In last year’s Mechanimals, author/illustrator Chris Tougas married an original idea – a farmer who has lost his animals creates delightful new mechanical ones – to charmingly offbeat illustrations. With Art’s Supplies, he tells a simpler story enlivened by gorgeously coloured, saturated, uneven, mixed media, ink-splattered line drawings.

The tale really is straightforward: personified art supplies get together with a boy named Art for a party. In the process, the talking brushes, walking pastels, and blinking markers trade the exact sort of silly humour that this book’s target readership loves best. The art supplies, interacting freely with the narrator, tell knock-knock jokes, one-line groaners, and pun after pun on the theme of art and art supplies (such as “The paper started it by inviting everyone to her pad for a party” and “The markers all agreed that they FELT great”). Art’s Supplies ends with Art standing in front of a mess of paint-smeared floor and walls, a suddenly inanimate array of art materials, and several gorgeous childish canvases.

Building like the more unusual and inventive Mechanimals to a punchline, this book is something of a meditation on the value of untrammelled, festive creativity. But really, Art’s Supplies is less a fable than an excuse to string together a stream of knee-slappers amid exuberant colours and lines. For readers of that age who really appreciate wordplay and punnery, that’s all you need. Tougas’s great skill at joyous illustration is just icing on the cake.