Artistic freedom is at the intersection of Why Am I Creating This Street and Who Is This For Lane. Drawing Outdoors is an illustrated book about a fabulous teacher at a rural school and her very creative students. The pupils gather in the remote single-room house from a variety of trails that snake across the piedmont area. It’s a special day because the kids are told that their lessons will be outside. They’re going to explore, draw things in nature, imagine shapes and expand their horizons. Drawing Outdoors will appeal to lots of elementary-aged students, but there’s one elephant that’s presented early in the book that will water down most of the fun. You’re in for a time if you miss this because the kids won’t, and once they see it you’ll lose all control of the classroom, and the grand message of the book will be lost.
It’s a small detail that doesn’t even merit words to accompany the illustration. It’s a minor detail in the landscape of the school that’s set against the rising mountains. However, it’s also hugely distracting and impossible to un-see, once you’ve seen it, and it’s impossible to miss. For now, though, let’s relieve ourselves of the good aspects of the book.
The art in Drawing Outdoors is beautiful and allows young readers to see the hidden beauty of nature. Dinosaurs and animals are all around us in the shapes that the mountains, rocks, or trees might produce. The colors make is such that the flying birds pop out from the dark green trees, and the emerging artists are gazing at different aspects of each vista looking for inspiration.
The text spells things out as the classroom walk along the forest floor. With each new dinosaur that they encounter they stop to draw, paint, crawl on, or marvel at their size and scope of them. Young audiences will follow along as the Pterodactyls are flying overhead, but some readers will still be laughing at something else.
“Stop laughing”, you’ll say.
“But, there was a dog using the bathroom, it’s funny”, they’ll counter.
“It’s just nature, every animal uses the bathroom”, you will logically try to get them to understand.
“But the dog is…..”, they’ll try to say, but you’ll cut them off and go back to the pages that have pictures of the dinosaurs.
The elephant in the room of Drawing Outdoors, and what the kids will be immediately distracted by, is a dog urinating on the very first page. It’s when we first meet the teacher and the rural school. There’s a dog in front of the school, facing the reader whilst raising its back left led to relieve itself. That illustration alone will preclude this book from being a read-along book in elementary schools. It’s not because it’s crude, it’s just that young audiences will laugh that inappropriate laughter. They’ll howl with convulsions and have competitions to see who can be the first to tell their friends that there’s a book in the library that has a dog actively urinating in it.
Elementary school students are base creatures, aren’t they? 95% of Drawing Outdoors is a charming book about seeing the creative beauty in the world around us ……why is there a dog urinating on the second page of the book? If you erase the dog that percentage goes up to 100%, but it’s challenging to get your head past the fact of something that just doesn’t belong. Perhaps there was an underrepresentation of illustrated dogs peeing in books. I really can’t think of any more bathroom metaphors, jokes about urination or dogs peeing in books, I guess I’ll never be number 1 in that category.
You could read the book to kids and put your finger over the urinating dog. But then you’d look at the cover of Drawing Outdoors, see that character that looks like Beavis, from Beavis & Butthead and follow him throughout. It’s like Where’s Waldo, except with a Beavis-looking character and a dog that looks like it doesn’t have to pee.
Drawing Outdoors is by Jairo Buitrago and Rafael Yockteng and is available on Greystone Kids.
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