May 15, 2016
Grades 1-3 The insect world collides with the art world, all with a push of a . . . finger! In this installment in the Fun with Fingerprints series, fingerprints, ink, and a pen are used to create neat, cartoonish renderings of insects and spiders ranging from the familiar (a monarch butterfly) to the more obscure (the horned Hercules beetle). The first two pages offer basic instructions on materials and how to make different-shaped fingerprints, and after that, each page has three to four different types of fingerprint-based bugs to make, with four illustrated directions each. Though some of these projects could be done by artists of just about any age, some add complicated details that would be more manageable if broken down into more than just four steps, and that may frustrate the youngest fingerprint artists. Although it lacks information on the types of insects and spiders or photographs of what the critters really look like in nature, this will still satisfy little ones looking for an accessible, gratifying rainy-day activity.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)
July 1, 2016
Two books in the vein of Ed Emberley's Great Thumbprint Drawing Book give step-by-step instructions for taking a fingerprint and transforming it into such images as a dump truck or a praying mantis. Many of the bugs are shaped like a fingerprint, but the vehicle drawings have little relation to the underlying fingerprint. The books are neither original nor very successful. Reading list.
(Copyright 2016 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)