Alison Lester's Wonderful World: Colour your favourite drawings by Alison Lester

Allen & Unwin, 2016. ISBN 9781760293130
(Age: 5-18) Recommended. 'Draw with your eyes closed, draw all the time, mistakes are often the best bits' - words to encourage young artists from Alison Lester, well-known Australian children's author and illustrator. Generations of children have engaged with her picture books from Clive eats alligators to favourites like Magic Beach and Imagine. She has drawn fantastical places, imaginary worlds, everyday experiences, country landscapes and outback settings. Horses and farm animals are clearly important in her life; she began drawing them on a chalkboard easel at the age of six.
With an array of encouraging artistic tips on the endpapers and in the prologue, Alison encourages the young artist to experiment, colour outside the lines, to have a go and to keep a folder of their work. Each double page spread is filled with familiar characters, there is Noni the Pony, farm animals from My Farm and creatures from Alison Lester's ABC.
Her picture books encourage children's creativity, their self-belief; they celebrate differences and bring faraway places to life. The much-loved Magic Beach was published over twenty-five years ago, here we can add a splash colour to the beach and jetty scenes. Why not bring the jungle scene from Imagine to life and discover all the animals listed around the page border?
Alison Lester's Wonderful World: Colour your favourite drawings is a perfect present, to build a young artist's creativity or something special for families to work on together.
Rhyllis Bignell