How to Draw a Dragon: With Audio Recording

by Douglas Florian, Douglas Florian (Illustrator)

Overview

Pull out your pencils! Everyone’s an artist in this lively and inspiring picture book full of wit, whimsy, and wacky imagination…and dragons, of course!

Dragons of all shapes and sizes are on display in this high-flying how-to picture book from celebrated author-illustrator Douglas Florian. Get ready to meet dragons who love singing, cycling, playing musical instruments, and more—and learn to draw each one along the way. Then at the end there’s a big surprise: a dragon-drawing art show for all!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781442474000
Publisher:	Beach Lane Books
Publication date:	04/14/2015
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	32
File size:	46 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	4 - 8 Years

About the Author

Douglas Florian is the creator of many acclaimed picture books including Windsongs: Poems About Weather, UnBEElievables, Poetrees, and Dinothesaurus. He lives with his family in New York.

Editorial Reviews

This how-to book takes a very practical approach to drawing dragons. It begins with an simple instruction: “Drawing dragons isn’t hard. / Drag a dragon to your yard.” Indeed, we see several children using little red wagons to drag home sleeping dragons. The key, you see, is to use actual dragons as models. Florian takes readers through the tongue-in-cheek practicalities associated with doing life drawings of these huge (and often grumpy) beasts...Florian's illustrations are...kidlike, rendered in pencil, crayon, paints, and bit of collage, which subtly bring in the medieval world with inserts of tiny castles and walled cities. Gently comic in tone and with an almost hunt-and-find visual approach, this book might be meta, but it's also just straightforward fun.

March 2015 - Booklist *STARRED REVIEW

Florian speaks to dragon-loving children everywhere in this ode to creativity, imagination, and fire-breathers. Dragons act as models for the book’s budding young artists, and the story ends at an elementary-school art show with all the muses receiving their place in the sun...When it comes to Florian’s glorious illustrations, childlike is an understatement. Each spread, done in bold-hued mixed media, looks like it was dashed off by an amateur; at first glance you can easily see the outside-the-lines crayons, broad brushstrokes, and ragged edges of cut paper. But it takes precision to be this messy, and closer inspection reveals bits of collage materials (e.g., patterns of birds, insects, and butterflies throughout), along with a use of perspective and depth that points to the work of a seasoned artist. The penciled-up endpapers showing various dragon parts also look like a kid drew them, and a kid could use them to draw his or her own mythological beast—all without once being told, specifically, how.

The Horn Book

2015-01-20
Florian's rhyming verse carries a group of children through drawing their own dragon, starting with the encouraging couplet, "Drawing dragons isn't hard. / Drag a dragon to your yard."The front endpapers catalog dragon eyes, scales, teeth and so on, while the back endpapers display an entire dragon with parts labeled (forked tongue, sharp back toe, etc.). The children engaged in this artistic enterprise are brown-skinned and black-haired, pink-skinned and red-haired, and the dragons are just as varied, from versions that are pink with catlike faces to vaguely Chinese-style dragons in green and orange. The illustrations, while evoking children's own drawings and collages, are quite sophisticated in their use of texture, photo and fabric, as well as matte and transparent color. The final pages are a foldout of P.S. 117's "dragon art show," where all of the drawings are proudly displayed. The genders of the dragons are indicated by pronouns, so readers (and artists) are not stuck with a passel of only boy dragons. The rhyme flows smoothly with its whimsical advice: "Dragon fire has reds and yellows, / and it's good to toast marshmallows." This rhyming romp will no doubt spur multiple requests for rereading—and redrawing. (Picture book. 4-8)

Kirkus Review