The Best Color Book Ever! Color by Ruth Heller

From pencils and markers and crayons and chalks...
from paints in a tube...or a jar...or a...box...
come colors delicious, delectable, lush...
applied by ten fingers, two hands...or a brush.

So begins Ruth Heller's delicious, delectable picture book Color, a feast for the senses, with illustrations so real you want to grab one of the pictured colored pencils and start sketching or dip your digits into the finger paints and just let go!

But it's not only a beautiful book to look upon. It's the best darn book for teaching everything a youngster needs to know about color. Not only does it demonstrate primary and secondary colors, but it demonstrates with a print of an angel fish in four color separations how printers apply yellow, magenta, cyan blue and black in sequence to produce full-color prints. The rhyming text describes the magic that black and white bring to color prints as well:

We call black a color,
but that's problematic.
Black should really be
called ACHROMATIC.

With acrylic overlays of the basic four colors, the reader can combine bars of the six primary and secondary colors into 36 color blocks or perform the same trick to make a kaleidoscope of colors. Heller's rhymes explain how to warm up or cool down a color and how to use the color wheel to make colors pop or pair them with complementary colors to calm them down. There's even a green and pink heart which when stared at for the count of 30 will produce a perfect negative image on the facing white page.


The final pages disprove that a rose is a rose is a rose. In Heller's hands a rose is a masterpiece of color overlays which produce the perfect rose for the author's hat--or what's left of it!

Color is magic...
No doubt about that.
If you're not convinced...
I'll eat my hat!

This is the perfect book for the toddler just learning colors. It's perfect for young artists and art teachers, too. In fact, it's a book just to sit quietly with and be reminded of the beautiful magic of color.