There is a Chinese legend about a boy with a magic paintbrush. Somebody did a picture-book version, which I saw on Reading Rainbow.
I guess I have never forgotten. The boy is given a magic paintbrush and
he begins to paint and all hell breaks loose. He paints Chinese dragons
writhing in the sea and they come to life. The water that he has
painted floods his room. He has numerous adventures, and is borne to
far-away lands, buffeted by the crazy fecundity of his own mind, the
billowing hills and rushing whitewater. He’s a little bit intoxicated
with his brush. But the real problem is that art come to life is
essentially—it’s just reality. He can’t color or inflect it the
way he could with art that stayed on the canvas. And so he finally
develops a technique: if he leaves just one thing out, so it isn’t quite
real, it can’t come to life. By the close of the story he’s leaving one
eye out every time he paints a deer
