I can’t wait for my child to get old enough for arts and crafts and drawing. As an adult, I feel like we’ve lost that element of creativity and wonder long ago. There are books that try and help us recapture that, like How to be an Explorer of the World, but I’m excited that many of these “adult” books can work well with kids, too, especially the artsy books.

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A Japanese author brings us a great series called Illustration School. I’ve highlighted Let’s Draw Happy People and Let’s Draw Cute Animals, and these books actually do walk you through step by step how to draw each of her figures accompanied with thoughtful annotations. Great for probably 7 years and up.

Rosie Flo’s Travel Coloring Book – There are many books in the series covering Rosie Flo’s Kitchen, Garden, Animals, Night-Time (requiring gelly pens), Fashion Show and more. There’s also a few for the boys including Johnny Joe’s Time Travel Colouring Book. While it is a coloring book, it also allows you to draw in the faces and limbs. The Let’s Draw Happy People mentioned above would be a great tool to have alongside this for adding faces.

Taro Gomi – you may know him from the famous book Everyone Poops, but he has these really great doodly books, too: Happy, Grumpy, Wake up, and Cheer up. I bought the Happy Doodle Book for myself while on vacation and it has random lines and squiggles on each page that you can let your imagination run wild with. As an adult, it feels more liberating to start drawing from a little messy scribble than having a crisp blank page to agonize over. It uses imagination, and I love the idea of gifting the same book to two siblings and seeing how they interpret and draw out each page. I think this would work well for younger children, whereas many of the other books I’ve selected are probably age appropriate at 7 and up. Gomi also has a Scribbles, Doodles, and Squiggles series.

Secret Garden: An Inky Treasure Hunt and Coloring Book – Super intricately detailed drawings to color with a Where’s Waldo-type premise.

712 More Things to Draw – Each page is divided into one to four sections with a simple word to work with. Examples include: a pie-eating contest, synchronized sky-diving, a taco, and a mortician. This book will not teach you how to draw the bundt cake – you have to figure that out for yourself. I find myself referencing google images often because I always need something to copy.

Ed Emberley’s Drawing Book of Faces. The faces and colors feel like something out of the 1970’s, and I like that many of his simple face techniques could be applied to making a thumbprint anthropomorphic. Now that I look, he does have a book to that effect: Ed Emberley’s Complete Funprint Drawing Book. His drawings are broken down step-by-step.

Oodles of Doodles: Over 200 Pictures to Complete and Create – This follows the same premise as the 712 More Things to Draw book, posing questions like “what has the dinosaur eaten,” but it is definitely geared more towards kids than adults. It also provides a little more structure by including some already-drawn elements with each page.

Charley Harper is one of my favorite artists, and we have a few board books with his illustrations. Sketch Book Charley Harper 28 Birds breaks his drawings down step by step.

I don’t know how many Hello Kitty or Dora coloring books I can personally handle, but these seem like great alternatives without being too intricate – Natural Wonders: A Patrick Hruby Coloring Book and Charley Harper Coloring Book of Birds.

If you or your child falls in love with any one of these books, many of the authors have many more similar books to add to your collection.

What are your favorite unsuspecting children’s activity books?