  | Full Text Reviews: Booklist - 02/15/2017 A young boy recognizes that he can’t draw. “Some people are really good at drawing, But my puppies look like mush. My cars look like lumps.” Yet he can still create art in his own way. “When I color, I can express myself without drawing anything.” Lehrhaupt’s spare text tells of one child’s artistic expression with colors, and Sala’s exuberant illustrations joyfully prove the point. Sala combines watercolors, colored pencils, and crayons of all colors to produce appealing, childlike illustrations. The end result is a delightful array of blobs and squiggly and jagged lines set to angry reds, sad blues, happy yellows, calming purples, and excited oranges, which easily communicate those feelings. When asked to draw a portrait, the boy instead produces “a colorful masterpiece” of all the swatches jumbled together, since he is never just one color, after all. This attractive, approachable book offers a variety of teachable themes, including basic color theory, self-expression and emotional vocabulary, and confidence, and would be a great pick for an art-themed storytime. - Copyright 2017 Booklist. School Library Journal - 03/01/2017 PreS-Gr 2—A young boy provides examples of his drawings to prove that he cannot draw, and chooses instead to express himself through color. "My puppies look like mush./My cars look like lumps," he says. But with color he can reveal his feelings and impressions: yellow for happy, red for angry, black for scary. Sala's illustrations, rendered in watercolor, colored pencil, and crayon, depict a curly-haired child shown at first in black-and-white as he draws his less than satisfactory childlike images. When he talks about using color, though, the white ground comes alive with "thick" or "thin," "squiggly" or "jagged" lines. There are splashes of bright yellow and drips of "sad" blue. A rainbow of colors bursts from the boy's hand to indicate that he can have several feelings at the same time. "I'm a whole jumble of things…a colorful masterpiece," he declares as his Technicolor image fills the page. Encouraging experimentation with color ("What colors are you?") is fine, but this offering may also have the negative effect of quashing children's artistic efforts. Readers will very likely recognize that the protagonist's drawings closely resemble their own artwork, and could become discouraged by his belittling comments. VERDICT Peter Reynolds's Ish conveys the far more positive message that drawings do not have to be perfectly representational to be of value. An additional purchase.—Marianne Saccardi, Children's Literature Consultant, Cambridge, MA - Copyright 2017 Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and/or School Library Journal used with permission. Loading...
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