Beautifully Illustrated Flowers and Garden Scenes printed on both sides of page

I found this gem of a book at a local big box store. It is filled with gorgeous flowers, garden scenes and inspiring quotes. I was a little disappointed that it was printed on both sides until I test my coloring medium (more on that later.) The designs have a good amount of detail but not so much that it is intricate or too small to color. I appreciate the high quality of this book and hope to see more coloring books by both this artist and by this publisher (Harper Collins) in the future.

The designs are printed on both sides of the heavyweight, non-perforated page. Most of the designs merge into the binding. A few of the designs spread across two pages. In my copy, the alignment of the two-page spreads is excellent. The binding is a hybrid of glued and sewn. The sewn binding is the type that has many stitches rather than just a few. Because of the binding and the way the design merge in (though nothing of note is lost in the binding), I will not be removing pages from this book. If you wish to do so, you will have to cut them out and you will probably lose some portion of the design in doing so. I was able to get the book to lay fairly flat by breaking the spine.

Only my alcohol-based markers bled through this paper. I was able to use all of my water-based markers, India ink artist pens, and gel pens without any bleed through. Gel pens required some extra drying time but that is common for gel pens on a good grade of paper. My coloring pencils worked excellently. The soft lead pencils went on thick with full coverage and blended beautifully. The hard lead pencils worked well and did not leave indents on the back of the page. I was especially pleased with the way my TomBow brush end markers worked with the paper. I was able to easily blend in my colors without roughing up the surface of the paper or having ink seep through. If you choose to use alcohol-based markers, it will ruin the design on the back of the page. I would suggest that you use a blotter page to keep the ink confined to just the back of the page and not ruin the following pages.

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) Bic Mark-its (fine and ultra-fine) and 2) water-based Tombows dual end markers (brush and fine point), Stabilo 88, and Staedler triplus fineliners

India Ink: Faber-Castell PITT artist pens (brush tip)

Gel Pens: Sakura, Fiskars, Uni-ball Signo in the following sizes – 0.28/0.38/0.5/1.0 and Tekwriter

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