Pencil’s Perfect Picture

PreS-Gr 1–This book addresses a common anxiety of young children when they are asked to draw and may provide them with some strategies to overcome this concern. In the story, a personified pencil wants to know how to create a “perfect” picture. The pencil approaches a variety of art tools that have just created a picture—including a paint brush, a marker pen, a pastel, a group of crayons, and a piece of chalk—and asks how they manage to create a perfect picture. The tools find the pencil’s request surprising, and sometimes silly, and share why they create (“I paint for pleasure,” “I draw for peace, not perfection,” and “We draw because it’s fun!”). The marker pen also mentions that doing your best is most important when drawing. The pencil combines all of their thoughts and strategies to create a picture for a friend, finally realizing that the picture is perfect because it was made for another. The illustrations are simple, colorful, and two-dimensional.