Dragon Smear
My 7 year old daughter E had a project to do in school. They needed to take a paper lunch bag and decorate it so that the bottom flap did something with the character. She has been reading Wings of Fire and Dragon Masters, so of course she wanted to make a dragon.
E has been dragging this project on for a few days and knew what she wanted to make, but didn’t know exactly how to make it. She was going to draw this ice dragon, which needed to be perfect. Perfection is the enemy of progress though and that is where the situation landed. My wife stepped in to help my printing a photo of a dragon so E could use it to color and cut out. That’s when a lot of progress was made.
E wanted to finish the project one evening and was trying to color it. She was coloring between the lines and I thought it looked pretty good. Then E started to have a meltdown because the crayon smeared. I was so confused because it looked like she was coloring pretty well between the lines. I also thought crayons don’t really smear that easily. If it did smear, she could use another color to blend and give the dragon some pop in certain areas. I explained this all to E, which did not help at all.
After a while, I was demonstrating how rubbing my hand on the dragon where there was crayon used to color did not smear. The picture still looked the same. E was adamant that the crayon smears. We had a disagreement and she stopped working on the project. There was a stalemate.
The next morning, I was getting ready for work and as I was getting ready, I saw the back of my hand. There was crayon all over it somehow! E was dancing in the mirror in my bedroom and I showed her the hand. I said the crayon did smear! She had the biggest smile and said the most ridiculous I told you so to me. As a parent, I can admit I’m wrong and I can apologize for it. It’s something that I need to do to show my kids that it’s ok to do the same. Leading by example will hopefully work here, but hopefully, I won’t be wrong about too many art related situations in the future.
