Wild rumpus

I can’t draw. You wouldn’t want me on your Pictionary team. I also have a fifteen-month-old, so tushy humor is big right now. For these reasons, Brian Snyder and Alexis Moniello’s Everything Butt Art at the Zoo (Madbrook, May) caught my eye. “What can you draw with a butt? Everything!” Starting with a flattened-looking W (i.e., bum shape), the authors demonstrate, step by step, how to sketch fifteen different zoo animals, from a simple-ish six-step snake to a more involved twelve-step lion. A lot of the fun is seeing where the butt shape will take you; for almost all of the animals, the starting-point wiggly line doesn’t end up forming the rear. Sometimes it’s paws, sometimes cheeks (on the face, that is), sometimes a big, wide grin.

There’s no way kids won’t think this is funny, and it does get them thinking, between giggles, about shapes and forms. The fun continues on the website, and it looks like an app is on the way. Visual art is taken out of the museum and plopped right into the zoo—just where kiddos might want to find it.

—Elissa Gershowitz