Ed Emberley's Fingerprint Drawing Book Book

With little more than some ink, paper, and your own fingers, you can become an artist! Caldecott recipient Ed Emberley, author of Go Away, Big Green Monster!, as well as many creative art books (Ed Emberley's Great Thumbprint Drawing Book, Ed Emberley's Drawing Book: Make a World, etc.), shows readers how to turn fingerprints into lions, basketball players, reindeer, "bean buddies," submarines, rainbow dragons, trees, even watermelon. Emberley provides straightforward information about materials and techniques on the very first page, then sets readers free to discover and explore. Step by step, Emberley takes artists through the process, showing, for each picture, a fingerprint first, then adding simple lines and other fingerprints to make the print evolve into an entirely new entity. A mouse, for example, starts out as a brown oval fingerprint. Next, two pink fingertip-print ears are added. A black dot makes a nose. Two smaller dots become the eyes, and finally a few lines turn this blob into a bewhiskered mouse head. Young artists can spend hours creating designs, patterns, and decorative scenes with this fun technique, especially if they move on to advanced finger-printing on the last page. (Ages 4 to 8) --Emilie Coulter