My fifth grade daughter loves to draw. It has become a hobby for her and she is always looking for ways to improve her drawing skills. This is why I wanted to review Let's Make Some Great Art, by Marion Deuchars, with her.

Let's Make Some Great Art is a 224-page paperback book. The pages are eleven inches by eight inches and the book contains 600 illustrations in it. It is an interactive coloring and activity book that is designed for children ages eight and up. The book starts with a two-page list of basic art supplies that would come in handy not only for use in this book, but also for creating art in general. After that, the book is filled with all kinds of art activities to complete. There are pages that discuss artists like Leonardo Da Vinci, Jackson Pollock, and Vincent Van Gogh among others. The book teaches many different mediums of creating art such as crayons, pencil, finger prints, cutouts, and painting. It also teaches many art concepts like perspective, mixing colors, shading, dimensions, and many more. The most important art ideas that this book teaches is that there is no wrong way to create art and art is about using your imagination. The book is available on the website for just $19.95.

My daughter was excited to get this book in her hands especially when she saw that she didn't have to work on it in a certain order, she could just flip it open and work. She has had a lot of fun working on the many of the projects in the book and even though she works in the book almost every day, she still has many more pages to complete. So far she has designed her own bag and t-shirt in the book. She completed several pages on Tangrams (ancient Chinese geometric shape puzzles) and had a lot of fun with designing them and then trying to trick the rest of the family with the puzzles. She worked on line art and turned abstract doodles into fantastic drawings among other projects. She has fun flipping to a random page to pick a project to work on. I love that she can do that with this book. Every page teaches concepts, but they don't have to be done in a certain order. This makes it a perfect fit for my free-spirited little artist.

I also appreciate that Let's Make Some Great Art encourages imagination and creativity because that means there is no right way or wrong way, it is all about creating art you like. This book can be used by students on their own as long as they can read which made it a good fit for us because I am terrible at art. The only bad part of this book was that there was at least one questionable image for us. It was a drawing of a female statue that had most of the parts covered, but some of the chest uncovered. We just covered this image and I will find a different image for my daughter to draw upside down. Other than this page, I would definitely recommend this book if you have any artists in your school that want to broaden their artistic skills.

-Product review by Cassandra Holdeman, The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, LLC, August, 2018