My Review
When I first heard about this book, I fell in love with the cover and the fact that it was focused on being tropical. While I haven’t seen Millie Marotta’s first coloring book – Animal Kingdom, I thought this one would do a wonderful job showing off some beautiful tropical artwork.
Tropical World by Millie Marotta does not disappoint. The illustrations are indeed beautiful, and there are plenty of them to choose from. There are lots of animals (frogs, birds, big cats, etc), trees, and lots of flowers to choose from. There are even some pages in the book with directions to help add your own artwork to the book – such as creating some flowers for a bird nest in order to make it more homey. While I’m not much for drawing, I can see how these pages would definitely appeal to those who are good at it and enjoy it.
Some of the designs are pretty simple, flower-y designs, and some of them are much more intricate and time-consuming. In fact, a lot of the designs in this beautiful book are very detailed, and you would need very sharp pencils to get to a lot of these areas. I have only tried out colored pencils in this book so far, and since the illustrations are printed on both sides, I’m not sure how well markers or gel pens would work out. Either way, colored pencils definitely do a nice job when coloring these pictures.
The paper in this coloring book is pretty thick, so you can add a lot of layers of color (at least with pencils) without worrying about ruining other pictures, and the pages are a nice bright white, so you can make these images pop with all kinds of color combinations.
The only issue I have with this book is how a lot of the illustrations span two pages, and it can be difficult to add color close to the spine. Even on the single page illustrations, I had a bit of a difficult time fully coloring the images because of this, but it isn’t enough to ruin the awesome coloring experience that this book brings.
If you’re new to adult coloring books, or you’re looking for a new one to pick up and try out, I recommend this one! It has a lot of variety – animals, flowers, plants, tropical designs, etc., and the illustrations are all so beautiful!
Note: I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.