Maggie Rosier

Grades 3-5

This book can't quite make up its mind whether it wants to be a drawing book or a book about robots, and it ends up being mediocre in both areas. Students will enjoy paging through and reading the descriptions of the various bots pictured ("Crush, the Recycling Robot;" "Point, the One-Bot Rescue Force;" "Spike, the Canine Bot"), but when they attempt to draw the robots, they're going to run into some frustration: the instructions just don't have enough detail for budding artists in the 3rd or 4th grade. The supply list at the beginning of the book instructs students to have drawing pencils, erasers, black ink pen, pencil sharpener, colored pencils, and paper. The paper that is pictured is a plain white stack, although all of the drawings are done on graph paper and a suggestion to use something similar would have been quite helpful. A glossary in the back lists no art terms, but instead defines words like automatons, humanoids, retractable, rubble, and other terms that relate to the personalities of the robots being drawn. The index lists art terms such as drawing lightly, mixing colors, smudging, using your arm-- but the pages that the index directs the student to give no instruction or detail on any of these techniques. Stick with Ralph Masiello's Robot Drawing Book (2011).
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