Beezus and Ramona - Beverly Cleary [8]
Ramona beamed at Miss Robbins, who found a drawing board for her and a stool, which she placed between Beezus and Wayne. She lifted Ramona onto the stool. “There. Now you can share your sister’s paints,” she said.
Ramona looked impressed at being allowed to paint with such big boys and girls. She sat quietly on her stool, watching everything around her.
Maybe she’ll behave herself after all, thought Beezus as she dipped her brush into blue paint, and now I don’t have to sit next to Wayne. Since Beezus still had not thought of an imaginary animal, she decided to start with the sky.
“Do the sky first,” Beezus whispered to Ramona, who looked as if she did not know how to begin. Then Beezus faced her own work, determined to be free and imaginative. To be free on a piece of paper was not as easy as it sounded, she thought. Miss Robbins always said to start with the big areas of a picture and paint them bravely and boldly, so Beezus spread the sky on her paper with brave, bold strokes. Back and forth across the paper she swept her brush. Brave and bold and free—that was the way to do it.
Her sky turned out to be too wet, so while it dried a little, Beezus looked at what the other boys and girls were doing. Celia, who sat on her left, had already filled in a brave, bold background of pink, which she had sprinkled with big purple dots. Now she was painting a long gray line that wound all over her paper, in and out around the dots.
“What’s that supposed to be?” whispered Beezus.
“I’m not sure yet,” answered Celia.
Beezus felt better, because Celia was the kind of girl who usually knew exactly what she was doing and whose pictures were often tacked in the center of the wall. The boy on the other side of Celia, who always wanted to paint airplanes, was painting what looked like a giraffe made of pieces of machinery, and another boy was painting a thing that had two heads.
Beezus looked across Ramona to Wayne. He had not bothered with a sky at all. He had painted a hen. Beezus knew it was a hen, because he had printed in big letters, “This is a real hen,” with an arrow pointing to it. Wayne always tried to do just the opposite of what Miss Robbins wanted.
“Hey, quit peeking,” said Wayne in a loud voice.
“I’m not peeking,” said Beezus, hastily trying to look as if she had been interested in Ramona’s paper all the time.
Ramona had dipped her brush into blue paint and had painted a blue stripe across the top of her paper. “That’s the sky,” she said happily.
“But that’s not the way the sky is.” Beezus was trying to be helpful. She felt better, because Ramona had not plunged in and painted a picture full of imagination. “Skies should come farther down on the paper.”
“The sky is up,” said Ramona firmly.
Beezus decided she couldn’t waste time explaining about skies, not when she still hadn’t thought of an imaginary animal. Maybe she could take a real animal and sort of change it around. Let’s see, she thought, I could take a horse and put feathers on it. No, all those feathers would be too hard to paint. Wings? That was it! A horse with wings was an imaginary animal—a real imaginary animal—because Mother had once read aloud a story about Pegasus, the winged horse, out of a library book. In the story Pegasus had been white, which was a real horse color. Beezus decided to be extra-imaginative. She would make her horse green—a green horse against a blue sky. Miss Robbins ought to like that. Beezus did not think blue and green looked very pretty together, but Miss Robbins often liked colors that Beezus thought did not really go together.
Beezus dipped her brush into green paint and outlined a wing against the sky. Next she outlined the body of the horse and a long tail that hung down. It was a magnificent horse. At least, Beezus hoped it would look magnificent when she finished it. Anyway, it was big, because Miss Robbins liked her artists to cover the whole paper. Quickly and neatly Beezus filled in the outline of the horse, because Miss Robbins, who was looking at Celia’s picture, would look