Z has been asking for assistance in a quest to draw portraits of people she is interested in, to supplement her daily quota of princess drawings.

Pee Wee's Playhouse is one of Z's favorite shows. We have several seasons, possibly all of them, on DVD.

Z drew the portrait of Pee-Wee above a few months ago, after rushing to find me during an episode of Pee-Wee's Playhouse and complaining that she couldn't pause the player at the right moment. She had assembled her drawing equipment (a cigar box full of markers and a stack of copy paper) and when I helped her track back to the pause position she wanted, she turned out a couple of studies, both with the odd, fanglike teeth shown above.

Rufus Wainwright is probably Z's favorite musician, thanks in part to me. We listen to his music a lot when I'm working on our desktop computer and she's coloring at her desk in our ZRecs home office, and she sings along with a lot of it. As adult as much of his music is, it seems to resonate with her as four-year-old girls often have a sense of doomed romanticism without understanding what "doomed" really means. I think they learn it from Disney films. Wainwright's cover photo for the 2003 album Want One also made a very big impression on her as she's very into princes and princesses. You can read a conversation Z and I had about him on Punnybop.


Z drew the portrait of him above about six months ago during one of our listening/singing sessions in our home office. She often has me print out coloring pages from the web for her to color, decorate, and cut out and she asked me to print out some pictures of "Woofus Wainwight" from the internet so she could draw him. In addition to coloring in teeth and adding makeup to the photos I printed out, she drew the above likeness. She was very proud of it, and I didn't ask her to explain the nose. The dense cluster of eyelashes is code, in Z's personal iconography, for her infatuation with him. Even princesses don't get that many lashes in her drawings.

I'm interested in the idea of putting together a book of portraits of celebrities by young children, but I'm not sure how common this behavior is. Do your children draw pictures of people they know about only through media exposure or as "fans", who aren't cartoon characters?