That's more like it.

Here is how I propose to spend the next week:You may care to note that my book is the same colour as the sky and earth. This is because it is a book about nature. You may also care to note that my children have staggeringly small heads. This is called “perspective”. Their heads are small because they are farther away. The sun, however, is not closer; it is just very, very, very big. This is the thing most people don’t understand about art – sometimes, it’s perspective; sometimes things are just really, really big. That should be the first thing people learn in art class, really. There should be a big poster on the wall that says “is it perspective, or just really, really big?” Then everyone would understand art.

What you see here, what I have made for you, is something called a “colour study”. In layman’s terms, that means that you kind of study the way a picture might look if it had colour. It’s also a kind of rough draft of what a painting looks like in real life. For instance, below is a colour study of the pretty famous painting “Mona Lisa” , by L. D. Vinci:
When you’re a pretty famous artist, they don’t use your whole name. They just use your initials. This also happens in music (k.d. lang) and in books (J.D. Salinger). But you have to be pretty famous before people start calling you just by letters.

Anyway, if you don’t believe me about colour studies, you can look below to see what the Mona Lisa looks like *after* the finishing touches were added.
As you can see, it is the same picture as the one above, only with a few more brush strokes here and there. Artists use ‘colour studies’ so that they don’t have to waste too much paint in the finished picture. It’s like writers, who do what are called “edits” so that they don’t have to waste too many words in their books. L.D. Vinci did this painting in a few hours, I guess. The colour study I did at the top there of our week today only took me a couple of minutes to finish, but I’ve been working on art probably longer than L.D. Vinci did. But he had a bunch of other stuff to do, and I only had to work on that one colour study.

There was this other guy who had, like, four names, but they only called him by one, kind of like Sinbad or Jesus. Anyway, he was a painter too, and they gave him a whole church to paint, and a bunch of people got mad at him because he wouldn’t use just one colour. So they just turned the Sistine Church into a Chapel and nobody really mentioned it again. It was one of those socially awkward moments. Artists often have socially awkward moments because nobody understands about perspective and colour studies.