Bet you can’t draw-a-saurus just one!

Since I live in a house full of dinosaur fans, I was delighted to receive a copy of Draw-A-Saurus by James Silvani to review. This is one for your permanet collection, particularly if you are planning to celebrate Dinovember. You could have a dinosaur, drawing a dinosaur, drawing a dinosaur… (And, and and and!!! Also see if your library will order one for their collection too. I don’t know why I don’t mention this more often… not all library systems are able to order books year round, but they all want to hear your requests. Next time you’re there, just ask how you request they order a book.)

Even if you aren’t sure which end of the pencil to hold, as long as there’s a dino lover in your house, you’ll get a lot of bang out of this book. Without the instructions on how to create your own dinosaur illustrations, this book would be charming, funny, and informative. With them, it encourages the reader to build their artistic skills by thinking about the science and by drawing comparisons to modern animals. In other words, if it doesn’t inspire your budding paleontologist to draw prehistoric animals for your personal art gallery, it will feed their imagination and help them put what we know about dinosaurs into the context of their own experiences. Integrating knowledge in this way helps kids tremendously when it comes to making connections in other subjects. This book does exactly that in a light and playful way that will make you want to read it again and again. I wish I could give you an estimated age range on this book, but it will really depend on your individual child’s fine motor development. (Any dino lover will enjoy reading it!) Most children who have learned to write the alphabet would be able to start doing the activities in this book, although some of the fine details might be ahead of them for a while.

After I arm wrestled my copy away from my husband, who figured out immediately that it would make a great primer for how to make animated dinosaurs in Blender, I decided to try my hand at following the instructions. I’ve had some basic drawing instruction, but neither achieved any level of mastery nor practiced what little skill I ever had, so if you have a set of colored pencils and some blank paper, you should be able to do at least as well as I did. I should warn you, though, that this is like eating potato chips. You will not want to draw just one.

I tried my hand at my very first ever drawing of a T-Rex. (Did you know they were “theropods?” Or that they were an average of 43 feet long and 13 feet high, and probably weighed an average of 7.5 tons? Well, you do now.) Here’s how it went: