Promotion for Penguin Books
Meet Goose, a passionate artist who wants to create a PERFECT portrait and win the village art competition. But after a whole week of painting Puffin and friends, Goose is all aflutter. Is an artist’s work EVER good enough?
I’m Goose! And I descend
from famous painter geese.
Every day I paint and draw
to make a masterpiece.
As Goose paints and paints to make the perfect picture, the deadline draws closer, the pressure mounts and Goose feels the cherished award slipping further and further out of reach. Then disaster strikes. Will anything or anyone help our tortured hero win through?
This delightful story is set in the endearing world of Puffin the Architect and her friends. Perfect for inquisitive and creative children aged 2-5 years, they will love poring over Kimberly Andrews’ detailed pictures and spotting the spider hidden on every page.
We asked Claudia and her daughter Aria (5) to review Goose the Artist – the fourth story in Kimberly Andrews’ award-winning series that explores a community of charming animal characters and their working lives.
A passionate young artist
Aria (5) is a passionate young artist herself so Goose the Artist immediately caught her interest. We settled in for some bedtime reading together, and I didn’t realise before we started just how much she would relate to this story.
You see, she is a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to her creations and can get very upset when something she is drawing or painting doesn’t come together the way she thought it would in her mind.
The message from Goose
Five-year-olds have big emotions, and I often have to step in to calm her down or help her to “fix” something that is not quite right in her artwork. I try to explain as best I can that making mistakes is part of life and it’s how you learn and get better at something, but sometimes hearing this from someone else (like Goose) can reinforce this message better than Mum can.
Meet Goose
Goose loves painting and decides to enter an art competition, so gets to work on some portraits of his animal friends. After each painting, his friends praise his work and find all the positives in it, yet Goose only sees what is wrong with it and decides that each painting is not as perfect as it should be to enter the art award competition.
As the deadline to the competition gets closer, Goose gets more frustrated with his work and can’t decide which of his paintings is good enough to enter. Then, on the morning of the art awards, disaster strikes. It is how Goose recovers from this disaster that really showed Aria that looking for the positives in not only her artwork, but also in unexpected situations, can lead to very happy outcomes.
Beautifully illustrated
The illustrations in this book are charming and incredibly detailed – busy and colourful with lots to look at and talk about. Also, if you look carefully, there is a hidden spider on every page so we had a lot of fun trying to spot him as we turned the pages.
Aria loved hearing about the basic shapes Goose uses to begin each of his paintings and this gave her some new ideas about things she wanted to draw and paint.
It gave us the opportunity to talk about being creative and the mistakes that might happen along the way in a positive light and I loved seeing Aria think about this differently.
Thanks to Goose the Artist, I hope she will now be more accepting and tolerant when things don’t go her way with her creations, and that she finds ways to turn mistakes into something beautiful.
Free Goose the Artist printable
Click on the image to download and print the free Goose the Artist instructions so your child can learn to draw portraits of their favourite animals.
Visit Puffin Books for more great kids titles.
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- The Māori Picture Dictionary / Te Papakupu Whakaahua | Book Review
- Atua: Māori Gods and Heroes | Book Review
- Discover, or revisit, our Puffin Books of the Month from previous years!
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