Beautiful flower inspired designs by Johanna Basford

World of Flowers

By: Johanna Basford

Rating: 5 of 5

“World of Flowers” is yet another beautiful coloring book by Johanna Basford. With flowers as a theme, I found that there appears to be much less use of green (or as I like to call it, 50 shades of green because it could get painful coloring that much green and using all of my green pencils up on one coloring book.) There is a page or two with lots of fuchsias which are one of my favorite flowers to grow.

Even though this book has less design pages, I like it better than “Magical Jungle”. That’s a personal choice because I like flowers more so than cartoon jungle animals.

As usually, there are some designs with a large amount of detail and others with very little on the page. The ones that are mostly empty are great for individuals who like to add their own unique touch and designs in their coloring.

Again, there are areas which have small and intricate areas to color. That is par for the course with Ms. Basford. I would be surprised if it weren’t so.

As with her most recent coloring books, there appears to have been a concentrated effort to reduce the elements which span across the binding if the page is one of the few two-page spread designs. In my book, the pages line up well.

The paper is the same color as in “Magical Jungle” which is an ivory but it is different from my older coloring book by Ms. Basford (which is more of a cream color.) Once again, as with “Magical Jungle”, seems to me that the paper has a smooth side and a slightly rough side and that it alternates in my book. The paper is heavyweight in nature.

The cover is attached and has light pink foil highlights. The inside of the front and back covers have French folds (partial fold-outs.) There are color palette test pages at the back for testing your medium to see what seeps through or not.

This is what I found in this coloring book.

80 flower inspired designs pages (including title and color palette pages.) There is a two-page foldout at the back of the book which has different designs on the front and back.

Designs are printed on both sides of the page. There are only a few pages which are two-page spreads of a single design

Only a few pages have design elements which run into the binding (and most of those are wallpaper in nature.

Glue Binding

Alcohol-based markers bleed through the page quickly.

Water-based markers (except for Tombow’s) leave shadows and partial spotting through on the back of the page. The brush end of Tombows did not bleed through.

Gel pens and India ink did not bleed through the page.

Colored pencils worked well; however, they worked better on the slightly rougher side of the page. On the smoother side, my oil-based pencils did not grip the page as well but were still acceptable. I tested both oil and wax-based pencils. I was able to layer the same color for deeper pigment, layer multiple colors and to blend with a pencil style blending stick (again, better on the rougher side than on the smooth side.) Pencils did not leave indentations on the back of the page.

Here are some sample pages from the coloring book:

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