After running away from her last foster placement with the Regan family, twelve year old Hollis Woods is placed with a new foster mother, the loving, retired art teacher, Josie Cahill. Hollis is a talented artist and her life stories unfold through her pictures. One revealing picture is the "W" picture Hollis drew for a first grade class assignment on the letter "w". Hollis drew her Wish, her Want. She drew a picture of a family. Hollis had that family in the Regan's, but fear of attachment and motional turmoil caused her to run away. As Josie's forgetfulness grows worse, Hollis is forced into the role of caretaker. Through her artwork and her care of Josie, Hollis Woods finds her family. Based on the Newberry Honor award winning book with the same name.

In an airport hotel on the outskirts of Paris, a Silicon Valley engineer abruptly chucks his job, breaks things off with his wife, and holes up in his room. Soon, fate draws him and a young French maid together.

A celebrity reads a story, enhancing it in ways that will entice the most restless of children.

Winsor Z. McCay bets another cartoonist that he can animate a dinosaur. So he draws a big friendly herbivore called Gertie. Then he get into his own picture. Gertie walks through the picture, eats a tree, meets her creator, and takes him carefully on her back for a ride.

Jerome, a kid from the suburbs who loves to draw, goes to New York City's Strathmore College for his freshman year as a drawing major. Competition and petty jealousy consume faculty and students, with an end-of-first-semester best-student award held out as a grand plum. Worse, a strangler is on the loose, killing people on or next to campus. The idealistic Jerome falls in love with Audrey, a student who models for life-drawing classes and who responds to his sweetness. But he has a rival: the clean-cut, manly Jonah, also a first-year drawing student, whose primitive work draws raves and Audrey's attention. As cynicism seems to corrode everything, Jerome is desperate to win.