Paint with Ploof

The friendly little cloud named Ploof is back again. In the same vein and using the same format as Ploof (www.cmreviews.ca/node/3939), readers of Paint with Ploof are invited to enter right inside the covers to help Ploof bring his ideas to life.

Here, Ploof is experimenting with colours and shapes in an attempt to make a rainbow.

This is a big day for a little cloud. A first rainbow.

Want to help Ploof make one?

Great! Let’s begin with a rainbow shape.

The next page shows square and triangular clouds, clouds in the shape of a heart, a fish and even a rabbit. The one that looks like a crescent seems to be the winning choice. Then we have a quick tutorial in colour-mixing after which Ploof daubs a wide brush into his palette and swoops it across the sky. What appears is more of a spiral ribbon than a rainbow, and Ploof is not pleased with his efforts. The audience is asked to weigh in and cheer him up at this point.

We all feel sad sometimes. Is there anything you’d like

to say to Ploof?

Feeling a bit better, Ploof? What if we take some big breaths and

then have another look at that rainbow.

This is the one time when readers are asked to physically interact with the text by doing some calm-inducing deep breathing with the cloud. The other invitations to participate involve naming hues and shapes, and applauding Ploof for his inventiveness in painting rainbow-coloured animals of all sorts in the sky. (My favourite is the kittycorn, a smiling cat with a spiral horn on its head.)

Now ready to try again, Ploof takes his brush and paints a long ribbon with the outline of a face with rainbow-shaped eyebrows and a big rainbow smile.

“Time to say goodbye!” And, of course, as Ploof’s hand moves across the page in an arc, he is making a perfect rainbow.

Clanton and Musser have produced another charming book illustrated with pale chalky pictures created with “powdered graphite, erasers and pencils”, with the pale blue page-filling backdrop of a daytime sky supporting all the multi-coloured action. Although there is lots to look at and enjoy here, the book is not quite as successful as its predecessor in the absence of the interactive element that made Ploof such fun to read with a group or an individual child.