Douglas Florian is the creator of many acclaimed picture books including Windsongs: Poems About Weather, UnBEElievables, Poetrees, and Dinothesaurus. He lives with his family in New York.
Rhyming couplets offer a diverse cast of child artists advice in
Douglas Florian's (Poem Runs: Baseball Poems and Paintings)
tongue-in-cheek picture book. A child pulls a slumbering dragon,
snoutfirst, through his neighborhood in a red wagon, as if it's the
most natural thing in the world. "Drawing dragons isn't hard. Drag
a dragon to your yard," says the accompanying text, which opens the
book. A swirl of green paint indicates grassy rings around homes
surrounded by picket fences, while gray and yellow pastels mark the
sidewalks and roadways. Collage elements include a snail and
peacock. The rhyming couplets continue in the next yard, belonging
to a boy carrying a T-square, colored pencils and other tools
("Dragons may be large in size. You'll need lots of art supplies").
In the third scene, however, a pink dragon in a circle, like an
overlarge napping kitten, rests on a rooftop as a child draws from
a perch on the dragon's back ("Dragons, when they wake, are
grumpy./ and their heads are rather bumpy"). Florian varies the
color schemes and perspectives: a girl sketches within a dragon's
mouth; a redheaded boy draws another's claw as the dragon, in turn,
draws the boy. One girl holds an umbrella to deflect a dragon's
sneeze, while another boy toasts marshmallows in a dragon's fire.
Always, the children draw and sketch. The culminating foldout
spread delivers a lovely surprise that reinforce's art's ability to
capture a moment for posterity. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's
editor, Shelf Awareness
Discover: A gallery of dragons, introduced in rhyming couplets and
drawn by a cast of child artists.--Shelf Awareness "May 29,
2015"
This how-to book takes a very practical approach to drawing
dragons. It begins with an simple instruction: "Drawing dragons
isn't hard. / Drag a dragon to your yard." Indeed, we see several
children using little red wagons to drag home sleeping dragons. The
key, you see, is to use actual dragons as models. Florian takes
readers through the tongue-in-cheek practicalities associated with
doing life drawings of these huge (and often grumpy)
beasts...Florian's illustrations are...kidlike, rendered in pencil,
crayon, paints, and bit of collage, which subtly bring in the
medieval world with inserts of tiny castles and walled cities.
Gently comic in tone and with an almost hunt-and-find visual
approach, this book might be meta, but it's also just
straightforward fun.--Booklist *STARRED REVIEW "March 2015"
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