The Wonder of Color

May 15, 2022
Searching for a subject for a classroom art project leads a young student to discoveries about light, colors, and paint. Visits to a playground and an art museum, a museum guide's minilecture on pigments and binders, and a home demonstration involving a flashlight and a glass of water fill out a sketchy storyline with some basic information about the visible spectrum. With his dad and his little sister as a gobsmacked audience, young James shows how light is reflected and refracted and also explores the relationship between primary and secondary hues on a simple color wheel--all on the way to proposing a mural for the school library's wall that everyone in his class can decorate. That mural, along with the chalk drawings and paintings James inspects, is blandly generic in Pottage's illustrations. Her figures are staid, too, though she uses a range of skin tones in depicting the students and teacher who join James and his family (who are light-skinned with dark hair) at the final unveiling. The dark-skinned museum guide uses a wheelchair. Budding artists may appreciate the technical background, but for capturing the "wonder," other takes on the topic, such as Shelley Rotner and Anne Woodhull's bright Colors (2019) or David Elliott's Color the Sky (2022), illustrated by Evan Turk, do a better job. (This book was reviewed digitally.) Just a few dabs at the topic, utilitarian at best. (Informational picture book. 6-8)

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