Butterflies Coloring Book for Adults
By: Amanda Neel
Rating: 5 of 5
Butterflies is the latest release by Amanda Neel. I own a couple of her previous coloring books, all of which deal with animals (cats, dogs, horses.) It is really nice to see a book with beautifully rendered butterflies. These designs are drawn in a doodle style with the butterflies either by themselves or superimposed upon flowers, plants, or other types of backgrounds. A few of the designs have gray shadowing already pre-printed in to give the artwork an almost three-dimensional look.
I will go into more detail below, but as an overview, here is what I found in the book:
30 Butterfly Designs
printed on one side of thin white typical CreateSpace paper
non-perforated pages
glue binding
All markers bleed through
All gel pens and India ink artist pens leave shadows on back of page
Coloring pencils work well
The designs in the book are printed on one side of thin, white non-perforated paper. It is the typical paper that CreateSpace uses and one that I accept when I buy a book published by this company. It doesn’t bother me when the price is low as with this book but they use it on their pricier books as well.
The binding is glued so you will have to cut pages out if you wish to remove them. The designs stop well short of the binding, so you will not lose any part of the design if you cut the out. I could get the book to easily lay flat for coloring purposes.
The artist has used a framing line around all of her designs, which I really appreciate. I always try to note when they include this feature. It gives me a good stopping point and saves me time ad ink when working on a design.
I test all of my coloring books with my increasing stash of coloring medium. I will list those I used in testing this book at the bottom of this review. Here are my test results:
All markers, alcohol or water-based bled through the paper heavily. Gel pens and India ink artist pens left distinct shadows of color on the back of the page. Coloring pencils worked well but the hard leads left an indent at the back of the page.
I do not plan to remove my pages from the book, so I will use a blotter page of card stock or other heavy weight paper below the design I am working on to keep ink and dents from ruining the page below.
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, Caran D’Ache Pablo Colored Pencils and Faber-Castell Polychromos