Review: Draw!

Draw! by Raúl Colón

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Colón charts his own path in a medium well known in the 80s and 90s from the likes of [a:Chris Vanallsburg|6865653|Chris Vanallsburg|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-ccc56e79bcc2db9e6cdcd450a4940d46.png] and [a:William Joyce|137553|William Joyce|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1407870851p2/137553.jpg]. Not to mention, it reminds me of Nancy Erekson's beautiful prismacolor on paper work! Nancy reminds me how long this kind of layering takes, so I appreciate how much work the book represents. Colón's flawless drawing! I could sit and look at the giraffe page for hours! I loved watching how he used the palette for all the shadows and nuances. Look at those reds in the chin stripes on the zebra, and the blue green shadows on the backs of the giraffes' legs! And the way drawing paper insists on its own texture despite the colors makes each page so look-at-able.

The peritext says [a:Raúl Colón|3513587|Raúl Colón|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1307040621p2/3513587.jpg] used lithograph pencils, and Nancy and I discussed whether he did the scratches in the paper beforehand so the drawing wouldn't go into those grooves or whether he scratched afterward to create those interesting contour lines. I think Nancy is probably right: he likely grooved his pencil drawing before digging in with the prismacolors.

The little jokes in the narrative were a lot of fun: Making the front and back of the story in the 'real' world less realistic, drawn with black outline; moving out of imagination was a visual loss, more spare; keeping the animal from the previous page and showing it in the background on the next page--the rhino was pretty funny; the way the little heron gets on its tiptoes to try to see the elephant drawing; boy on back of elephant, birds on back of buffalo. Not laugh-out-loud jokes, just fun.

It's a simple narrative: draw pictures of folks and share sandwiches with them. As with other memorable books about making pictures ([b:Harold and the Purple Crayon|98573|Harold and the Purple Crayon|Crockett Johnson|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327390957s/98573.jpg|1285373], [b:Journey|17262290|Journey|Aaron Becker|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1367256642s/17262290.jpg|23859090]) Colón's work makes magic out of visual imagining.

A wonderful main character with brown skin, strong multiculturalism without making the story follow that topic. There was no trace of tokenism, just good representation in a strong wordless picturebook.



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