Art Books

The Fish and the Cat

May 16, 2018 By Annette1 Leave a Comment

Have you ever discovered the sheer joy that a wordless book brings? To be able to look at pictures and formulate your own story? I tell you, it is SO MUCH FUN. To sit with a wordless book like “The Fish and the Cat” and tell any old story you choose…it’s a great thing. And then to flip it around and let the child tell the story to you? AH! THIS I LOVE! I love helping children learn to tell their own stories, and having a prop book just helps them along the way you know?

About the book:

The Fish and the Cat is a playful story of pursuit between a cat and pet fish that starts in the house, moves through the neighborhood, and ends in the sky with a chase around the stars and the moon. This wordless picture book, full of action and humor, encourages children to create their own stories and adventures.

Marianne Dubuc brings to life the cat and the fish, using shades of black with splashes of orange-red for the fish. We are privileged to follow the fish and the cat on their journey through the world and even to the moon!

What kind of adventures do you think one fish and one cat could get into?

Geared for ages 4 and up, this hardcover book, with mostly black/white illustrations, is filled with easy to follow illustrations, making it easy to concoct an adventure for fish and cat to get into.

My Thoughts:

I LOVE, dearly love books like this. To be able to sit down with a child with a book in hand that has no words, just pictures to spark conversation and story. It harkens back to the days when I would ask children I was babysitting to give me three words, any three words I would make a story from them. We had SO much fun together it was simply delightful.

The simplicity of the drawings leads to further flights of fancy as I’m not distracted by too much in the illustrations, or I can simply add something not yet seen, only to be imagined. I simply adore the creative process wordless books like these lend themselves too.

One time for my homeschool co-op I taught a story-telling class. I brought in all my story telling props… like story cubes, picture card deck, ghost story box, grammar fish and more. We had a lot of fun using these aids to tell stories and to learn all the parts of a story. A book like The Fish and the Cat would be a welcome addition to my resources. Wouldn’t it be fun to give this book to a bunch of 9-12 year olds and see the story they would each come up with? And then share how they came up with it? Simply marvellous.

Or you could even make it simpler and have a story time with 6-8 year olds… that could be a blast don’t you think? Helping creative minds learn how to tell a good story?

I hope that you are as delighted with this book that I am. Wordless books can be a bit disconcerting at first, but once you discover the joy of telling your own story, or in listening to a child tell their own story, you will find yourself hooked. 🙂

The Fish and The Cat
Marianne Dubuc
Princeton Architectural Press
Hardcover, Wordless Book, Ages 4+
at least 60 pages (I kept losing count)
Wordless, storytelling, creative

My Vacation Drawing Book

May 9, 2018 By Annette1 Leave a Comment

My Vacation Drawing Book is a great book to take along with you on your vacation. Geared for 5-8 year olds, this is a creative book that introduces art elements around the theme of going on vacation.

Imagine being able to design your own menu, or draw some of the scenery before you as you go down the road. What about learning to draw some of the interesting animals you will see? Do you know how to draw a bird, or how to turn a box into something new and fun? Staying in a tent? A trailer or a Resort? Wouldn’t it be fun to draw it and see what you can add? How about making a sign post of all the interesting places you will go? Ideas like these and more fill the 72 pages of this hardcover book.

Coming with an elastic band as a placeholder, this book is built to stand the rigors of an early elementary student hauling it with them on their travels.

I loved the space given on each page as well as the variety of activities provided. Lessons are taught using simple lines that children can easily copy, and yet I found the children are pushed a bit to become better at what they are doing (like practicing where to put the horizons, and working with vanishing points).

All in all I found this book to be a well designed one that many children would delight in working through, giving them a keep sake to remember their vacation with. The only page I wish could have been made different was one where they were asked to add captions to images. The space for captions was too small for children of this age bracket to write in. Asking Mom or Dad for help would solved this problem. This is a nice book that I would have no problem giving any child.

My Vacation Drawing Book: How to draw, sketch or scribble your adventures.
Gillian Johnson
Lonely Planet Kids
72 pages, 5-8 years,
Drawing, art, sketch, vacation, activity book
Hardcover with elastic band
Reviewed for: Raincoast books.
Where to find: Amazon link.

642 Awesome Things to Draw

May 2, 2018 By Annette1 Leave a Comment

Do you have the thought that you would like to draw something and when you sit down to draw all your ideas float out the window? Or do you ever have a child come and say “I want to draw something Mom/Dad but I don’t know what to draw!!!!” 642 Awesome Things to Draw, Young Artist’s Edition is the answer to all those wonderings. It has been my pleasure to review this book.

You might be asking… what can I draw?

a jungle, a beach and a desert coexisting together
a tarantula taking over Japan
sheep organizing a strike
a red, white and blue rollercoaster
A car covered in bumper stickers
a circus run by mice
a jumbo paper clip

So many ideas… it almost makes a body want to try them all.

Can you imagine the stories you could tell as you each drew your own version of the picture prompt? Consider the laughter and conversations that could erupt around you.

For we all know what might come out of “a huge pile of trash”… books filled with tails, forgotten drinks bubbling up, making toy fish float as alligators come bumbling out with leftover turkeys riding their backs, as stuff dragons breathe fire while dancing with hula hoops… what stories could emerge as your budding artists fill the pages, waiting for the next adventure to come their way.

Each space comes in a variety of formats, whole pages, 1/2 and quarters, sometimes on a diagonal. Rectangles and squares, with a few triangles thrown into the mix. No circles to be found in this book.

642 different things to draw on car rides, or while on vacation driving to the beach or the campground, be inspired as you sit inside on a rainy afternoon when no-one can come over to play. Imagine…what could you do? What could your children come up with? Ah the fun to be had!

642 Awesome Things to Draw: Young Artist’s Edition
by Root Division
Trade Paperback, 304 pages
Ages 8-12
Art, Drawing, Creativity, Imagination, Activity Books

Reviewed for Raincoast Books.
Where to find: Amazon Link.

Part of a series of 642 Things to draw. I have reviewed the 642 places to draw, 642 Big Things to draw,and 642 Things about Me. This is a great series of books to spur on your children to creativity (as well as yourself). Relax with your children, be inspired to draw!

What do I think?

642 Things to do does what it sets out to do. Provide 642 different things for children 8-12 (or those who wish they could be again) to draw, things to inspire the imagination, the intellectual curiousity to wonder, and the willingness to try.

Paint by Sticker with free printable

April 11, 2018 By Annette1 Leave a Comment

Saturday night I came home later than I had planned from a homeschool conference, completed the chores I needed to and than sat down tired. My mind was racing and I felt unsettled. Watching TV with the boys as they played their computer game was relaxing me so I thought I would pull out my Paint by Sticker book and do a page. I don’t think I’ve shared this book with you before so let me walk you through it. Do stay tuned to my ArtWork Notebooking Page at the close of this post.

The page I did took me about 30-45 to complete and I have to admit I was TIRED, I wasn’t focused on perfection, I was focused on getting my mind to settle so that I’d be able to get to bed and sleep. 🙂 So the page I did isn’t perfect, but it completed that task I had…the fiddling with stickers, looking for numbers, settled my brain down wonderfully. I think it’s one of the reasons I like colouring, it gives my brain something fiddly to work with that helps it to shut off all the extraneous, and at the end of it I can see I’ve accomplished something. This Paint by Stickers book does the same thing, but leaves me not having to worry about getting colours right.

Paint by Sticker gives me 12 different pieces of artwork to complete. What the artwork is, is listed in the table of contents. This book contains such as the Creation of Adam, Girl with a Pearl Earring, Dance as well as others. The one I am showing you today is called “House of Parliament, Sunlight Effect” by Claude Monet.

I admittedly didn’t take a picture of the uncompleted work, so I’m showing you a different page. 🙂 You’ll bear with me right? The spaces have an alpha-numeric combination.

The instructions in the beginning of the book tell you to be careful about putting the stickers on, and advise using a tweezer. I learned that if you don’t stick the pieces on firmly you can do some replacing, but once it is stuck, it’s stuck. AND if you apply too much pressure it’s too bad, so sad. Ergo, if you want it to come out just so… take your time, have good lighting, be finicky about your placement.

It’s easy to know which page of stickers you need to use. Each sticker page has a picture of the completed art work in the top right corner.

AND each sticker page is perforated so they rip out easily making it super easy to complete each page. And they do… sometimes perforated pages don’t rip out smoothly or easily, these do. So much better than flipping back and forth in a book trying to reach small stickers.

You may have noticed on the page above the stickers are divided into colour coded sections. This makes it easier to find the sticker that you need to use. I found the colour coded divisions added a bright spot, so helpful and so much nicer than a plain white background eh! 🙂

My thought when I started out was that I would start on one side and work my way across but as I worked I changed my mind. I then started picking out the biggest pieces and fitting them in, I saved the smallest pieces for the end. You can make your creation in whatever way you want to!

MOST of the stickers I managed to get well. I was able to reposition three or four of them, one I bungled badly. But my son said “It looks good mom!”

You can probably see the darker purple one in the middle that I messed up with. I’m thinking if I wanted to I could take a purple pencil crayon and fill in those white lines, but from a distance the lad tells me it looks great and I should just leave things be. 🙂

I did learn that the stickers are definitely not oriented to the page. I frequently had to turn the sticker around to find the right orientation. Make sure that you don’t just slap the stickers down. Take your time and turn them around so you get the sticker on the correct way.

All in all this was an excellent way to relax without having to fuss about with crayons, paper or markers. No big colour decisions to make, just a look, sort, place and be finished with a decent looking piece of art. I urge you, if you like colouring books, to give the paint by sticker books a look. I know I’ll be looking for more of them (hopefully on sale like this one was). 🙂

Just so you know, some of the art work is more involved and requires two pages of stickers to complete. All carefully labelled so you know what goes where. Go on… create a masterpiece… One sticker at a time. 🙂

I was thinking about how this book would be so handy to do with a homeschooling unit. Can’t you just see working with your students/children as you talk about this work that the artist did, and then take small breaks to see other works by the same artist. You could easily pull in history, geography, science and more. Reading to your children fascinating tidbits as they keep their hands and eyes busy recreating works of art!

Click on the image below to download my ArtWork Notebooking Page.

Art Book: Fallout, a colouring book

March 21, 2018 By Annette1 Leave a Comment

Welcome Kristen to the blog today. She’s introducing us to a adult colouring book for a game called Fallout. Kristen is from the blog Mom’s Quest to Teach. You really should go visit her. 🙂

Fallout Coloring Book
It’s All Over But the Coloring

The Fallout Adult Coloring Book, a ThinkGeek and Bethesda Store exclusive, contains over 100 line drawings from the game Fallout 4. For fans for of the Fallout series, this might be a must have for their vaults.

The majority of the book contains images of the Vault Boy to color of the various perks one can choose from the actual Fallout 4 game. Other pages depict the companions of the game: Dogmeat, Piper, Strong, Cait, Hancock, X6-88, and Gage as well as some of the enemies of the game like Deathclaws and Ghouls. Noticeably missing from the coloring book are many of the more popular companions including Nick Valentine, MacCready, Deacon, the two Robots (Codsworth and Curie), Preston, and possibly Danse (one could argue he is one of the two Brotherhood of Steel soldiers). Upon further thought, Preston is probably helping a settlement.

Personally, I like the chance to color some of the characters from the video game and Vault boy but I would have also liked to see more images from the game itself. Perhaps towns or locates of the Commonwealth like Diamond City or the Atom Cats Garage? Or even Vault 111.

(suggested Fallout hashtags: #Fallout #Fallout4 #Fallout3 #Bethesda #ThinkGeek #VaultBoy #Vault111 #Vault101)

“A Mom’s Quest to Teach is a regular column covering elements of teaching and learning (with an eye towards homeschooling), parenting, crafting, and all of the discoveries, joys, and daily roller coaster rides that occur while being a mom.”