New Books: Get Dressed

Illustrator Seymour Chwast is renowned for his long career of, well, illustrious commercial design work. Chwast's style, once you've seen it, is instantly recognizable, both for its cultured-cartoon look and for its ever-present twinkle of humor (often dark humor, since he never shrank from topical subject matter).

So it's not surprising that a picture book by Chwast would be smart and pretty much irresistible—but just to be absolutely sure, he gave Get Dressed! flaps, too! It's a simple book for the very youngest readers—minimal text, lots of manipulation and variety of illustrations—addressing the command in the title in various situations and various times of day. In each situation, Chwast lays out all the options, presenting the reader with a sort of virtual walk-in closet, each item labeled Richard Scarry–style.

Young kids will adore Get Dressed!, and like all of Chwast's work, it'll tend to bring a smile of admiration to parents' faces as well.

[Cover image courtesy of Abrams Appleseed]

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Security Blanket: Hands

We've recently reached yet another fascinating stage (aren't they all, really?) of parenting: Our three-year-old, Griffin, is starting to pick his way through many of the books his older brother, Dash, read back when he was three. It's interesting to see which he loves more than Dash did, and which of the old favorites he has little time for; there are ample examples of both. But the best endorsement our family can now give a children's book is that both kids have independently taken it to their hearts.

Hands: Growing Up to Be an Artist, by Lois Ehlert, is a 2004 book we'd almost forgotten about—it's been that long since Dash read it much. But Griff picked it off the shelf recently, and now it's again one of the new regulars at bedtime.

It's written from the perspective of a girl whose mother and father both work around the house in various handy, crafty ways—painting, sewing, building, planting. Ehlert illustrates this abstractly with busy close-up photo-collages of the materials and items being worked on, and cutouts of the different types of work gloves they use. The narrator then explain how she's been allowed to pitch in and learn how to do all these tasks, with a work space and tools of her own. The book ends with a series of work gloves that tie mother, father, and daughter together: one big crafty family.

This message of family creativity is, of course, nearly irresistible to parents of a certain bent, and this could have been one of those books that the adults adore but the kids are bored by. But Dash seized upon it as a toddler and didn't let go for years; it was a recurring favorite for a long, long time. Now Griff has done the same, and despite being a very different personality, seems to respond just the same way Dash did to Ehlert's simple text and multifaceted collages. 

The book also seems to magically survive toddler reads in a way most books with cutouts don't—somehow, mysteriously, those work-glove pages don't have torn fingers. Since Hands is not made of heavy-duty cardboard or anything like that, I can only attribute this to a weird respect the boys have for the book...realizing as I type it how very bizarre that statement is!

[Cover image courtesy of Harcourt Children's Books]

New Books: Let's Make Some Great Art

Every parent knows and loves art workbooks; they're sometimes the only nonscreen ways to keep the kids occupied long enough for us to complete a monumental task (like, you know, cooking dinner). And there are a lot of perfectly good ones to choose from, but as with kids' nonfiction, beyond certain obvious distinctions—Pixar or Dreamworks theme, or no?—there aren't too many reasons to pick one over another.

Until now, that is: I'd choose Marion Deuchars's Let's Make Some Great Art over any of the others. The British illustrator originally created these hand-drawn, real-art-inspired projects for her own kids, and it shows; this is a kid-directed interactive art primer with a sweet, personal touch. Its 224 pages include quick focuses on established art, from cave paintings to Damien Hirst—each offering children a chance to take their own crack at the style, reproducing Mona Lisa's smile, Hirst's shark, Jackson Pollock's action drips, and many more. Others feature concise lessons in technique—shading, form, perspective—often in the form of games or projects that feel like play rather than learning. Another bunch deal with content, presenting, for example, a small figure of a frightened person, and instructing the child/artist to create in this page's large blank space the reason for the fear.

It goes on and on like that, each page as simple and brilliant as the last. Deuchars has created the holy grail of activity books as far as culturally minded parents are concerned: deeply engrossing to kids, yet delivering far more than a mere distraction. The only trouble with Let's Make Some Great Art, really, is you may have to resist an urge to do some of the projects and exercises yourself—or, if you can't, get an additional copy so you can … as my wife is quite seriously considering doing.

[Photos: Whitney Webster]