Doodle Artist Butterflies – A Review

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Doodle Artist – Butterflies: Colouring for grown ups: Volume 1 is a beautiful book illustrated and kindly sent to me by Annette Rand. This book is filled with 30 full-page spreads of butterfly images and they are gorgeous! This paperback book is A4 size, with a portrait cover but all of the images inside are landscape to maximise the space available and each picture is of the back of the butterfly as you’ll see in the images below. The book is glue-bound so it’s a little difficult to get it to lie flat but the images are printed single-sided with a large border around them so none of the image is lost into the spine. What I really noticed about this book, apart from the stunning images, is the paper quality. Many self-published books are printed on thin paper that you can see half the proceeding images through. Not-so in Annette’s book, the paper is bright white and thick enough that my water-based fineliners didn’t bleed at all or chew up the paper in any way so it was a joy to colour and would be perfect for pens or pencils and you could even use your sharpies or alcohol pens with a protective sheet behind so that the next image doesn’t get spoiled.

In terms of mental health, this book is lovely. It’s really calming and has various different levels of intricacy to suit your good and bad days. The line thickness is the same throughout and I would describe it as thin but not very thin. I didn’t go over the lines with my fineliners and it’s roughly a fineliner thickness line. The lines are crisp and accurate with no fuzziness, blurring or not quite joining up so this is a really professional looking book. Some of the butterflies have larger open space to colour in blocks and others have intricate patterns covering them that create lots of small spaces for you to take your time over colouring in. I really enjoyed colouring this book ready for review and had to stop myself from colouring more but this will certainly be a book I go back to time and time again in between other reviews. The butterflies are beautifully drawn – some a swirly, some are patterned, some are fiery and one is even made up like a mosaic. This really is the colouring book bible for all those who love butterflies and my eyes lit up when I was sent it because I’m always drawn to butterfly pictures when choosing an image to colour for my reviews.  These butterflies aren’t drawn like real-life species, there isn’t a red admiral, a painted lady or a speckled wood but you could always use them for inspiration for your colour schemes if you’re stuck for ideas.

I found this book really calming and relaxing. As with all nature themed books, I find them the most relaxing and the best at reducing my anxiety levels and this book was no exception. The pictures are beautiful, there are no filler images and each has definitely earnt its right to be there and you could even cut them out once you’re done and frame them – they’d look gorgeous in a butterfly themed room! The variation in levels of detail and intricacy means that as long as you have fairly good vision, you’ll be able to enjoy this book on your good and bad days and those of you with moderate to good fine motor control will definitely get a huge amount out of this book. The image below is coloured using Stabilo point 88 fineliners and a few fineliners from The Works (UK store). If you’d like to get a copy of Annette’s beautiful book head over to Amazon Doodle Artist – Butterflies: Colouring for grown ups: Volume 1

If you would like to read my reviews of Annette’s other titles then click below:
Doodle Artist Fanciful Rats
Doodle Artist Peaceful Patterns
Doodle Artist Pets
Doodle Artist Rabbits and Hares
Doodle Artist Simply Snowflakes