The Color Factory

by Eric Telchin, Diego Funck (Illustrator)

Overview

Introducing The Color Factory, an interactive and entertaining picture book in the vein of Hervé Tullet's Press Here and Mix It Up! and a wonderful follow-up to The Black and White Factory.

Welcome to the Color Factory! Penguin, zebra, and panda will take you on a very special tour to see all the wonderful, factory-approved colors that are made here, like:

Robin's Egg Blue

Canary Yellow

Chocolate Brown

Fire Engine Red

But when the tour gets to the perfect replicator machine, the factory workers mix Canary Yellow and Fire Engine Red only to find that the new color is not factory approved! It's up to the readers to help get the non-factory-approved colors off the page! But if they can't, the factory must be closed.

Can penguin, zebra, and panda come together to approve the new colors (which are fluorescent!)?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781499805567
Publisher:	little bee books
Publication date:	06/19/2018
Pages:	40
Product dimensions:	9.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.40(d)
Age Range:	4 - 8 Years

About the Author

Eric Telchin grew up in Niskayuna, New York, and graduated from George Washington University. He worked in design at ABC News and at washingtonpost.com before creating Boy Sees Hearts, which showcases photographs of naturally occurring heart shapes, and writing the books See a Heart, Share a Heart and The Black and White Factory. He currently lives in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Diego Funck is an illustrator and graphic designer from Buenos Aires, Argentina. He's been drawing professionally for the past ten years, creating children's books and working with educational publishers in Belgium, Congo, Haiti, and India. He previously illustrated the children's picture book The Black and White Factory. He currently lives in Brussels, Belgium.

Editorial Reviews

2018-04-18
Operators at a color factory lose control and ask readers for help.A panda, a zebra, and a bespectacled penguin—the same characters who managed The Black and White Factory (2016)—invite readers into the Color Factory for a grand-opening tour. This manufacturing plant uses a fancy replicating machine to calculate a color's exact ingredients. The color-creation process is never depicted; instead, one page displays the upcoming color's ingredients—Fire Engine Red and Canary Yellow make Factory-Approved Orange, for instance—while the following page reveals objects of that color (in this case, basketballs, traffic cones, and safety vests). The text bristles with rigid language, such as "strict formulas," and frequent repetition of the terms "Factory-Approved" and "perfect"; when things inevitably go awry, the drama feels as forced as these rules do. It's also unclear quite how things go awry. After readers are asked to pull blue and pink separately onto a lollipop, the lollipop suddenly has brown-gray stripes, and other objects are somehow colored in warm grays: "We do not approve!" yells the zebra as sirens wail. Actions requested of readers—tapping, rubbing, or inhaling colors—are disconnected from the displayed results. A chaos of circles, swirls, diagonals, and jagged lines along with too many similarly saturated colors create busy pages lacking focus. Hervé Tullet's Mix It Up (2014) treats similar themes brilliantly and without blaming readers in the process.Visually cheap, narratively forced. (Picture book. 4-7)

Kirkus Reviews