Rantabulous

My oldest son enjoys coloring and drawing.  I think he’s really good at it for a little guy, and for a year or more he has done some things that have really impressed me.  He has an amazing eye for detail, and I have wanted as much as possible to encourage his drawing.

When I was his age I drew a lot, and I always wished that I had taken drawing lessons.  Now that he’s 5 I feel like he is ready to get a little instruction.  I found an instructional book at our local library and my son was very excited to think we would be taking lessons together.  My idea is to spend an hour or so each weekend and work our way through the book.

This weekend was our first with the book so I thought it would be a great idea to take a piece of paper, draw something on one side, and then, once we were done with the lessons, draw the same thing again on the right side of the paper, and note the improvements.

My son drew Buddy, our elf on a shelf.  Afterward, we made it through the first chapter.  It was tough going because he’s 5, and the first chapter was mostly talking about left and right brains and trying to be all inspirational.  My son just wanted to draw.  We did a few exercises but it was all a bit much for his attention span.

Once I put everything away he asked for his paper with Buddy so that he could do the other half.  I mentioned that we had to wait until we were done with the whole book, but of course he wasn’t interested.

I didn’t want to ruin our plan, so I thought I would scan the page into my computer, and print out a copy.  Now, when I was 5, if my dad had gone to a computer and made a copy print out I would have thought he was magic.  I mean, an exact copy?  At home?  In a minute?  Wow!!

The printer started up and out came an exact copy of the drawing.  I handed it to him expecting the sounds of utter amazement to emanate from his shining face as I hand him this modern marvel of engineering.

He took the paper, look at it, looked at me and said “How come the lines are darker than my drawing?”  Kids these days, they don’t know how good they have it!

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