31 Lovely Butterfly Designs printed on one side of thin white non-perforated paper

This coloring book has 31 designs which have butterflies as their main point of reference. In some cases, the butterfly is the complete design and in others, the butterfly is shown in near flowers or as part of a collage. Many of the designs are intricate and will certainly take a little more time and thought. For some of the designs, you will need good eyesight and a steady hand to color in the tiny details. Some of these areas are so tiny that even with my smallest of points of pencils and gel pens, I had problems coloring them. Because of this issue, I detracted a point from my rating. The book was printed in a smaller format than usual. Perhaps if it had been printed full size, this issue could have been avoided.

The designs in this book are are curated which means that they are licensed from various artists. It gives you a wider range of design styles but along with it, you get very different quality of lines and print. Some designs have heavy and/or dark black lines while others seem almost dark gray in color. In a few very, some of the lines seem less distinct than in others.

The designs are printed on one side of thin white paper. The pages are not perforated but ample room has been left to cut a page out if you choose to do so. The binding is glued rather than sewn so you will have to cut the pages if you want to remove them. The designs all have a small framing line on the outer portions of the designs. I really like this as it helps give work a more polished a finished look and saves me time, frustration and ink in finishing the project.

You can see a list of my coloring medium used for testing below. All of my markers (water-based as well as alcohol) and all of my gel pens bleed through this paper. My coloring pencils work well with it and behave according to their type of lead (though my hard lead pencils leave a noticeable indent on the back of the page. As the backside of the page is blank, I can use a heavyweight paper or chipboard beneath my working page to keep ink from leaking through or my indents from marring the page beneath. Chipboard can be purchased at an office supply store or on-line fairly inexpensively. I can reuse it many times over, so that is becoming my standard blotter sheet.

While I could wish for thicker, perforated paper, it appears that this is the quality of paper and print that usually accompanies an inexpensive coloring book. Because of the price, I think that the value is still there. A better quality of paper could easily double or even triple the cost of the book.

These are the coloring medium that I use for testing. If there is something else you feel I should be testing, please let me know and I will see if I can add it to my growing pile:

Markers: 1) alcohol-based Copic Sketch, Prismacolor double ended markers (brush and fine point), Sharpies (fine and ultra-fine) and 2) water-based Tombows dual end markers (brush and fine point), Stabilo 88, Staedler triplus fineliners, and Pentel markers

Gel Pens: Sakura, Fiskars, Uni-ball Signo 0.38/0.28 and Tekwriter

Coloring Pencils: Prismacolor Premier Soft Core, Derwent Colorsoft, Prismacolor Verithins, and Faber-Castel Polychromos