Colouring books are slowly taking over the world, and with their ubiquity it’s interesting to find ones which take an innovative, unusual approach to the pastime. Cut and Colour Playbook: Seasons by Anouck Boisrobert is just such an eye-opener.

In fact, this book turns people into little magicians, for with just a few pencils or crayons and a pair of scissors, it allows you and your kids to conjure into being 3-D landscapes across the seasons. The process is simple but hugely effective – as this short video shows:

The explanation and design is very clear and the illustrations are clean and uncluttered with just a sprinkling of detail and pre-printed colour. Young children may need some support with the cutting, not least because the pages are all bound tightly into the book, rather than with perforated edged for easy removal.

Boisrobert’s pop-up books are among the most treasured books-as-objects in our home, with their crisp lines and clever paper engineering never failing to delight. It’s such fun that with Cut and Colour Playbook: Seasons a little of their beauty has been packaged up in such a way as to enable children to create something a little similar.

Whilst colouring and cutting out the scenes in this activity book it occurred to me that we could adapt the basic idea of Boisrobert’s book to create our own layered landscapes. First I gathered together examples of paintings where layering, in terms of shades and colours, plays a big role. You can see what I found (with much appreciated help from blog/twitter followers Anamaria Andersen and Fiona Barker amongst others) on this Pinterest board.

With these beautiful pieces of art in mind, M put watercolour washes in several shades of blue on separate sheets of paper, basically making each sheet lighter than the last by using more water on her brush.

When dry, she draw mountain ranges on the reverse of each sheet…

…before cutting them out and layering them up.

We noted how when hills or mountains are “layered” in a picture, they tend to “fade” the further they are away. M also noticed how in many of the pieces of art we looked at the sky’s colouring typically went from darker up above, to lighter near the horizon. She decided her “mountains” were beneath a stormy sky and so painted a final sheet with a graded black-grey watercolour wash.

Finally everything came together and I framed it:

For such a simple art project, I think it is remarkably effective, and M is definitely delighted with the results.

Whilst making our cut-out layered landscapes and colouring in Cut and Colour Playbook: Seasons we listened to:

Other activities which might work well alongside getting crafty with Cut and Colour Playbook: Seasons include:

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Disclosure: I was sent a free review copy of this book by the publisher.

A pared-down, stylish tale packed with adrenalin and mischief in equal measure about a child’s ability to see possibilities and transform the world around them, That’s My Hat! by Anouck Boisrobert and Louis Rigaud follows what happens when a hat created by a child is blown away on a gust of wind. Turning the pages takes us on a journey across the city to retrieve the hat, visiting various shops, a zoo and a library along the way. But when the child reaches the top of a skyscraper it looks like disaster will strike – can they use their imagination to save the day?

Although we may have seen the device before in Harold and the Purple Crayon, Anthony Brown’s Bear Hunt and Aaron Becker’s Journey, the idea of a child using a pencil to transform their world, changing something simple into an object of their imagination (in this case starting with a semi-circle being turned into a hat) never grows old. Perhaps this is because the ability to see alternative realities is a very real experience of childhood; we have all turned sticks into stallions ready for galloping, cardboard boxes into boats or stones into pets.

What That’s My Hat! brings afresh to this storytelling mechanism are very clever illustrations. Made of only 10 basic shapes and 5 flat colours, with simple black line embellishments, Boisrobert and Rigaud have created 3-D scenes to explore, with the use of intricate pop-up mechanisms and lots of hidden detail behind the folds and bends of the paper. It’s amazing to see the complexity that can be constructed from very basic building blocks. The magic is captivating and perhaps also empowering for young readers – these illustrations have a child-like achievability about them.

The ending draws the story full circle (literally, if you take note of how it began and what it concludes with), deeply satisfying readers, listeners and observers of all the fine and clever details in this playful book.

That’s My Hat! sent us to one of our favourite crafting materials – a bunch of paint chips (free! lovely thick card! great colours!), and from them we cut out lots of each of the 10 different shapes which appear in That’s My Hat!. For the circles I used a couple of outsized hole punchers and the kids loved the physicality of using them; I love it when the girls enjoy the preparation as much as the intended activity!

It was then time to let loose our imaginations, creating scenes with just the 10 types of shape and a black pen to add detail.

The girls loved looking closely at how the shapes were used in the book, copying some of the ideas for themselves, but also coming up with their own transformations for some of the shapes.

I love the grumpy looking mum and the dancing spider in this spread!

Whilst making stories with our shapes listened to:

Other activities which might work well alongside reading That’s My Hat! include:

If you liked this post you might like these other posts by me:

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Disclosure: I was sent a free review copy of this book by the publisher.

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