By Fiona Watt
Nearly three hundred pages of art projects to actually make — expect to buy some paint and give up a table.
Three older Usborne art books stitched into one thick one — well over a hundred techniques and projects, each one photographed step by step with real hands doing the work. Ink blown through a straw until it branches into a tree. A candle rubbed on the paper first, so the paint slides around the invisible waxy line. Printing with a fork, a potato, a leaf. There's chalk pastel, tissue collage, paper sculpture, watercolor dropped onto wet paper just to watch it spread. It isn't really a book about drawing well. It's a book of things to do with materials, and the results tend to come out looking like art instead of homework.
This suits the child who has drawn everything with a pencil and gone flat on it. What it hands over are the tricks nobody teaches at school — the straw-blown ink tree, the candle that makes the paint go around it, the print you pull off a squashed leaf — and the reason to own it is that they come out looking good on the first try, with no drawing skill underneath. One honest catch: it's the most expensive book on this shelf to actually use. You'll want paints, brushes, ink, tissue, glue, an apron, a table nobody minds wrecking, and a grown-up nearby for a fair bit of it. Left in a drawer it does nothing. Bought alongside a cheap paint set, it can keep a child busy for a couple of years.