Blue & Other Colours: With Henri Matisse & An Art Project {Book Review}

Over the summer, Phaidon sent us a book to review. I kept looking at it with an idea in mind, but being summer, we were just so busy, we never got round to it. Well, rather than heading to the paddling pool after our regular Tuesday (brrrr) we came home, so I decided it was high time to turn our Blue & Other Colours book into a Matisse themed artwork.

Blue & Other Colours “takes children through Matisse’s colour palette, one artwork per page, beginning with blue and returning to it as a familiar refrain throughout. The variance of shapes, depth, and scale will keep readers engaged, while the text enriches the reading experience with relatable and humorous commentary.”

The book starts with “blue and blue again, then blue and green, green at the back, green at the front, green and blue again…and what’s that other colour? It looks like purple…” and goes on through yellow and orange and red.

The text in the book is simple, perfect for early readers, and also for those learning their colours, with lots of repetition and room for word recognition.

The book itself is a 30-page board book with durable glossy ‘paper’. It’s fairly hard wearing and should withstand childhood rather well.

We’ve been reading about Matisse, and watching a few videos about the Fauvism movement (a five year period that changed art from ‘symbolist’ to expressionist) on Khan Academy, which was great for informing our art project.

We realised, in painting it, that Matisse would have used cut-outs for these, but I just gave the children 9 square blank cards and some paint and asked them to create their version of Matisse’s images for our kitchen wall.

This was also a good exercise in colour mixing as we only had a few primary colours and had to create a whole array of colours – including sparkly purples and whites!

I am so pleased with how it worked out – though I might need a ruler to make it all straight! Never mind – I love it, and think it was a great art project!