Beautiful garden/nature scenes printed on both sides of non-perforated page

Harmony of Nature: Unwind. Create. Color.

By: Mihoko Kurihara

Rating: 5 of 5

This is a very pretty book of excellent hand-drawn nature designs. It is in the kind of square format that many of the artist coloring books are now taking. The cover is quite lovely with touches of red foil on it. The designs center around animals and plants you would find outside in the garden or in the woods. There are mice, birds, deer, rabbits, squirrels, owls and cats. There are many designs of flowers and leaves.

I counted 55 separate designs. Of these designs, 12 of them span across two pages. A few of the pages of these in my book did not line up and were off slight. On the other hand, most of the designs could be considered a single page designs and colored as such. That is my current plan for most of them.

The book is printed on both sides of the non-perforated white pages. The pages are a nice thickness. The binding is sewn in rather than glued. Rather oddly, the last two pages are purposely left with blank pages on the backside of the design. It made me wonder why the artist/publisher did not do this for all the pages as they were aware that it was something the colorist would want.

All of my markers bled through on this paper while none of my gel pens did. The paper accepted my color pencils well and allowed for blending nicely.

For some reason, Amazon has two versions of this book listed (same artist/same publisher). They seem to be the same size although one has a lighter weight. I am going to list my review in both listings, so you can see what is in the book. I don’t know if the lighter, less expensive version is made with different materials or if there is merely a glitch in the system. I purchased the more expensive one because that was the one which was available when I looked at the book.

This is a really beautiful book of designs but this book could have been great improved by printing on one side and having perforated paper. I don’t detract any points for this but point it out for the artist and publisher to consider in the future. There are a good number of colorists who will not purchase this book based on one or both of these criteria.