THAT STRANGE PERSPECTIVE

when I was six or seven years old, one of my two teachers asked me to
illustrate a story she had written. It was about a red hair boy whose dad was always
drunk. I did not know anything about drunks. “Just
draw a lot of bottles everywhere” said my teacher. She had chosen me because
a) I was good at everything and
b) it always seemed like I had nothing to do. That is what she told my parents anyway

the project involved about twenty drawings, so that took me weeks to complete. I
went crazy over the details, examining our house, and attempting to reproduce
as many things as well as I could. For some unknown reason, unknown even to me, I
drew many scenes as if seen “from above”
according to a strange perspective I had “invented”. You
could see the floor and two walls. The furniture was always flat, but
that was probably because I was unable to draw things in 3D. There
was an advantage to that: the characters had a lot of free room

the hero had a t-shirt with a picture of a cool car on it. Nobody had a neck. Instead
of empty bottles everywhere, there were many electrical sockets

::: ::: :::

[Picture: That strange perspective by reading_is_dangerous]

I could not draw one of those interesting neckless figures in the above picture because I cannot remember how I was drawing a nose when I was seven years old.

The book was never published. My mom fought over it, wanting to keep it, and she got it in the end. Unless I lost it, it must be somewhere at my parents's home in Canada, in the basement with the spiders.