My Mean Streak

This feels kind of bad, I suspected I had a mean streak, just a little one. It's often not a wide enough streak to carry through my mean ideas but I do have them.

Long ago when one of my older boys was homeschooling, I bought an art book for him to learn to draw landscapes. He's quite artistic and the book intrigued him. He enjoyed learning the techniques and being able to draw all these scenes he has in his head. My boys' dad is the kind who can whip out a scrap of paper and a pencil, scribble and dash for a moment and there in front of your eyes is a whole jungle scene with a little village tucked in the corner. After everyone marvels at it, he tosses a few more scribbles at the page and there's a tiger attacking a crew of comically frightened villagers. He does stuff like this with about eight or nine lines!

I found the book. Their dad may be an artistic genius but I'm not, I SO, SO want to be able to do this. But I've tried and...well, it wasn't a pretty sight! Is it mean to make D work out of this book?! It looks so scary and overwhelming! He enjoys drawing and has a book full of cartoons and comics he's drawn but that's a far cry from realistic landscapes. He is interested but he hasn't messed around with it any on his own.

How mean would it be to assign him some from this book just because I enjoy people's sketches?