Beautiful Hand-drawn Designs of English Wildlife but with printing and alignment issues printed on both sides of the page

This is a lovely coloring book depicting the wildlife of the British countryside as well as the surrounding flowers and plants. It includes foxes, owls, stags, birds, cows, sheep, rabbits, squirrels and more. The designs are drawn with firm, dark outlines and are made extra fun to color with enlivening doodles throughout the animals. There are a number of geometric, sort of wall paper designs and a few fun challenges (mazes, areas to color yourself, etc.) which makes the book a little bit of an activity book as well as a coloring book.

The designs in this book are printed on both sides of white medium weight, non-perforated paper. The binding is glued rather than sewn (which is unusual for a coloring book from the UK.) Many of the designs merge into the binding and some portion of them will be lost if you cut the pages from the book. I could not break the spine enough to get the book to lay flat. This could be a problem with designs that merge into the binding.

Thirteen of the designs spread across two pages. In my book, the pages were not aligned well. It seems to be a printing issue rather than an alignment issue. I found that the elements at the center of the each side of the binding doubled slightly. That left me with a design that could not be aligned properly. This may be particular to my book or it may be a general issue. I am thinking a more general issue as the images were sized a particular way rather than printed improperly on the page.

Because of this alignment issue, the problems with trying to get the book to lay flat, and because most coloring medium bled through the paper, I detracted a star from my rating. The designs are absolutely five star but the execution of the printing and the paper had problems. I still like my coloring book and will certainly color the single page designs.

I test all of my coloring books with a wide variety of coloring mediums. I will list those at the bottom of this review. This is what my test results were:

All alcohol-based markers bled through this paper easily. The water-based markers either bled through or left a distinct color shadow at the back of the page. My India ink artist pens also left a shadow at the back of the page. My gel pens left a shadow of indistinct color on the back of the page. All of my coloring pencils performed fantastic. The book is published by Derwent and is supposed to be especially good with Derwent Coloursoft pencils. I found that Prismacolor Premier Soft Core and Faber-Castell Polychromos worked just as well on this paper. My hard lead Prismacolor Verithins laid down nicely and did not leave a dent on 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