Early Drawing Adventures

Since my last post, I have been thinking a lot about my first joys with drawing when I was a child. One of my earliest memories of drawing bliss was with my friend Daniel Cox. Daniel, like me, loved to draw. I remember that he loved to create little worlds within his drawings. He seemed to particularly like to draw cut-a-way views of forts and underground cities and such.He put an extraordinary amount of information into his drawings which reminded me of looking at museum dioramas crossed with ant colonies. Since he has become a surgeon since then, I can imagine that this obsession with details is still with him. I was quite taken with these little worlds and enjoyed to go to his house when I was 8,9,10 and draw my own little worlds along side him.Many hours of childhood bliss were the result of these drawing sessions. Around this time, I ordered a drawing book, Make A World by Ed Emberley. It is a sort of stick figure drawing book and quite approachable for any beginning artist. I still have my copy of that book that I got some thirty years ago. It is a wonderful drawing book that gives simple instructions for drawing everything including people, animals, buildings, vehicles, etc. All of his drawings are built up step by step with lines and simple shapes. I have included a link to this book at the side. He has lots of other really great drawing books which are loved by every child who has ever seen them. Adults like them too. In fact, quite a few families who live near me have been borrowing my little collection so that I've decided to get a duplicate set. The drawing I included with this week's blog is a pirate ship I did a few years back based on one of his how-to drawings. When I was a child, this was the sort of drawing I would create as I spent a lot of time by myself and drawing was one of the things I did quite often during that alone time. I loved to pour through drawing books like Emberley's and draw pictures from them and populate my imagination with these images. Like the child I was, I still love to spend time by myself drawing and pouring through drawing books. For those of you who have been following this blog and are interested in discovering and following your passions, I have found that mining childhood memories is a great way to reconnect with what excites me about life. Too many of us have put those memories into deep storage as we grew up. Tapping into those childhood joys has always been rejuvenating force for me and as my son Sinan get older, I look forward to sharing and reliving such things with him.