Just Add Color: Arboretum: 30 Original Illustrations to Color, Customize, and Hang – Bonus Plus 4 Full-Color Images by Lisa Congdon Ready to Display!
By: Lisa Congdon
Rating: 5 of 5
This is a really fun to color book for any gardener or some who enjoys the fruits of gardening. There are 30 hand-drawn designs in this well put together book by Lisa Congdon. This line of books is new to me but I will be looking for both older and newer titles now that I have tried the publisher (Rockport Publishers.) The designs are fun and easy to color with the ability to work in big blocks of color with markers or to blend away to your heart’s content with coloring pencils.
The designs range from scenes in a garden outside to collages of gardening tools or trees or plants. I really enjoyed coloring some brilliant plumage birds in the midst of an orange tree on a bright sunny day (or so the design spoke to me.) I’m about ready to head out to my garden to do planting for spring crops so this book of designs really spoke to me. There are four colored samples of pages included in the book each one is placed behind the coloring design it depicts. That actually makes it more difficult to view if you choose to but for me, it was an interesting sample but not one that I plan to copy.
The book is really well put together. The designs are all printed on one side of perforated heavyweight paper. The designs merge into the perforations but nothing essential is lost to that area. If you plan on removing pages, you might want to do so before coloring as it is hard to get into the areas near the binding and you will lose that area when you remove the page in any case. The book is glue bound but as you will remove pages at the perforations, that should not be an issue. I was easily able to get the book to lay flat by breaking the spine.