ED EMBERLEY'S BIG GREEN DRAWING BOOK

Paired, overlapping circles form the basis of the "prata" people and animals that open Emberley's latest batch of step-by-step drawing demonstrations. He explains in the front endpapers (there is no paper wasted here) that prata is an old Irish name for potato, but these cartoon figures might just as well be based on peanut forms. Departing from pratai, Emberley also has some fun with snakes, with cats and dogs based on log shapes (thus "cat-a-logs" and "dog-a-logs"), with dressed-up tracings of hands, and with other more complicated figures including a Jekyll-Hyde head that flips personalities as you turn it upside down. Complete with Dracula, a three-masted schooner, and the resident fauna of planet Zort, this seems to be a catchall for Emberley's odds and ends—not as basic and nifty as some of his drawing books, though ingenious enough to amuse.