Pinty
Tailor was a little boy who enjoyed going to school and doing all sorts of
things, except for art and writing. Using brushes and pencils did not come easy
to Pinty, so his works of art did not end happily, and he would just give up in
disgust.
But
one day Pinty found a pencil of such lovely colours that he could not resist,
and he tried drawing a circle. As ever, it did not go well, and he was about to
throw the pencil away when his drawing began to speak to him.
‘Psst!
You aren’t going to leave me like this, are you? Come on, the least you can do
is draw me a pair of eyes!’ said the drawing. Pinty was understandably shocked,
but he managed to draw two little spots inside the circle.
‘Much
better, now I can see myself,’ said the circle, looking around at itself…
‘Arghh! But what have you done to me?!’
‘I
don’t draw very well,’ said Pinty, trying to make excuses.
‘OK,
no problem,’ the drawing interrupted him, ‘I’m sure that if you try again
you’ll do better. Go on, rub me out!’ So Pinty erased the circle and drew
another one. Like the first one, it was not very round.
‘Hey!
You forgot the eyes again!’
‘Oh,
yeah.’
‘Hmmm,
I think I’m going to have to teach you how to draw until you can do me well,’
said the circle with its quick, squeaky little voice.
To
Pinty, who remained almost paralysed with shock, this did not seem like a bad
idea, and he immediately found himself drawing and erasing circles. The circle
would not stop saying
‘rub
this out, but carefully; it hurts,’ or ‘draw me some hair, quickly, I look like
a lollipop!’ and other funny remarks.
After
spending nearly the whole afternoon together, Pinty could already draw the
little figure much better than most of his classmates could have. He was
enjoying it so much that he did not want to stop drawing with this crazy new
teacher of his. Before going to bed that night, Pinty gave his new instructor a
hearty thank you for having taught him how to draw so well.
‘But
I didn’t do anything, silly!’ answered the little drawing, in its usual quick
manner.
‘Don’t
you see that you’ve been practicing a lot, and enjoying it all the while? I bet
that’s the first time you’ve done that!’
Pinty
stopped to think. The truth was that previously, he had drawn so badly because
he had never practiced more than ten minutes at a time, and he had always done
it angrily and grudgingly. Without doubt, what the little drawing had said was
correct.
‘OK,
you’re right, but thank you anyway,’ said Pinty, and before he went to bed he
carefully placed the pencil in his school bag.
The
next morning Pinty jumped out of bed and went running to find his pencil, but
it was not there. He searched everywhere, but there was no sign of it. And the
sheet of paper on which he had drawn the little figure, although still full of
rubbing out marks, was completely blank. Pinty began to worry, and he did not
know if he had really spent the previous afternoon talking with the little man or
whether he had dreamt the whole thing.
So,
to try to settle the matter, he took a pencil and some paper and tried to draw
a little man.
It
turned out not bad at all, except for a couple of jagged lines. He imagined his
bossy little teacher telling him to round out those edges, and that it looked
like he was trying to give him spots. Pinty gladly rubbed out those bits and
redrew them. He realised that the crazy little teacher had been right: it made
no difference whether you had the magic pencil or not; to manage to do things,
you only needed to keep trying and to enjoy doing so.
From
that day on, whenever Pinty tried to draw or paint, or do anything else, he
always had fun imagining the result of his work protesting to him and saying
‘Come on, my friend, do me a bit better than that! I can’t go to the party
looking like this!’
