Add Humor to Your Neighborhood
By Michael Sherman
$12.99, ages 6 and up, 40 pages.
Concrete got the blahs around your block?
Grab some chalk and turn all that wear and tear to your comic advantage.
In this fun twist on an old pastime, Sherman inspires kids to turn ugly concrete into a crack up with a few strokes of chalk.
"Release your inner smart aleck," he encourages before taking readers through a basic how-to and a slew of his own ideas.
The book comes with four fat pieces of chalk and pictures of cracks, walls, steps, rocks even drains dressed up silly.
There's even a section on how to take hopscotch up a notch (literally up a wall) and transform flat top into track for tricycle test driving.
With sticks of chalk, a run-down slab of concrete can go from drab to happy to just plain funny:
A split in the sidewalk becomes a perch for birds that never fly away or the gaping mouth of a monster ready to snag the feet that cross it.
The more broken, cracked or tilted the pavement, the better.
In one picture, hairline cracks become lightening bolts crashing down from a cloud. In another, a sewing needle drawn from chalk stitches up a big crack in a driveway that's split in two.
And don't forget to put a choo choo train on that mountainous crack crossing the basketball court.
You start to see how a chalk drawer could feel like they owe every crack a chance to be more than a flaw at their feet.
And cracks are just the beginning. Anywhere there's hardtop, there are bound to be imperfections, scattered debris, an inkling of something cool.
Pebbles on the sidewalk become the knobs of a chalk-drawn Etch-a-Sketch, the body of dangling spider or the wheels of cars backed up on sidewalk seams.
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Created by Michael Sherman & David Avidor
$16.99, ages 8 and up, 20 pages
Dr. Frankenstein wasn't much of a sharer.
Whenever anyone asked how he pieced together his monster, he'd clam up so no one would repeat his hideous mistake.
But thanks to those crazy, devil-may-care editors at Klutz, your kids can now make their own gruesome blunders with Dr. Frankensketch's monster machine.
Within the pages of this clever art book, young dabblers get to assemble and trace a closet full of yellow-eyed, tummy-bulging ghouls.
But beware, the editors warn, as you open the storage locker for the monsters, "Contents may be rabid and angry."
Not to mention brutishly cute.
Inside the book are 20 ready-made ruffians that can be torn along serrated lines into three parts, a head, torso and lower portion with legs, then mixed to create other ghouls that are terribly, adorably wrong.
By themselves, these fellows are already pretty hideous.
There's a pointy-toothed ogre with zebra-striped horns and a clown-size nose and even a four-eyed blue blob that drips goo and has dog bone hands.
For traditionalists, there's also Frankenstein's monster with flat, green head, bolts in his neck and a scowling mouth and a Dracula with menacing brow, beady eyes and bloody lips.
But you haven't seen nothing yet.
In the back of these monsters is the evil drawing machine, where kids then concoct their own creations.
Here's how it works: First, they arrange up to three body parts in a drawing bed. Next, they flip a clear hard cover over the monster, followed by a piece of tracing paper that comes attached to the binder.
Using a graphite pencil found in a little box on the cover of the book, they trace their ghoul onto the paper. Once done, they remove it and use three pencils w
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