74 Beautiful Birds

I have enjoyed all of Millie Marotta’s previous coloring books (Animal Kingdom and Tropical World). Her coloring books are of the natural world around us. In Wild Savannah, Ms. Marotta circles the globe with animals from various grassland areas. This includes the traditional African wildlife but also animals of Northern Australian, South America, and even Asia. By taking this point of view, the coloring book is filled with diverse and interesting animals and, for me at least, it makes me stop and think about the areas that the animals inhabit.

There are so many animals in the coloring book, including zebras, elephants, rhinoceros, lions, flamingos, various insects, hippopotamus, and much, much more. There are many designs which either focus on or include birds. Of the 74 designs in the book, five of them are semi-duplicates of the opposite page. As with her other coloring books, Ms. Marotta has included a few of these duplicates which do not contain the high level of detail of their twin. This allows the doodle artist or the blending artist a canvas to make those designs their own.

This particular book is the UK version. The US version will be released in a few months. I will do a comparison of the two coloring books at that point and will include my comments about any differences that I find in the comments section below. I would edit the text of this review but currently there seems to be an issue with editing reviews with photos.

The book is in the larger square format that is typical for many British coloring books. The book cover is very pretty. It has touches of color and gold foil on the front of the cover. You could certainly color the remainder of the design if you so choose. The inside of both the front and back of the cover have a fold out flap and artwork similar to that of the front of the cover is printed for coloring fun.

The designs are printed on both sides of white heavyweight, non-perforated pages. There are also 14 designs which spread across two pages. The pages in my book were well aligned. There are 60 single page designs. Some of the single page designs and all of the two page designs merge into the binding of the book. As the binding is sewn rather than glued, you can easily remove several pages at a time by snipping a few threads. I was able to break the spine and get the book to lay flat for ease of coloring.

I generally test many types of coloring medium (a list is included below) and this is what I discovered in testing this book:

All alcohol-based markers bleed through the paper easily. All water-based markers either bled through (especially Stabilo) or leave distinct shadows of color on the backside of the page. India ink artist pens also leave a color shadow. My various gel pens left a slight darkening on the backside of the page noticeable but I could not tell the color of each just that they were there. My coloring pencils did the best of the various medium. They went on well and blended well; however the soft lead pencils were not quite as good a coverage as I have had with other books. My hard lead pencils went on true to type and did not leave an indent at the back of the page.

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