If You Take a Paintbrush: A Book of Colors

by Fulvio Testa

Children in and out of doors are depicted with things of the major white snow, red apples, brown chocolate, etc.

Genres: Picture Books, Fiction

24 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

children book illustrator

Reviews

[Cheryl · Rating 2 out of 5]

reading rainbow project in Children's Books group, openlibrary.org
Imo the art and text are boring, and in fact the children look rather ugly. Young me would have rated it even lower. I don't get the appeal; there are so many other books about colors out there, and even the most boring ones I've seen before this have something appealing about them. This just doesn't.

[Beverly · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really liked the simplicity of the text. However, I wondered why Testa only mentioned the mixing of yellow and blue to make green, but did not mention the mixing of the other primary color mixtures to make orange and purple. That seemed like a huge omission to me. The illustrations were very nice, but each one had many more than the featured color in it; and I think the featured color should have been much more prominent in each illustration.
(Reading Rainbow book)

[Diane · Rating 3 out of 5]

Illustrations of all the colors and what they represent.

[Miriam · Rating 5 out of 5]

This will always be one of my favourite picture books of all time. The pictures are beguiling and the simple writing is charming and engaging. This book feels like a story of life constantly in motion, despite really only being a book of colours. The illusion is delightful.

[Sydney West · Rating 3 out of 5]

This beginning book also focuses on colors. It uses one color at a time. It also uses the colors to describe items in the book, such as the "red car". I would use this when teaching colors or teaching adjectives.