Badly Drawn Dog

The eponymous hero decides to pay a visit to an artist in order to receive a stylistic makeover, being as he is, tired of being badly drawn, tired of his ‘scribbliness, his scrawliness and his sketchiness round the eyes’. He experiments with Cubism, Van Gogh swirls and Warhol/Lichtenstein dots before the luke-warm reception that his efforts receive from his friends persuades him to return to the little girl whose artistic efforts were responsible for his original incarnation. She duly obliges, and before long Dog is back to his Badly Drawn self. Dodson’s book playfully addresses the anomalies of two-dimensional pictorial representation while at the same time revisiting the well-worn theme of envy, dissatisfaction and ‘you were better off as you were in the first place if you’d only appreciated what you had’. This is a nicely designed and produced book, if one that clearly subscribes to the theory that young children should be reared on a diet of seriously strong colour.