Having learned to be creative in drawing pictures at home, young Tommy is dismayed when he goes to school and finds the art lesson there much more regimented.

Describes how Vasya Kandinsky's creative life was profoundly shaped by a neurological condition called synesthesia which caused him to experience colors as sounds and sounds as colors.

Jean-Michael Basquiat and his unique, collage-style paintings rocked to fame in the 1980s as a cultural phenomenon unlike anything the art work had ever seen. But before that, he was a little boy who saw art everywhere: in poetry books and museums, in games and in the words that we speak, and in the pulsing energy of New York City. Now, award-winning illustrator Javaka Steptoe's vivid text and bold artwork echoing Basquiat's own introduce young readers...

Nine-year-old Gregory's house does not have room for a garden, but he creates a surprising and very different garden in an unusual place.

Flattered at first that all the other fairies and sparrow men want her to paint their portraits, Bess soon begins to feel overwhelmed and tries to find a way to return to the kind of painting she really wants to do.

Delly Porter enjoys the feel of soft dirt beneath her feet as she walks to and from school, but after a classmate makes her feel ashamed of having no shoes she learns that her parents and others, too, see value in things that do not cost money.

Micawber, a squirrel fascinated by art, leaves a museum with an art student and secretly uses her supplies to make his own paintings.

"Marisol loves to paint. So when her teacher asks her to help make a mural for the school library, she can't wait to begin! But wait-how can Marisol ever make a sky without blue paint? After gazing out the bus window and watching from her porch as day turns into night, she closes her eyes and starts to dream"--

Mary paints a balloon, a tree, and a sun before realizing that her artwork is missing something very important.

After a field trip to a museum, Matthew the mouse decides that he wants to be a painter, and he fulfills his parents' dream, though not exactly as they had expected.