“Max was floored when he realized that spheres are just circles with some shading on the edges,” Max’s mother, Mallory Hoffsfield, said, holding up her son’s school notebooks, homework assignments, and Converse All-Star shoes, all covered in hand-drawn spheres. “Now he draws them everywhere, complete with intricate cross-hatching and a shadow to indicate depth. He’ll even use his thumb to smudge the shading so it looks more polished.”

Flipping through her son’s sketchbook, which has slowly devolved into page upon page of spheres, Hoffsfield noted that her son took a sudden interest in drawing spheres on every available surface after learning how easy it is to make a simple circle look deceptively 3-dimensional.

“Last year he was into drawing that block letter ’S’ on everything, but as soon as he learned how spheres work he moved on really quick,” Hoffsfield continued, watching as her son drew a sphere on the back of an envelope. “I guess his friends are really into spheres too and they all draw spheres together? I don’t really know; I just know he hasn’t been the same since the still life unit in art class.”

At press time, there was no looking back after Max’s friend taught him how to draw pyramids.