Tuesday, June 12, 2012

my 6th grade drawings


I got a really unexpected email the other day. It was from my 6th grade teacher 
who had found me due to the magic of this great Internet driven, social 
networking , find anyone at the click of a mouse, age we live in! 

I asked her how she remembered me after all these centuries and she recalled 
that I always liked to draw, and that I had an unusual name. I gotta admit, 
there ain't too many kids with the name. "Elgin" running around.

She informed me that she was retiring from teaching, and was cleaning out some 
of her papers from her cases she'd accumulated over the years. She was delighted 
to find some pages from a class magazine I had illustrated, and asked me if I 
wanted them. Before I could the out a es, the pictures were sitting in my email 
box waiting to be downloaded,

You gotta love this electronic age.

The drawings I got were very revealing. It's a weird feeling going back in time 
and seeing yourself, and what impressed me the mst was that I had remained 
consistent to my dream of becoming an illustrator. Looking at this pictures, I 
can tell that objectively I wasn't the greatest artist. The figures are horribly 
dsproportioned, the anatomy isvmisaligned, the line quality is terrible, and the 
perspective is awful.  And yet none of that mattered to e. Judging how I kept up 
with it obviously, it shows thst I had a commitment to improve, and I 
objectively did. I also see that even back in six grade I had a love for comics 
and story telling, and an interest in drawing faces and capturing personality. 
Today I'm still drawing comics and doing caricature.

These drawings are inspiring and demonstrates that even the most talented 
artist, starts from humble beginnings. It's all about practice  and not giving 
up folks.






drawing live on the subway

here i am drawing e live on the train. i look at live drawing as just my way of communicating to the world. it puts people at ease, and makes an otherwise boring ride more exciting. its important not to treat this as anything special or else youll get too self concious and mess everything up.  learn to be in the moment and just draw.