Can't wait. I think it'll be like going to Heaven. My friends will be there, too. My first art class at the Castle. She's also my piano teacher, and she thinks I'm terrific. I wonder if after today she will still think I'm terrific. I want to paint doggies and horses. It's gonna be fun.

First we write our names on all our stuff: pads of drawing paper, brushes, paints, canvases. Then, before we paint, we do five-minute charcoal sketches of Eddie-Teddy. The three of us take turns posing Eddie-Teddy; sometimes he's standing on his head, other times he's standing on his chair. Our teacher sets a timer to make us sketch quickly and to help us learn to draw from life. "People don't always sit so still as Eddie-Teddy," she explains.

Here I am, holding up my charcoal pencil, measuring and comparing things. See? Our teacher shows us how to "see" things. Like, compare the distance between the teddy's eyes to the distance from the corner of one eye to his nose. Hey, it's the same distance! I never noticed that before. She tells us to find the shadows on one side of Teddy's face and to study how the sunshine circles Teddy's ears.

The timer goes off, and hey, I'm not done! That's okay, she says, we're just warming up. Now it's time to paint our favorite pose. This is fun! Someday I'm gonna be famous!

It was one of those moments too wonderful to pass up. I was showing three of my students how to draw a teddy bear by first measuring the comparable distances between eye-to-eye and nose-to-eye. In "Young Artists", the girls are checking their measurements. We sketched "Eddie Teddy" in about 10 different poses -- sitting sideways, holding flowers, from the back, and, most tiring for him, balancing on his head. But someone always set the timer to four minutes so our model wouldn't get too tired. When it was time to paint, each girl chose her favorite pose to paint on canvas.

Happy music and art, Cinder LeDell