I am trying to find a book that I remember reading as a child.
I do not remember the title but I think it was from the 1950’s.
It was a thin book about the size of a Golden Book.
At the end of the story the main character paints all of the landscaping overnight bright and beautiful colors, which surprises everyone the next morning… 🙂
Your description sounds like a Little Golden Book we had, called “Grandpa Bunny”, in which the head of the bunny family paints Easter eggs for a living, but continues after hours painting the houses, landscape, etc. He eventually grows old, teaching all his descendants to paint things too, and the ending is very touching. If you Google “Grandpa Bunny Bunny” (his actual name in the story), you’ll see lots of images.
Here’s the book you’re looking for:
Grandpa Bunny by Golden Books.
http://www.amazon.com/Grandpa-Bunny-Little-Golden-Book/dp/0375839305
This is a long shot, but could it be The Great Blueness, by Arnold Lobel? In a gray world, a wizard invents color, and paints everything first blue, then yellow, then red, but having everything just be one color upsets people, so he finally mixes all his colors and paints everything different colors. You can see a picture of the cover and some of the illustrations in this Flickr set: http://www.flickr.com/photos/16735390@N00/3910381168/in/photostream/
This could also be Tinky’s(sp?) Pink Clouds. Tinky was an elf who was supposed to paint the clouds white, one day he picked up the wrong paint and used pink instead. He was in trouble until they realized that the people underneath loved the new colour, so it was decided to have pink clouds every evening from then on.
This was in a book of other elf stories if I remember correctly, but have no idea of the title of the actual book.
The story of the elf Tinky is in a book by Mabel Lucy Attwell – not sure of the title though
The story was called Tinky’s pink clouds. It was part of the yearly album I was given for Christmas about 55 years ago.