Picked up a copy of a great book by Ed Emberley from the library book sale a few weeks ago and had a blast making some the “collages” with the girls last week. If you aren’t familiar with Ed Emberley, he’s an artist who created a simple system to teach people how to make complex pictures out of very simple shapes. We own one of his thumbprint stamp books and it is delightful to use it with toddlers. Our library has a DVD, “Drawing with Ed Emberley,” that we’ve watched so many times that I can sing most of the lyrics to most of the songs on it. And now we have Picture Pie 2. Our copy is missing the stencil that originally came with it, so we made our own. Here are a few links to Ed Emberley books (I’m not endorsing these sites….I’m including them here solely because they are cute and not Amazon. Not that I have anything against Amazon…it’s just nice to throw the smaller guys a bone or two every once in a while.)
More about Ed Emberley at Scholastic (with a very friendly-looking picture of him). And a link about Picture Pie from somewhere in his website….
Speaking of which, Ed Emberley, if you or those repsonsible for your public image ever read this, as of this date, July 10, 2009, I have tried and tried to open your website over the last few weeks and can’t get it to load. I get a tantalizing glimpse and then it crashes. I was, however, able to get to the pdf link I included above. If I was able to get into your website, I would contact you and ask permission to post a copy of the stencils here on my blog made specifically to be used with computer drawing programs. We used our stencils with my much-beloved ArtRage 2.5 and it was an excellent project to introduce layers and image manipulation (rotating stencils, re-sizing, etc.) for my kiddos.
