My Quick Thoughts: Perfect for young ones learning to draw! This art book features 28 different animals, and each animal has a page of step-by-step instructions followed by a practice page to try for themselves. I love how darkened lines show the addition/current step for the drawing as we go through the steps to the cute end result! The additional basic art-related information at the start of the book and fun animal jokes at the end are sure to appeal to parents and children alike.

Disclaimer: I got a digital review copy of this books from Netgalley originally and these are my honest opinions of the book. Please note that the review is based on a more recent reading of the book (library/personal copy)

This book is so much fun with the cartoon drawings. Each drawing is broken down into super simple steps that make it easy for just about anyone. And then you have coloring suggestions and practice pages. You can even practice tracing one of hers right there in the book.

From land, to water, to rodents, to insects, this book covers so many options to busy oneself with drawing. We found the instructions to be doable and not frustrating. It’s a great book to sit down with, thumb through, pick a favorite, and go for it. Once the drawing is on paper, then the coloring and making a picture around it comes in. Why not make up a family giving them all different facial expressions.
I received a digital copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.


*** Also posted on Barnes&Nobles

Hours of fun for kids. With colorful, simple-to-follow, step-by-step instructions, children will find it easy to recreate the cartoon animals featured in this excellent how-to book. Reptiles, jungle animals, furry animals, marine animals—they're all here. A few bonus pages at the end offer practice for drawing facial expressions and reading animal jokes. Five stars.

Nice Drawing Instruction book.

What a fun book for children (and maybe adults)! The bulk of this book shows a child how to break down drawing cartoon animals step by step. The authors start with a brief introduction, giving the artist things to keep in mind as they proceed through the book. The number of steps ranges from 5 to over 10 depending on the complexity of the animal. While some would be easy enough for a younger child, like the very simple elephant head, most would be more appropriate for an older child who has good fine motor skills and pattern recognition. The animals range from the normal to the unusual, featuring animals from all over the world and including both land and sea ones. Each animal is given two pages, one with the step-by-step instructions and one with space for the child to trace the animal and make three different versions of it. I like that each step clearly showed what changed between them. The authors use a heavier line for the new additions to the previous illustration. I do think the amount of area given to draw your own versions of the animal would be a bit small for most children. They should actually just grab a standard blank sheet of paper and attempt the drawings. After the step-by-step instructions to draw specific animals, the authors give several pages for the child to fill in a variety of facial expressions for different animal heads, like a lion. These are given in small, medium, and large sizes. The book ends on a single page of colorful animal jokes. If your child likes to draw and likes animals, this book is probably perfect for him or her.

I loved to draw as a kid. Sometimes I get a chance to draw with my friends' kids when I am hanging out with them babysitting. It's a lot of fun! And I definitely prefer drawing cartoon animals over trying to draw more realistically. I think I do better with this.

This book is so much fun with the cartoon drawings. Each drawing is broken down into super simple steps that make it easy for just about anyone to become an illustrator. And then you have coloring suggestions and practice pages. You can even practice tracing one of hers right there in the book.

The pictures do vary in difficulty and you can't be too upset if yours doesn't look exactly the same as the one in the book. You can even spread your wings and make your own variations. And there's no rule that says you have to go completely in order of the way they are presented in the book. Poke around and decide where you want to start and go from there. There's an animal for everyone!

As a bonus at the back, there are some cheesy animal jokes that kids love to share over and over again.

Overall, it's a very fun book that even this adult enjoyed!

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with a requested review copy. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

A Kid's Guide to Drawing Cartoon Animals shows simple and easy to follow directions to draw adorable animals. I showed my daughter the book and she cannot wait to try and draw a few of her favorite animals. This would be an excellent book for indoor recess at school for the students who love to spend their recess drawing.

Very cute book! I enjoyed trying to draw the animals. It's a very fun activity for kids. I got an advance reader's copy of this book complimentary from NetGallery in exchange for my honest review.

Going back to animals for a moment, A Kid’s Guide to Drawing Cartoon Animals almost immediately became one of my favorite how-to-draw books. This book contains guides to drawing 28 different animals, making it one of the most densely packed of them all.

Included are a wide variety of different animals from domestic pets like dogs and cats, wild animals like lions and elephants, sea creatures like sharks and sea otters, to creepy critters including a snake and a tarantula. All are highly stylized but realistic—there are no sunglasses or handbags on these friendly faces. At the back of the book is a number of blank animal heads with examples of different expressions so you can practice giving your animals even more personality.

A Kid’s Guide to Drawing Cartoon Animals only uses the step-by-step method but these steps are highly detailed with only small jumps between each one, making them some of the easiest to follow. I felt as if I got some of my best results from this book. Each animal gets a full double-page spread with space on the right-hand side for you to practice.

If I could only pick one book to buy from this collection, it would be this one because it offers the widest variety of animals and the clearest step-by-step guides. My ten-year-old also felt that this was by far the easiest book to use and the most fun as well. For those looking to use other drawing methods, however, it’s best avoided.

This book can keep kids entertained for hours. The instructions are simple, but the end result looks like it would have been more complicated. I personally am not a great artist, but I was able to draw these animals.

When I was a kid, I doodled animals a lot. This is good timing for spending your time to learn how to draw animals step by step. If you are in quarantine and don't know what to do with your kids, perhaps you can give this activity by following the tutorials. I as an adult still enjoy this kind of book, because I do like drawing.

Inside the book, there are many kinds of animals. Good for kids who are still learning animal names. Also, you got a few tips from the author on how to enjoy drawing after all this book is for learning to draw in a fun way.

Good for kids and adults alike! There's a great variety of animals that are depicted very cute and are fairly easy to draw, even for beginners. I think this book would be useful for anyone with an interest in learning to draw animals. The otter is my favorite!

This is an easy and straight-forward way to entertain your child - let 'em loose in the zoo...but not just any old zoo: the zoo of the imagination where they get to draw animals all day long. The drawings included in here, by Jeff Schinkel, along with step-by-step instructions and the space right there in the print book to emulate the examples - run the gamut from...well not A, but Bee to T for tiger (or tarantula!), and include an insect or two, a mollusk, a gastropod, and the aforementioned arachnid. Predictably, most of the animals are mammals. I'm not going to say it's a crock, because that would be a misspelling, but there is one dangerous reptile, and one cute fish to horse around with, but no birds.

That said, the animals that are included are quite diverse, and easy to draw even for the inexperienced and lacking-confidence because of the guides to follow. There are hints and tips, and outlines to add faces to existing drawings in one section. Some of the animals are the entire thing, others just faces, and on that score, there's a section with head outlines, and a selection of practice faces full of weird expressions that your kid gets to copy in the blank spaces. There are cats and crocodiles, gorillas and koalas, rats and reindeer. In short, plenty to provide practice skill and the confidence that comes with it.

I think this is a fun and useful book for any budding artist.

This book help any person (not only children really) to learn how to draw some animals using simple step-by-step method.

Oh my what a fun activity! The kids loved every page of this and never wanted to put it away. Lots of family fun and they still draw what they memorized and want to learn more.

This book was so cute. I love all the pictures and animals that the author chose to teach others to draw. each animal and picture was more adorable than the next one. I am excited to try more of the pictures and use this book to teach my client's. Thank you Netgalley.

Step-by-step guide book that is easy to follow. The animals are all super cute and yet not too overdone that they don’t look like the animals they are supposed to be.

Super fun book for kids. I used this book with my grandkids and we spent hours of fun bonding time trying to draw the animals. The instructions and pictures are easy to understand and with practice to duplicate. I feel this would be the perfect book for the young artists in your life. I received this book from NetGalley for an honest review and I am so glad I gave it a chance.

OK, full disclosure - I used this book myself. I am no artist and have struggled with trying to take a stab at drawing. I figured using a kids book might be less pressure and have a greater variety of adorable drawings . I was right! It even gives you some very helpful words in the beginning of the book, letting you know that it's OK if your drawings don't turn out identical to those in the book.

My husband and I set out to show how awesome we could be at art by flipping through this book together, armed with crayons, pencils, and drawing paper. I chose a few to demo and I have to say - the steps were totally doable! Otter may have been the most challenging for me, but that was probably because some steps seemed rather large in expectations. This book would definitely entertain kids and I'm sure they would do an even better job than me and my husband. We sometimes got in our own way by assuming we knew the next thing to draw, only to have to erase or go back. I would recommend this to anyone looking for a great activity (with or without kids!).

This is a great guide for the beginning drawer. While it says kid in the title even the adult wanting to try something new will enjoy this book. My son and I went through the pages together and it was a lot of fun. My son is 11 and has gone back and forth with different drawing books over the years and he said that this is one of the better ones he has ever used!