Daily Archives: April 1, 2016

This is a beautiful coloring book of unusual, exotic and slightly abstract botanical designs. Most of the designs are of flowers though the odd sea creature and certainly succulents make their way onto the page. I have never heard of this artist before but I took a chance in ordering this book and I am so glad that I did so. Her artwork has a flowing and organic look and feel and is a real pleasure to color. In addition to the frame-quality designs, the book also includes a full-color, signed print from the artist that can also be framed if you so choose.

In addition to the fantastic designs, I have to say that this coloring book is published exactly as I would love to have every coloring book published. I will go into more details below but short of extremely high quality paper, I can’t think of anything more I could ask from a physical stand-point. I don’t believe that I have other coloring books by this publisher, Get Creative 6, but I hope that they will be providing more high quality coloring books in the near future.

While the artist suggests using a few colors in the same family to get a harmonious look, when I chose my first project, I wanted to play with all of the fun colors in my box of Tombow markers. It isn’t often that I get a design that lets me use lots and lots of colors, but that is the way I saw this bouquet. Perhaps for my next project I will follow her advice, but the fun of coloring is doing whatever you want to do and to do it your own way. It gives us the opportunity to put our own artist stamp on an artist’s work.

I will provide detailed information about the physical aspects of this book below, but here is a quick overview of what I found:

45 Exotic and Abstract Botanical Designs
1 Full Color, Signed and Frame-quality print
Printed on one side of heavyweight paper
Pages are micro-perforated
Glue Binding
Designs do not merge into the Binding
Alcohol-based markers bleed through the page
Water-based markers leave a color shadow on the back of the page
Gel pens and India ink pens leave an indistinct shadow on the back of the page
Coloring pencils work excellently with this paper

The designs in this coloring book are printed on one side of heavy weight, micro-perforated, white paper. The designs do not merge into the binding area. The binding is glue-bound but you will remove pages at the perforations if you want to take them out of the book. I could get the book to lay fairly flat by slightly breaking the spine. There is also a lovely and frame-quality full-color print included in the coloring book.

I test my coloring book with various coloring mediums (which I will list in the comments section at end of this review.) Here are the results of my tests:

Alcohol-based markers bleed through this paper but not as heavily as many others.. Water-based markers leave a shadow of color on the backside of the page. Gel pens and India ink pens leave a slight shadow on the back of the page. Coloring pencils work excellently with the paper. The soft lead pencils go on with great and thick color. They layer and blend easily. The hard lead pencils make sharp and distinct lines and their color is fairly deep as well.

I think that the paper used is a great quality though some medium did bleed through. I don’t have an issue with this as the publisher printed on one side. I used and will continue to use a blotter page under my working page. I suggest that you also do this or remove pages before coloring to keep the rest of the book safe from seeping ink.