A child who loves drawing wants two completely different things, and almost never on the same day. Some days they want permission — for the thing they made to be real, to count, to be allowed to look like nothing at all. Other days they want their dragon to look like a dragon, and no amount of being told it's wonderful will help, because they can see perfectly well that it isn't. Four of these books do the first job and three do the second, and they don't substitute for each other. Hand a child who is furious that their horse came out wrong a story about how any mark you make is beautiful, and they will throw it at you. Hand a child who has stopped drawing entirely a book of fifty numbered steps, and you've handed them fifty more ways to fail. So: read the split below, work out which side your child is on this week, and take one book off the shelf.
The split is the whole thing, and nobody says it out loud in a shop, so here it is. Harold, The Dot, Ish and Radiant Child are permission books. They teach no technique whatsoever — not one line, not one shape. What they say is: make the mark, it counts, it's yours. Ed Emberley, Draw 50 and the Usborne book are instruction books. Do this, then this, and you get a lion. A child stuck on 'I can't draw' needs the first kind and will find nothing in the second but proof. A child who wants their dragon to look like a dragon needs the second kind and will find The Dot infuriating, because they don't want to be told a dot is enough. They already know what they want and it isn't a dot. Get that one call right and the rest of this page hardly matters. Now the two drawing books, because they look like the same book on a shelf and they are opposite methods. Emberley builds everything out of shapes a small hand can already make. A circle. Two dots. A triangle. Each little box adds one mark to the last one, and by the eighth box there's a mouse. The design of it means your child cannot fail — there's no gap between what they meant and what came out, because they never aimed at a mouse, they aimed at a circle. That works from about five, and it works on the child who says they can't. Draw 50 is real construction drawing, the thing illustrators are actually taught: faint ovals for the body and the head, a curved line for the back, then the animal drawn over the top and the working rubbed out. It asks your child to compare their own line to a printed model and correct it. A six-year-old will get four steps in, see that their fifth line is nowhere near the picture, and shut the book. At eight or nine, with a light pencil and an eraser and some patience for an ugly page before the good bit arrives, the same book starts paying out and keeps paying for years. So: Emberley at five, Draw 50 at eight or nine. Same shelf, different children, and often the same child three years apart. Then Radiant Child, which needs saying plainly because it sits here looking like an art book and it is a real biography with real weight. Javaka Steptoe painted it on found scraps of wood and won the Caldecott for it. It's the childhood of Jean-Michel Basquiat, and it's honest that his mother becomes mentally ill and is taken to a hospital and does not come home. That's a sad thread running under the joy of it, and a sensitive child will feel it. The author's note at the back — not the story — says he died young at twenty-seven. The story itself stays in the childhood and the rise. It's a wonderful book and it is not a jolly art book, and those are both true at once. Last, the practical part, because it decides whether any of these get used. Harold needs a crayon. The Dot and Ish need nothing at all; they're stories. Emberley needs a pencil. Draw 50 needs a pencil with an eraser that works, and the eraser is half the method. Radiant Child needs twenty minutes and you nearby. The Usborne book needs paints, brushes, ink, glue, tissue paper, an apron, a table you don't mind wrecking and an adult in the room for most of it — 288 pages of that. It's the best thing here for a child who has drawn everything and is bored of pencils, and it is the one that ends up in a drawer if you buy it without buying a cheap paint set the same afternoon.