Christian Labyrinths: A Celtic Coloring Book

Color your way through intricately detailed labyrinths to discover the spiritual richness within. As you color, you will reveal prayers and verses hidden in the Celtic patterns. Acclaimed artist Daniel Mitsui draws on such medieval manuscripts as the Book of Kells to create thirty original coloring pages that will help you contemplate your faith and grow closer to Christ.

In his third and most ambitious adult coloring book, Mitsui creates illustrations inspired by medieval manuscripts such as the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels. This Celtic style is characterized by intricate knot or spiral decorations and highly stylized calligraphy. Also fascinated by the tile labyrinths decorating the floors of medieval churches, Mitsui combines these two popular genres into beautifully detailed coloring pages.

Christian Labyrinths features three types of artwork, each offering a unique meditative experience:

• Labyrinths pages portray Biblical scenes surrounded and connected by paths made up of interconnected knots and spirals.
• "Carpet" pages feature richly detailed patterns forming traditional Christian shapes.
• Cryptogram pages contain hidden messages in the design that are revealed when color fills them.

Following the practice of great monastic scribe Eadfrith of Lindisfarne, Mitsui has included a single, small, deliberate mistake on each page of the book, providing an extra level of challenge and interest to coloring enthusiasts.

Artist Daniel Mitsui specializes in ink drawing. His meticulously detailed creations―created entirely by hand on paper or vellum―are held in collections worldwide. Since his baptism into the Catholic Church in 2004, he has focused most of his art on religious subjects.

Mitsui is a 2004 graduate of Dartmouth College, where he studied drawing, oil painting, etching, lithography, wood carving, bookbinding, and film animation.

The Vatican commissioned Mitsui to illustrate a new edition of the Roman Pontifical in 2011. In 2012, he established Millefleur Press, an imprint for publishing fine books and broadsides of his artwork and typography. He is a prolific designer of custom bookplates. He has two other adult coloring books with Ave Maria Press, The Mysteries of the Rosary and The Saints. Mitsui recently began research on what he calls the Summula Pictoria, an iconographic summary of the Old and New Testaments―a project that will ultimately take him more than a decade to complete.

Born in Georgia and raised in Illinois, Mitsui lives in Chicago with his wife, Michelle, and their four children.