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The designs are beautiful and evocative of the holiday season. With everything from Christmas trees to polar bears, ornaments to prancing deer, the designs are instantly recognizable as Ms. Basford's charming style. There are 37 designs which celebrate the Christmas season. Christmas is my favorite holiday and having such a beautiful book of designs to color will help brighten up any dreary, cold days. Not to mention they will be a wonderful way to sit and relax when the holiday season starts becoming more and more hectic.
The designs are open and easy to color. This is something that Ms. Basford began in her most recent book (“Magical Jungle”) and I'm pleased to see it once again. It makes it so much easier to use all forms of coloring medium and with the printing on one side, this time it really should be a choice of any coloring book medium.
While several designs are set up too appear as two page spreads, only one design actually has elements which spread across two pages (a small garland and a baseboard.) Those elements cross the perforations and spread over the binding. Not a problem as it is so small and each of the pages can easily stand along as a single design. A suggestion for future books might be a fold-out page for the design or two of this nature. That would keep the whole design together and make it that much easier to color.
The cover of the book has fold-outs front and back with coloring opportunities on it. I'll be interested to see if the UK version still retains the dust cover as it did with “Magical Jungle”. The attached cover has black line drawings as well as very pretty red, green, and gold foil accents on the front. The cover can be colored, however, it is much smoother in texture than the paper inside the coloring book. The title and presentation pages can be colored as well.
I have ordered the UK version of this coloring book. Once it arrives, I will do a comparison of the US versus UK versions. You can look for the comparison in the comments section below.
This book is definitely going on my list of family and friend gifts. I can think of several individuals I would love to give it to along with a small set of markers – which we get to use finally with this book.
This is what I experienced while coloring in this book and testing the paper with my coloring medium. I will list, in the comments section below, the coloring medium I used to test this book and which I generally use for my coloring.
37 – Wonderfully Festive Christmas/Winter Designs by Johanna Basford (this counts the potential two page spreads as separate designs)
Printed on one side of the page (did I mention Hooray!!)
Paper is heavyweight, ivory, slightly rough and perforated
Glue Binding
Alcohol-based markers bleed through the page
Water-based markers and gel pens leave the slightest of shadows on the back of the page.
Gel pens did not bleed through the page but did require a little more drying time.
Colored pencils worked well. I tested both oil and wax-based pencils with good results. I was able to layer the same color for deeper pigment, layer multiple colors and to blend easily with a pencil style blending stick.
