A Splash of Red: The Life and Art of Horace Pippin by Jen Bryant

 

Title: A Splash of Red: The Life and Art of Horace Pippin 

Genre: Nonfiction: Biography 

Author: Jen Bryant 

Illustrator: Melissa Sweet 

Major Awards: Robert F. Sibert Honor Book 

Age group: Ages 5-11 

 

Summary: 

This is a book about the life of Horace Pippin and how he became an artist. As a child, he discovered he loved to draw and everyone in his family knew about his passion for art as well. Everything changed once he joined the military and got shot. He wasn’t able to lift his right arm anymore, therefore he wasn’t able to paint anymore. After a ton of practice and effort, he was able to paint once again. Soon after, famous people started noticing his art and before you knew it, his paintings were displayed all around the world. 

Evaluation: 

Appropriate grade levels for this book would be 1^st grade to 5^th grade. Melissa Sweet has a different type of illustrations that I wouldn’t normally like but for some reason, her illustrations in this book were great. I loved the way the text and the illustrations complement each other and the detailed in some of the illustrations. However, I would not use this book in my classroom because I think this book would be perfect for an art teacher. I can probably use it for whenever we are talking about art in our lesson, but I don’t know if I’ll ever have a lesson that teaches about art. This would be fun for an art class, for whenever they are talking about artists or whenever there is artist national day (if there is such day).