Lost Ocean by Johanna Basford Coloring Book Review

Hey guys, I'm Trina, and this is my review
of the coloring book Lost Ocean by Johanna Basford. I have previously done a review over
Secret Garden. From that first review I did, I had a lot of comments saying "what's the
deal with adult coloring books? Why do adults need something different?" Well, we don't.
It's just a buzzword for marketing. Any age person that wants more detailed pictures to
color can be using these books and I hear a lot of people say that they use them for
stress relief, or find them to be very therapeutic.

I personally don't find them to be any kind
of stress relief for myself. I use them because I have always been an artistic person. I used
to draw, and over the years I have just fallen out of practice. So these are just a really
nice thing to have when I just want an artistic outlet but I'm not having to build something
from the ground up.

I purchased both of these coloring books from Amazon and they were around
$10 or $11 each. I also believe that Book Depository carries these and they do mostly
free shipping worldwide as long as they ship to your country. And I've also seen these
coloring books by Johanna Basford in many, many bookstores. Before I ever got a coloring
book I had a lot of questions about what art supplies I should use to color these with,
and will markers bleed through the paper? So that's why I made my initial review for
Secret Garden.

The reason I am doing a whole different video for Lost Ocean is because
once I got it, I realized that there are quite a few differences in the paper quality of
these two books because they are published by different companies. Secret Garden was
published by Laurence King and Lost Ocean was published by Penguin, and what that means
for someone that's going to be coloring these books is that the paper texture and quality
is much different. So markers that didn't bleed through in Secret Garden kind of bleed
through in Lost Ocean, so I want to talk about the specific brands that I have and how I've
seen them perform for me. I will go over the colored pencils, the gel pens, and the markers
that I've been using in Secret Garden, but with Lost Ocean I have started using two different
kinds of watercolors too, so I want to talk about how they work on this paper.

So I'm
going to start out by inserting an image here of the differences in the paper color. You
can see that the Secret Garden pages have more of a yellowish tint and they're a bit
more slick and that's because they've been coated in a pigment, which makes them less
absorbent and that is the reason why markers don't bleed through those pages very easily.
However, Lost Ocean is more of a true white color. It is uncoated, which means that the
paper is not as slick, it has a coarser texture that really comes out when you're using colored
pencils on it. This paper is much more absorbent of ink, which means that gel pens or markers
are going to dry quicker and the colors are going to appear more richly, but there is
more risk of the ink bleeding through onto the other side, which is important to keep
in mind because the pages of both of these books are double sided.

In my Secret Garden
video I talked about the specific brands of stuff that I use, so for colored pencils I
have a mixture that is mostly Crayola, Prismacolor, and Faber Castell. I would highly recommend
to start out with Crayola, which are going to be very inexpensive and very easy to find
almost anywhere, and then supplement if you come upon other colors that you want. I know
that (in the U.S.) Hobby Lobby and Michael's sell the Prismacolor and Faber Castell pencils
individually so you can go and pick out exactly what color you want. Here you can see a page
from Lost Ocean that I've colored with colored pencils.

And you can kind of see what I meant
about the texture of the paper showing through. I really did find that colored pencils don't
blend as easily on this paper. You can get a blending pencil or you may need to bear
down a little bit harder to get rid of some of that texture appearance showing through.
Another art medium that works really well in both of these coloring book are gel pens,
and mine are the brand Fiskars. I bought them on Amazon.

I'll put a link down below to the
exact ones that I have. I'll show you some close ups of pages that I've colored with
gel pens and you can see how that looks. In Lost Ocean, the drying time is much faster
because that paper is more absorbent. They are very bold colors, they look really great
on the paper.

Another art medium that I use in these books that I've already talked about
before in my Secret Garden review are markers, and I have the brand Staedtler. I have the
fibre tip pens, not the fine tips. I would assume that the fine tips have the same ink.
I got my set from Staples, they are available on Amazon, and I have seen them in Target
as well. So with these, I had no bleed through whatsoever in the Secret Garden, but in Lost
Ocean you can kind of see bleed through.

If you go over the same spot a lot, the ink will
show up on the back side of the page. For me, what I'm having the most trouble with
is just a shadow of the color from the other side of the page. I'll put an image in here
of what I'm talking about so that you can see it. On the back side of a page that's
been colored with markers I can see exactly the shape where I colored on the other side.
It just depends on how much something like that will bug you.

This is the only brand
that I've used, so I can't speak for other brands. I would love to know from you guys,
if you have used markers in the Lost Ocean coloring book that's published by Penguin
and you don't have any bleed through, tell me what brand you use down in the comments.
The final art medium I want to talk about and mention its performance in Lost Ocean
is watercolors. I use two different types of watercolors in it. I have the traditional
paint bricks, which is the brand Master's Touch.

I picked these up from Hobby Lobby
and this is a $10 set. And I also use watercolor pencils. These are the Prismacolor brand and
you just color them on like a normal colored pencil and then you paint over it with just
plain water. These are so great for getting into fine details, and these are really great
for like flooding the background of an image.

You might be saying, if markers bleed through
wouldn't straight water bleed through too? Now, the paper is very absorbent, so it's
going to suck in the water and it does kind of warp the pages and makes them a little
bit wavy, but the color does not bleed through. As long as you let the pages dry completely
and then lay the book flat, it's not going to like completely mess up the pages of the
book. Plus, this is a book meant for you to be creative with and for you basically to
destroy and make it your own so I wouldn't worry about that. This is honestly my favorite
thing to color with in Lost Ocean because it is an underwater theme and these really
do give that appearance like the images actually are underwater.

I did have several questions
on my last coloring book video about would watercolors work in them so I definitely wanted
to mention these. So that is really all that I have to cover for Lost Ocean. I will end
this video by just showing you some of the uncolored pages in this book so that you can
see what some of the images are and see if it's one that you might want to pick up for
yourself if you like the art style and images in this book. So those are the differences
of these two books and the different art mediums that I use in them.

I hope that you have found
this video helpful. If you have any other comments or questions definitely leave those
down below and I will answer you there. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you
in the comments. Bye! (Outro music).