Review:
This book is good for two reasons. The first reason is the illustrations. The illustrations in the book follow the development of the story. As Luke begins he doesn't seem to "fit in" with his peers because they all make realistic artwork and his is more abstract. Once Luke visits the art museum he realizes that his style is not bad, just different, and the illustration begin to take on more abstract and colorful styles. The second reason I liked this book is the character development. When the story begins Luke has difficulty accepting that he must follow the instructions for making art the way his teacher instructs. As the story unfolds, Luke begins to realize that he has a gift for abstract art, and that it isn't bad at all how he paints. The big idea of this story is to be yourself, and don't let anyone tell you to stop being you. ( )

I was flipping through this book at a museum shop because the colorful cover caught my attention. It features a canvas on an easel which has a painting of the background, the kind of composition where the easel is like a window, except that the background itself has sprouted imaginary beings.

The story is about a boy, Luke, who "sees things in a different way". To be honest, the text implied to me that Luke has a neurological disorder that interferes with his sensory processing. He doesn't know why, but he paints a blue apple instead of a red or green one the way the rest of his class does. When they're drawing portraits, he "put the nose and ears in the wrong place" (the illustration shows something like one of the lithographs in Picasso's "Imaginary Portraits" series). Only the third page says "Luke used his imagination", when drawing what he saw outside the window. The theme of the book is that it's okay to use your imagination and not have to be representational when making art, but the implications of the opening sentence just felt a bit weird and a little hilarious to me.

The illustrations are done in several different media. Most of the scenes at the beginning are pen and ink with watercolor washes to provide color and texture to the paper - the drawings themselves lack color and hatching is used to provide shape and volume. Color is introduced for the artwork Luke makes, and when he enters a contemporary art museum, the pages become fully colored with a wide range of media, including oil pastels, gouache, colored pencil, texta, and acrylic and oil paint. It's a nice way to show the transition from "ordinary world" to "imaginative world", which isn't uncommon - such transitions are present in Where the Wild Things Are (though with a different technique) and the film version of Wizard of Oz.

I don't have any young children to read the book with, but other than my amusement about the way Luke's "way of seeing" is presented at the beginning, I really enjoyed the 30 page book. The illustrations are lovely, and the ones from inside the museum are beautifully detailed with a lot to look at and discover. They also represent a wide range of contemporary art, including abstract expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. Sculpture is featured as well as paintings.

This is a lovely little book, and probably fun for even older elementary students to read, because of the artwork. I know some older kids look down on picture books once they can read "real" books. ( )