markers Bleeding Through Coloring Book Pages

Markers bleeding through is the most common complaint in adult coloring, and most of the advice about it is wrong in the same way: it treats bleed as a fault to be eliminated rather than a property of ink and paper to be managed.

You cannot eliminate it. You can absolutely manage it, and it takes about five seconds a page.

Why it happens

Ink is a liquid, and paper is a mat of fibers with air between them. When ink meets paper it travels along those fibers until it either dries or runs out. Alcohol based inks are built to keep traveling, because that is what lets them blend. Water based inks stop sooner.

Book paper is thin. It has to be, or the book would not fold, would weigh too much and would cost far more to print. So a coloring book is a stack of thin paper meeting liquid ink, and some of that ink comes out the other side. That is physics, not a manufacturing defect.

The six fixes, in the order I would try them

1. A scrap sheet behind the page. This is the whole answer for most people. Slide any spare paper behind the page you are working on. Ink that comes through hits the scrap instead of the next design. An envelope, a flyer, a page from a notepad, all fine.

2. A blotter sheet you keep. If you want something nicer than a flyer, cut a piece of cardstock to the size of the book and leave it in there permanently, moving it as you go. Some people end up rather fond of theirs after a few books, because it slowly becomes its own artwork.

3. Swatch before you commit. Color a small patch on the inside back cover with each new pen, then look at the reverse. Thirty seconds now tells you exactly how this pen behaves in this book, rather than finding out in the middle of a face.

4. Change how you apply, not what you apply. Keep the tip moving. Ink goes in where the tip rests, so slow scrubbing pushes far more through than quick passes. Build color in two light passes instead of one slow heavy one.

5. Switch families for the pages you care about. Keep alcohol markers for practice pages and use water based ones for the designs you want to keep. Or the other way round if blending matters more to you than the reverse side.

6. Take the page out. If a design really matters, cut or tear it out along the spine and color it flat on a desk with paper underneath. You lose the page from the book and gain something you can frame. Books with perforated pages make this easy. Mine do not, so this is a scissors decision.

Rescuing a page that already has bleed on it

It has happened, the back of the sheet has orange ghosting across the drawing you were saving. Options, from least to most work:

Color it anyway and use the ghost. If the bleed is in a background area, color over it in a darker version of the same color and it disappears into the shading.
Work the ghost into a shadow. A blotch near an object becomes a cast shadow if you extend it deliberately and repeat it elsewhere on the page.
Scan or photocopy the clean design first, then color the copy. Worth doing for any page you are nervous about, and it means you can color the same design twice in different palettes.
Accept it. A finished page with a shadow on the back is worth more than an unstarted page in a pristine book. The book is a supply, not an heirloom.

What a well made coloring book does about it

There are design decisions that make bleed less costly, and it is worth knowing which ones a book has made before you buy:

Single sided printing, or designs only on right hand pages, so nothing important sits behind your work.
A pattern or a plain tint on the reverse, so anything that comes through lands somewhere forgiving.
Thick lines and open spaces, which let you fill an area with confident strokes instead of scrubbing at the edges, and scrubbing is what drives ink through.
A note near the front telling you to use a protective sheet, which costs the publisher nothing and saves the reader a page.

All four are in my books, not because they are clever but because they are the obvious answer to a complaint that shows up in every coloring book review section on the internet.

The short version

Put a sheet of paper behind the page. Swatch new pens on the inside back cover. Keep the tip moving. Everything else is refinement.

And if a page does get marked, color it anyway. That is what it is for.