I Don't Draw, I Color!

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.