Have you ever accomplished something that at first seemed very difficult, like learning to ride a bike or learning how to swim, or maybe learning how to write? The gospel is much the same way. We learn a little bit at a time, and eventually we can do hard things. And best of all, our Heavenly Father is pleased when we try our hardest and wants to help us to do this. So today, I thought it would be fun to draw a pile of books and talk about this. Thanks for coming to draw with us. Let's get going.

[CHEERFUL MUSIC PLAYING]

All right. So let's go ahead and start drawing these books.

Now to do this, we’re going to need to have a book up here and a couple other piles of books. So I'm going to show you how to do that.

And to start, I want to make a dot in the very center of my page. So it's in the middle here and the middle here. You find the very center.

We're just going to put a dot there, and that's going to help us to make the rest of the lines to create the book. And so after you get that one,

just take your finger and go up towards the top of the page,

maybe a little bit off to the right. And let's put a dot right there.

And after you have both of those,

what we’re going to do, because this is going to help us to draw a rectangle that's kind of on an angle.

So now we're going to go from here and you have both of these and just kind of go out this way. You can go down a little bit lower from here, up a little bit from here. You can see that I'm creating kind of like a triangle from these two dots.

And it doesn't have to be in the exact same place as mine, but just put a dot out here.

And then from there we're going to go over to the other side.

And do another dot. So you can see like we kind of have like this diamond right here. And if you don't want to use dots, that's okay.

If you can just draw it, that’s fine, too. But now I'm just going to connect all of these.

And that's going to help us to draw something that might otherwise be a little tricky.

So right there you can see we have our diamond. And that's going to be the top of our book, of our first book.

And so then when we get to the next book, I want you to just go a little bit below that. Maybe you could even use your finger to measure.

So maybe I'll just do the top part of my finger, and I'm going to do a dot right below that one.

And I can do the same thing right here. And do the same thing right there.

That can be a neat little measuring tool, your own fingers.

And then I'm going to do the same thing. I’m going to connect these dots and just draw as straight a line as I can.

Just like that. So now we can see that these match up. So now we're going to connect these to make our book.

And to do that I'm going to go to this top one. And I'm going to kind of curve off to the right here.

So I'm going to kind of curve and go down to connect it.

And then I'm going to do the same thing up here at the top as well.

So we got a really good curve there.

And then for this next part, I'm going to go all the way over to this corner where I was at. And I'm just going to go down here a little bit. I'm not going to draw, but I'm just going to go down a little bit

and I'm just going to draw a line straight down. So it follows the same edge as the side of my paper.

And then I can create another triangle. So it has a triangle right here.

And then if you have that it kind of looks like the edge of the pages on your book. So that can be kind of cool. If you want,

you could even put another line in here for where the pages end.

And then to create some pages in here, we can just create some lines. They don't all have to be the same length and they can be in different places.

And that's to make it look like there's pages inside of this book here.

And we'll decorate this book and put other stuff on it later.

But for now, let's get the the rest of the books on here.

So now the next two books. I just want to have this one stacked on top of them.

So we're going to do some nice straight lines that kind of follow the bottom of our page here. And it might help to do some dots again. So if I want a line to go through and I want to go through this book, but I don't want to draw through the book,

so I'm going to go up from the corner of my book and I'm going to go over here.

And then I can lift up my pen and go over here and say,

I want the other dot over here. And now I can connect them.

But when I get to here, I want to stop and lift it up, put my pen back down and then go the rest of the way.

Okay, so now to create the rest of this book,

you can do kind of a sideways line. Instead of going straight up, just go a little bit to the right.

And that'll connect it to the book there.

And you can draw your books however you want, if you want to angle them different, or if you just want to draw three books this way, you could, too.

You can draw your books however you want to.

This is just one way that I do it. And then I'm going to do the same thing. I can go that same direction out this way.

And then if I have a little bit of extra space, I can go back.

And then to create the spine of this book, I need another line that follows this line. So I'm going to do the same thing.

If it helps to put dots here and here, you can do that and then draw lines to connect them.

And then we can follow this line back out again.

And then for the ends of the pages, straight down again, just like the edge of the page.

And then you can create lines in here.

And so this is a fun, tricky way to draw stuff. And the more you do it, you could get better at it or learn other ways that you like to draw things.

And then I'm going to do the same thing and create one more book down here.

And you can do dots again if you want to.

Maybe I want this book to be the biggest book down here on the bottom. And I'll do the same thing. I'm going to create a rectangle.

And then when I get to this book over here, I'm going to stop.

Now I'm going to do the same thing here. I'm going to do two dots out here.

And we’ll go down, put a line over, and do the top of our book just like that, and we can put some more lines in here.

So now we have three different books here.

And the reason I want to do three different books is because I want to talk about some of the different things that we have to learn,

because the last thing that we learn how to do is write. But before we can write, we need to be able to do some other things, like maybe you've done this and maybe you haven't, but maybe you’ve learned the alphabet, if you know what the alphabet is.

So on this top book, I’m going to write ABC on it.

And that represents the alphabet.

And some of you have learned the alphabet, and maybe some of you haven't yet.

And so if you want to just draw a picture on there, you can or you can just color this book. You don't have to write this on it.

And then we can do some curved lines on it or decorate it however we want.

So that one says ABC on it.

And so then once we’ve learned the ABCs, or learned the alphabet,

then we can learn how to read.

And maybe you have brothers and sisters that know how to read, or maybe you're good at reading yourself. So on this next book, I’m going to write the word “read.”

And if you want to, you could maybe draw a picture of a book on this spine or just color it, you know, whatever it is that you like to do.

You can see my A got covered up a little bit and that’s okay.

And I'm going to draw some lines on here for just decoration.

And so now we've learned the alphabet. Now we've learned how to read.

And after we’ve done that,

then the next thing we might learn how to do is we might learn how to write stuff, and I think the cool thing about writing is that when we learn how to write, then we can share stories and things with other people that other people can read and learn from. So then we can teach other people and help other people.

And that's kind of a lot the way that our Heavenly Father works. We learn a lot of things from Him, but we don’t learn everything at once. He wants lots of things for us to learn. So, you know, at first maybe you go to Primary and then when you get older, you graduate from Primary and maybe you become a deacon, or you go into the Young Women’s and then after that, you might grow up and you might go into Relief Society, or you might work in different callings where you can learn new things that our Heavenly Father wants us to know, so we can get closer to Him and better help His children.

All right, so let's go ahead and start coloring these books. And the fun part is, you can color these however you like and use whatever colors you like. I'm going to start with this orange marker.

And while we’re coloring maybe we can talk a little bit about

how we learn things from our Savior a little bit at a time.

So I'm going to color this. I'm going to draw a big circle in mine just because I think that's fun. And then color this outside part orange.

And you could put zigzags on yours or do whatever you like.

But while we're coloring this, we can think about maybe some of the things that we have learned.

Our Heavenly Father says that we learn line upon line. We learn a little bit here and a little bit there.

We don't always learn everything all at once,

like we aren't born as babies and we know how to write yet. First we have to learn the alphabet. And that's the same thing with the gospel. We learn a little bit at a time. And so sometimes for a small child, writing could be really, really hard.

But that’s just because they haven’t gone through the other steps. They haven’t learned the other things first.

They need to learn the alphabet. And then they need to learn how to read. And all those steps can be really fun. Every step of this is learning and growing.

And so that's why I thought it'd be really fun to draw these pictures of these books.

And you can do different colors here. Maybe I'll do some blue on the spine.

But not only that, but Jesus Christ wants to help us learn. And that’s why He’s given us scriptures. And He’s given us teachers and other people at Church to help us to learn.

I'm going to put another circle inside this circle.

So we know that Jesus Christ helps us to learn, too,

so we’re not even doing this on our own.

He even teaches His older children,

the prophets and the apostles and all the leaders in His Church. They’re always learning things, too. So we can constantly learn.

And Heavenly Father is very happy when we want to try our best and learn new things.

And I'm going to put some more lines here.

I’m just going to put some blue lines here on these pages because I think that's fun.

And then if you have that little edge part you could put some color there.

All right. So I’m going to go ahead and color this next step where we're learning to read.

Maybe for this one, I'll pick this purple color. That sounds like fun.

And so maybe you can think of all the different things you’ve learned. I’ll bet every single one of you has come so far in life. You’ve learned all kinds of things, and that you've even learned more things about the gospel.

And hopefully today we’re learning some more things that we didn’t know before,

or remembering things that we learned before.

That just helps us to continue to grow so that we can grow even stronger

and grow our testimonies.

And then for this last book I think I’m going to do

this

aquamarine or greenish blue color here for “Write.”

So even when we’ve learned these things, we go on and we learn even more.

There's so many wonderful things to learn in this world.

And that is why we're here. So that we can learn and grow.

And so that's why our Heavenly Father is so happy when we do it,

because that’s why He sent us here and wants to be here, and He wants to help us with it.

And today you guys are all here, and you're even learning new things about art and drawing,

so we can learn all kinds of things in the world. And you'll notice that even now,

you are better at drawing than you were a couple years ago.

And you probably might have older brothers and sisters that already know how to read and write, or they’re going to school, but they all had to learn the ABCs first, too.

So all of us have to go through and we need to learn different things, and as we learn them, then

we can add on new things and new things that we want to do, and we want to learn that our Heavenly Father wants for us.

Look at all these beautiful books. All of these pictures, they demonstrate how we learn a little bit at a time, and our Heavenly Father only wants us to do a little bit at a time. And as we learn the different steps, eventually we can do things that might otherwise seem very difficult.

I had a lot of fun drawing with you guys today.

I can't wait to see you guys next time. Thanks. Bye.