The Complete Home Decorating Book

Grade 3-6?As one has come to expect in a DK offering, the strength of these how-to-draw-it titles lies in their use of color photographs, a fairly novel and welcome feature in art books for a juvenile audience. Less welcome is the DK convention whereby each two-page spread introduces a new concept (in the case of Fantastic Animals, a new type of animal; in Amazing Faces, a new element, style, or technique of portraiture), which preordains a certain artificiality of organization and shallowness of coverage that is only compounded by the brevity of each title. Accepting these drawbacks as a given and ignoring the visual choppiness and other defects of layout and design, there are elements here that young artists may find helpful. Certainly the pages devoted to "family features" and "caricatures" in Faces are intriguing and illuminating. And the rather tedious repetitiveness in Animals does reinforce the basic concepts of form, line, shading, and perspective. If nothing else, both titles encourage methodical effort and careful observation and will be welcome in large collections.?Marcia Hupp, Mamaroneck Public Library, NY
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