In this playful account, Caldecott Medalist Gerstein (The Man Who Walked Between the Towers) suggests how and why drawing was invented, imaginatively drawing from an archeological find of cave drawings and a nearby child’s footprint. Second-person narration immediately pulls readers in: “Imagine... you were born before the invention of drawing.” A shaggy-haired modern boy, colored pencils in his back pockets, and a dog stand in front of a blank canvas. Opposite, the boy is transported. It’s 30,000 years earlier, and he has a wolf at his side. When he encounters a woolly mammoth, the boy shares the experience, using a burnt stick to depict the giant animal on a cave wall. Gerstein’s mixed-media spreads feature a mostly blue and brown palette, and thin, rainbow-hued brushstrokes add texture and vividness. The power and intrinsic reward of making art is revealed as the boy animatedly draws his mammoth over several panels—to the fear, then fascination, of his family. Artists see the world differently, but Gerstein suggests their true gift lies in allowing others to share in their visions. Ages 3–6. Agent: Joan Raines, Raines & Raines. (Sept.)
Fall 2013 Parents' Choice Award2014 CCBC Choices List
Children's Book Committee at Bank Street College 2014 Best Book of the Year
"The much-admired illustrator Mordicai Gerstein performs a persuasive bit of magic in The First Drawing...[he] uses delicate ink over rough colorful acrylics in a visual echo of the way the fineness of artistic sensibility might have arisen in primitive Stone Age culture"—The Wall Street Journal
*"In this compelling picture book, Gerstein invites children to travel back in time more than 30,000 years to a cave in what is now southern France....Gerstein's illustrations of rocks, clouds, and shadows cleverly conceal animal shapes that both readers and the protagonist are compelled to discover."—School Library Journal (starred review)
*"Gerstein's mixed-media spreads feature a mostly blue and brown palette, and thin, rainbow-hued brushstrokes add texture and vividness....Artists see the world differently, but Gerstein suggests their true gift lies in allowing others to share in their visions."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Gerstein's acrylic, pen-and-ink and colored-pencil mixed-media illustrations create depth and a sense of the past, as well as imparting liveliness and possibility...Solid storytelling, satisfying narrative circularity, and masterful, creative illustrations make this an inspiring story for young artists."—Kirkus
"The line, acrylic, and colored-pencil art, which fills up each spread, has the buoyant feeling of discovery and is clever in the way it turns imaginings into pictures. A way to think about the start of art."—Booklist
"Echoing the simplicity of cave drawings with simply sketched figures, Gerstein enhances them with expressive pen-and-ink detail and luminous acrylics and colored pencil, in hues from pure sky blue to firelight."—The Horn Book
"The story offers a creative approach to get kids thinking about that paradigm shift into artistic representation...Use this in an art class to spark consideration of the time before fingerpaints, refrigerator art, and even sidewalk chalk."—BCCB
[Gerstein's] illustrations are colorful and dramatic.— Library Media Connection
"The line, acrylic, and colored-pencil art, which fills up each spread, has the buoyant feeling of discovery and is clever in the way it turns imaginings into pictures. A way to think about the start of art."
K-Gr 3—In this compelling picture book, Gerstein invites children to travel back in time more than 30,000 years to a cave in what is now southern France. Using thickly applied acrylics and rough strokes of black ink, he creates a prehistoric setting complete with a community of early humans, giant woolly mammoths, and one inquisitive caveboy. Told in second-person narrative, the text asks readers to put themselves in the mindset of the boy surrounded by wide-open skies, plush drifting clouds, and a great diversity of flora and fauna. A true artist, the child sees more than the surface appearance of his world. Gerstein's illustrations of rocks, clouds, and shadows cleverly conceal animal shapes that both readers and the protagonist are compelled to discover. At first, the other cave dwellers are dismissive. Then the youngster does something unprecedented: he picks up a burnt stick and begins drawing on the walls. For his fellow early humans, this first taste of art is scary and disconcerting. "Magic!" the boy's father exclaims. It is, in fact, the world's first drawing. An author's note provides background on the real-life drawings in the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc cave and the discovery of a human footprint belonging to an eight-year-old child. Pair this title with Emily Arnold McCully's The Secret Cave (Farrar, 2010) to extend the lesson and learn about the 1940 discovery of the caves in southern France.—Kiera Parrott, Darien Library, CT
Who made the world's first drawing--and why? Caldecott Medalist Gerstein gives his own imagined answer to this question in a polished tale of a boy living 30,000 years ago with his pet wolf and his very extended family. Using narrative direct address ("Imagine… / you were born before the invention of drawing") to effectively bridge the gap between prehistoric times and the present, the story follows the boy on his fanciful discoveries of wooly mammoths in clouds, bears in stones and horses galloping on cave walls. The boy tries to show his family what he sees, but they see only a cloud, a rock and a cave. Gerstein's acrylic, pen-and-ink and colored-pencil mixed-media illustrations create depth and a sense of the past, as well as imparting liveliness and possibility to what could easily have become simply flat drawings. Like the boy in the story who finally, in frustration, picks up a charred stick and draws on the cave wall to make what he sees in his imagination plain to his family, readers may discover that they see pictures of their own within these layered illustrations. Solid storytelling, satisfying narrative circularity, and masterful, creative illustrations make this an inspiring story for young artists. (author's note) (Picture book. 2-6)
