Hoping you can help me remember my favorite children’s book, here we go.
Title: Don’t remember but going with “Dog Learns Colors”
Details: I was born in 1997, and this is a book meant for preschool to kindergarten kids. I’m guessing it’s a late 90s (maybe earlier) or early 2000s book.
I can’t remember the cover well but I believe the dog was like a terrier, mostly whitish with maybe a spot or some brown fur. In the short picture book, each page is dedicated to a color and the dog then wears clothes matching and does an activity matching as well. I remember for yellow he wore a yellow raincoat and for purple I think there was some purple grape jam involved. I want to say for the color black the dog appeared as a mime maybe? I remember black and white stripes. I believe the plot involved trying to decide what his favorite color was.
The style used for the illustrations was unique, the pictures were simple and used minimal detail. I want to say they were a type of watercolor, the children’s book “Where’s Your Creativity?” is drawn in a similar style but it’s not quite it. I included a picture. Wishing you luck, thanks!
Hi original poster here,
Thinking more about this book, I’m rethinking the main character being a dog. I think now it might have actually been a bear similar to how a beanie baby looks, but he had a pet dog with him in the book! Maybe that extra detail helps solve it. Thanks!
I’m not finding anything definitive.
There’s no guarantee the book is in any of the following links, but if you think you might recognise the cover, have a scroll down the possibilities…
Each link covers a variation on a basic search parameter e.g. color + juvenile fiction etc, with a date restriction.
https://archive.org/search?query=subject%3A%22Color+–+Juvenile+fiction%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%5B1974+TO+2005%5D
https://archive.org/search?query=subject%3A%22Color+–+Fiction%22&sort=-date&and%5B%5D=year%3A%5B1970+TO+2005%5D
https://archive.org/search?query=subject%3A%22Colors%22&sort=-date&and%5B%5D=mediatype%3A%22texts%22&and%5B%5D=language%3A%22English%22¬%5B%5D=creator%3A%22american+motors+corporation%22¬%5B%5D=collection%3A%22dticarchive%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%5B1950+TO+2005%5D
The last link is the most general and covers several hundred books, hopefully in date order, going back chronologically from 2005. If the book has been digitised, this is the widest net. However, books can be uploaded without the relevant tags, so it’s not guaranteed that data searches based on categories (in this case ‘color’) are picking up all relevant books.
Text based searches (not tag dependent) concentrating on variants of ‘grape juice’, ‘purple grape juice’ +/- yellow raincoat, coat, favo(u)rite colo(u)r(s)… are either throwing up high 5 figures of results (too many) or less than a dozen (not successful).
This one has a yellow raincoat, but otherwise doesn’t seem to fit…
https://archive.org/details/spotsbiglearning0000hill/mode/2up
I don’t have very detailed memories, but:
Could it be Eric Hill: Spot’s Favourite Colours (1997)?
Or if it is indeed about a bear, possibly Jocelyn Wild: Bear’s Book of Colours (1990) (I don’t remember whether this also contains a dog.)