The Flower Colouring Book: Large and Small Projects to Enjoy

The Flower Colouring Book: Large and Small Projects to Enjoy (Search Press Colouring Books) is published and was kindly sent to me by Search Press Publishing. The book itself is paperback and A4 in size with a glue-bound spine. The images are printed single-sided and do not enter the spine. The paper is a good thickness and bright white with a little tooth meaning you can use just about any colouring medium you fancy. My water-based pens shadowed and bled a little but this isn't an issue because there is no image on the reverse. I found it very easy to blend and shade with my Faber-Castell Polychromos pencils. This book is part of a series and each book starts with 7 double-sided pages of coloured images that are contained within the book and then changes to single-sided black line images. This book contains lots of realistic images of flowers, some of which are full page spreads and others are a collection of small images usually of the same type of flower on one page. The flowers include daffodils, orchids, lilies, roses, daisies, clematis and so many more. The book contains over 120 designs so it really is packed with floral images. The flowers are not arranged into scenes so it does feel a little disjointed and doesn't tell a story through the pages and at first I was quite put off by this because I personally like cohesive books that take you on a journey. However, this book is fantastic for practising blending and shading and colouring realistically because the images are drawn in a very true to life style so you can really go to town with your coloured pencils and practice using light sources and making the images look real. It would be a great companion to other colouring books that contain images of flora and fauna so that you can practice on these larger images before starting on the smaller, more intricate pictures that are found in many other colouring books.
In terms of mental health, this book doesn't have an awful lot of impact on it, though if you love flowers, it's sure to keep you focused and calm you down. The natural style of the images and the realism of them lends well to feelings of relaxation and I find images of nature the most calming to colour. Because of the variety of image sizes, it's a good book for those of you with fluctuating conditions because if you can't focus much you can just spend a few minutes colouring one of the smaller images and then complete the larger images on days where you're able to concentrate a bit more. The line thickness is consistent throughout and is medium/thin so you don't need perfect vision or fine motor control to be able to stay within the lines. The images vary in intricacy and detail levels with some having lots of small spaces and others being much larger, open designs. This is a really great book for practising your colouring techniques and learning how to make images look realistic.

November 2014

I remember how absorbing and relaxing a coloring book was as a child, and now they are back in fashion with a twist - they are for adults! Search Press has brought out a series of five titles, and there is more to them than meets the eye...

A coloring book is as good as the paper it is printed on, regardless of the designs and this one has thick, white paper that seems to beg to be colored on. The pictures are printed one side of the page only so felt pens and paints will not bleed through and as such you can color them in with almost anything. At the front of the book the first few pages are printed on shiny, thinner paper and are already in color. This is to give you an idea of what colors to choose for a selection of designs and if the act of coloring is therapeutic above all else, eliminating agonizing over color choice makes sense. The pictures are not as detailed as those in some adult coloring books and vary in size from full page to a quarter of a page or less, meaning you select one that fits the amount of time you have. A number of different styles of portraying flowers have been used including Art Nouveau, Victorian, botanic, folk and modern. You can cut them out and use them in papercrafts directly, and if you visit the website you can find the designs as PDFs ready to print out and color in again, or use as ideas for your own projects (provided they are not for sale). I imagined the floral motifs as embroidery patterns, showing that this is a volume with more to it than a mere coloring book.

Polly Pinder studied graphics at Leeds Art College. Her first job was with a Yorkshire newspaper, and she subsequently worked as a lecturer in graphic design at Wakefield District College. She has written and illustrated a number of books on a variety of other subjects including cake decoration and growing herbs, papermaking and paper crafts. Her illustrations in Muck and Magic were commended when that book won the 1993 Sir Peter Kent Conservation Book Prize. She has also designed bed linen and wallpapers, and the graphics for a wallpaper book based on newly-discovered eighteenth-century wallpapers.