Blue in the Forest

The girl had a blackened pink eraser at the end of her pencil. The art teacher had a beautiful white plastic eraser that wiped out pencil lines without tearing the paper. He leaned over now, and used it to erase the bottom half of her dog’s legs.

"You have the proportions off," he said. "No dog would have legs that long." He sketched little ovals where he wanted her to redraw the paws. "Now, over here, the house you drew has a problem with perspective." His eraser swiped away the yellow chicken leg that held up her house. "The angles of the house are fine, but the tree you drew looked stuck under the foundation. When you draw a tree you need to make it overlap, and add some branches like this."

In her drawing, the stunted dog was now floating mid-air, and the house was solidly set into the ground. The art teacher was lightly sketching a birch tree next to the foundation. "It wasn’t a tree," she heard herself say. "It is a chicken leg."

His hand stopped sketching. "I’m confused," he said. "Were you trying for Surrealism? You need to practice drawing what is real first. You aren’t ready for Surrealism."