'30 Days to Creativity' by Joanna Basford Review

Book Review - 30 Days to Creativity by Johanna Basford

Title – 30 Days of Creativity
Author – Joanna Basford
Publisher – Ebury Press
ISBN – 9781529148299

I have quite a few of Joanna Basford’s beautiful colouring books. I love the detailed illustrations and her wonderful imagination.

When I spotted that a new book was coming, I immediately prebought it on Amazon, and waited impatiently for the release.

“30 Days of Creativity” is a bit different to Joanna’s usual colouring books.

There are still lots of things to colour, but with the added feature of encouraging you to draw and embellish the pages.

At the start of the book, she encourages you to try to do a bit of creating or colouring in the book on every day, for a full 30 days. There is even a little Habit Tracker you can colour to show your progress. You don’t, of course, have to do this, you can just use it like any other colouring book. But the incentive to be creative every day is fun and may be something you are looking for.

Previous owners of Joanna Basford’s books will instantly recognize her famous “inky” style. Lots of flowers, cakes and cottage core style imagery awaits.

There are 80 pages. It is the same width as an A4 book, but in a square format. This is a good size to slip into a bag for colouring on the go.

The cover is sturdy card, and you can open if up to reveal more colouring pages.

Some pages have partial images, and encourage you to finish them off. So you might be adding decorations to fancy cakes, or putting flowers in vases. There are examples to inspire you and get you started. Even a nervous new artist can enjoy these challenges.

Some pages are more like her traditional colouring books. Lots of tiny details to colour in! You could, of course, still add little extra details if you wanted.

With so many little things to colour and draw, this is the ideal book to keep on hand for when you want to snatch a few minutes of creative time. I like to do a bit whilst waiting for dinner to cook, in phone queues and a little pick me up if I am feeling a bit burnt out from doing whatever else I am doing. You don’t need long to finish a little motif, though, of course, you don’t need to finish anything in one sitting!

The paper is pretty thick and will take felt pens happily. There are a couple of empty pages at the back of the book so you can test your pens here before using them in the main part of the book – very handy, and I definitely recommend you take advantage of this feature!

I like colouring with pencils, though I will probably be using my gel pens to add some sparkly and shiny details.

This is a wonderful addition to any Joanna Basford collection, and a great book for anyone who is looking for a little encouragement to get into crafty habits. If you enjoy adding the details to the images, you may want to go on to Joanna’s book “How to Draw Inky Wonderlands” which is all about how to draw illustrations in her style. I highly recommend this book too!

Whilst the title may encourage 30 days of creativity, I am pretty sure that more people will take a lot longer to fully complete this book. I have been doing a little now and then for a couple of months and suspect I will still be enjoying it for years.

Here are links to “30 Days of Creativity” and some other Joanna Basford books that I own and love. The links are for Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. These are affiliate links, which means that if you buy from them, I may receive a small payment for sending custom to Amazon – this is at NO extra cost to yourself! Thank you very much.