Page 68 of Pete and His Precious

“I gotta warn you. I really can’t draw at all.”

He says that, but I know he doesn’t have to be an expert. All he has to do is be able to believably draw just a few things.

“I looked up some of the most popular items for face painting, and horses are number one.”

That surprised me. Since horses are often brown, and who wants to go around with a brown picture on their face? But, I suppose that most of the people who get their faces painted are young girls, and young girls often are horse crazy.

“A horse sounds like it’s so far out of my talent range I might as well try to contract the flu. That’s pretty much the only way I can think of that I would get out of this.” He fidgets in his chair, like the idea of drawing a horse makes him want to run.

“Now don’t talk like that. We’ll get this figured out. First of all, it helps if you have a picture to look at. So, what I did today was print off a bunch of pictures, and then cut them out and put them on a sheet of paper like this.” I pull out the cheat sheet that I made. I have glued on pictures that I got on a quick search of the Internet.

“I think I could draw a ball,” Pete offers, his gaze worried as he looks at the paper.

“By the time I’m done with you, you’re going to be drawing more than a ball. But yeah, I think you have that one down without my help.”

We work for a bit, with me trying to just give him the rudiments of drawing, and to talk a little bit about proportion, and how he looks at the picture, and then how he needs to just try to draw what he sees.

But, Pete was absolutely correct. When he said he had zero talent, he was giving himself a compliment.

Finally, I look at the twentieth horse he’s drawn, and I say, “I think you do a really good job on the back half of the horse.” That is the best compliment I can think of. The head is constantly out of proportion. It almost looks like an elephant in some cases, and in other cases it looks like the horse was severely deformed in utero. The kind of horse that would have died at birth if it had been born alive.

And that’s being generous.

“Thank you, I think.”

I grimaced.

He looks down at the table.

“Maybe I could draw the back half. I just need someone to draw the front half.”

I lift my brows, and tilt my head.

“That’s not a bad idea,” I say. Under no circumstances should he be allowed to draw the front of a horse on anybody’s face. It’s almost sacrilege to have him doing it on the paper.

He shrugs, like any idea is a good idea to him.

“Let’s try this with crayons. A pencil makes you be a little bit more exact, which I thought might be a good idea to try to get the proportion in, but I think crayons will more accurately reflect what we’ll be using, since they mimic paints a little better.”

“All right,” he says. “Do you mean that drawing with crayons is easier?”

“Yes. And paints should be even easier than that.”

“If you think I’m impossible, you can just say so.”

I shake my head. “No. You are right that this is never going to be your area of talent, but I do think that you’ll be able to get going well enough to paint faces at the festival. At the very least, we’re going to try.”

“I’m game for trying,” he says, and he picks up a crayon, and listens intently as I start to talk again. Then I show him, then he tries to imitate what I do. I think he actually gets better on the backend. He’s just really good at the lines in that area. But he can’t get that neck to look right for anything. Most of his horses look like dogs in the front, and a horse in the back.

We try elephants, dogs, zebras, and even a frog, and with each one he gets the lower or back half but just can’t seem to get the upper.

“Can you see pictures in your head?” I ask suddenly, knowing that I’d heard before that there was such a thing as people who actually didn’t see pictures in their mind. Which I think is really weird, but it might explain why he’s having such a hard time visualizing things. But he seems okay on the lines down, and he’s able to do that, and I just wonder...

“No. It’s just kind of fuzzy up there. I have to look at the picture, and then I can kinda see like a little fuzzy rendition of it in my head. There is another way everybody sees?”

“I see full-color, full detail, complete whole photographs in my head. When I read it runs like a movie in my mind.”

“Really? You’re kidding. You see full pictures? Like a movie?” he sounds shocked.

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