Let's Make Faces: with audio recording

by Hanoch Piven, Hanoch Piven (Illustrator)

Overview

Learn how to find faces in unexpected places using everyday objects in this interactive guide to cultivating creativity, from globally acclaimed portrait artist Hanoch Piven

There are so many faces to discover in our world! All you have to do is look. Is a button just a button? Or is it an eye? That stick of gum sure looks like a mouth. How about some old yarn, unraveled from a scarf—that could be hair. Put all these objects together and you can make a face!

Join internationally renowned portrait artist Hanoch Piven on a delightful, artistic journey to reimagine the everyday world into facial fun in this instructive, illustrated guide.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781442481862
Publisher:	Atheneum Books for Young Readers
Publication date:	08/06/2013
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	40
File size:	6 MB
Age Range:	3 - 8 Years

About the Author

Hanoch Piven is the acclaimed creator of Let’s Make Faces, What Presidents Are Made Of, What Athletes Are Made Of, and What Cats Are Made Of, among other books for children. His incisive portraits have been published in the United States in such major magazines as Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Entertainment Weekly, and The New York Times. He lives with his wife and children in Israel. Visit him at PivenWorld.com.

Editorial Reviews

K-Gr 4—Collage master Piven returns with another book intended to spark the imagination. He starts by asking readers to find everyday objects that have "faces waiting to be discovered," such as a bathroom sink. (Think of the faucets as eyes, the spout as a nose, and the basin as a mouth.) On the next spread, children are told to look carefully at a seemingly random array of fruits, vegetables, and other foods to see if they can find faces. The following pages reveal what could be perceived as two faces from that mix. After similar exercises using tools from the garage and plant remnants from the garden, the author encourages readers to start gathering their own stuff from which they can create faces. He gives a few more examples, using found items like an old slipper, Scrabble tiles, beads, and broken toy parts. Two pages of tips and the advice to "play, play, play" and have fun follow. The digital photo spreads are captioned with large type and colorful refrigerator magnet letters, which emphasize the lively nature of the book. Although the concept of using found objects to create collage pictures is not new, Piven helps budding artists by focusing on the familiar configuration of a face. Fans of his previous books can look to those for additional ideas. Useful for arts and crafts lessons at school, in the library, or at home.—Martha Simpson, Stratford Library Association, CT

School Library Journal

The world is filled with faces waiting to be discovered,” writes Piven (My Best Friend Is as Sharp as a Pencil), the clown prince of animism. And if those faces aren’t instantly evident, Piven instructs children how to make them from things all around them, including produce, backyard detritus, hardware, and the kind of stuff found in every family’s odds and ends drawer (plastic whistle, toy car wheels). He offers inspiration and examples of emotions and states of being (goofy, scared, sleepy) as well as archetypes (mommy, daddy, monster), while implicitly encouraging readers to look beyond conventional circle-shaped faces with ones shaped like a teardrop or even a weird footprint. Each creation occupies a single page and is shown on vivid solid background to emphasize the shape and dimensionality of every contributing element. Piven wraps up with a “How to Make Faces” section that includes seven upbeat instructions applicable to just about any endeavor undertaken at any age, such as: “Watch for all the happy mistakes! Lots of good ideas will happen by chance. Be aware of them. Look out for them!” Ages 3–8. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

The author/artist of several books of portraits made from found objects provides a lesson in how to see and make faces using child-friendly materials found in the junk drawer and elsewhere. While his earlier works included tips about how to make portraits from random items, in this, Piven devotes a full book to it, introducing the concept to the very youngest. The first spread shows individual items that resemble faces: a toilet-paper dispenser, a boxy fan with knobs. From there he expands, asking tots to train their eyes to find similar patterns (eyes, nose, mouth and such) in groups of objects. One spread shows scattered plastic fruits and vegetables. With a turn of the page, Piven reveals the faces he sees by masking the extraneous items. (Cleverly, the outlines depict head-types of all sorts, such as peanut- or even footprint-shaped.) In this way, Piven conducts a conversation directly with his young art students; his comments are brief and appear in big, inviting type. After a few examples, Piven invites children to gather "stuff," and, using it, he composes faces demonstrating a range of emotions: happy, goofy, scared and sleepy. He closes with a spread containing seven more tips to get preschoolers started, the most important of which may be to "play, play, play!" This whimsical exercise is also a great lesson in reuse and recycling. (Picture book. 3-6)

Kirkus Reviews