Bea Reviews The Grown-Up's Guide to Making Art with Kids by Lee Foster-Wilson

Publisher: Walter Foster Publishing
Source: the publisher in exchange for an honest review
Release Date: May 21st, 2019
Buying Links: Amazon* | Barnes & Noble | Book Depository*  |
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Blurb from goodreads:

Make art and memories with the special kids in your life! Packed with how-to drawing and painting projects, creative prompts, and original crafting activities, The Grown-Up’s Guide to Making Art with Kids will inspire you and your little ones to spend hours of creative fun together.

This book includes drawing and painting projects featuring popular, kid-friendly, and on-trend subjects—like dinosaurs, pets, flowers, and robots—that adults and kids can create together. Guided practice pages invite interactivity and allow children and adults to draw and paint the same subjects, side by side, for a fun-filled joint activity. The book’s artwork is colorful, approachable, and done using ordinary, easily available art tools, including markers, crayons, colored pencils, and acrylic paint.

In addition to drawing lessons, The Grown-Up’s Guide to Making Art with Kids also includes projects and ideas for using artwork created from the prompts in the book to make crafts, including a map, pop-up art, and paper dolls.

The Grown-Up’s Guide to Making Art with Kids teaches valuable drawing, painting, and crafting skills to both kids and adults; inspires creativity; and encourages family togetherness. What better way to avoid screen time than by drawing, painting, and creating together with your kids? Follow-up books in the series include The Grown-Up's Guide to Paint Pouring with Kids and The Grown-Up's Guide to Crafting with Kids, both publishing in June 2020.

My Thoughts:

I had the idea that this book might be useful for ideas or projects in my toddler classroom. While it failed in that regard, it did succeed as a how-to for doing art  older children, say 5 years on up.

The best parts of the book are the art lessons. Foster-Wilson explains basic art concepts simply and respectfully, never talking down to readers. It's a good intro for adults as well as children, with simple instructions on drawing a variety of subjects and objects. The art projects are too adult driven and too product oriented for my personal taste but they will appeal to many children, and adults. The directions are simple enough to follow and there are lots of illustrations accompanying the directions. The subjects of the projects are a variety of trendy and classic. Most of the projects require some planning but a few can be done spontaneously. The book also provides suggestions for art supplies to keep on hand.