Drawing Comics with my Grandson

There is not much that gives an artist greater joy than sharing a drawing board with their child or grandchild. I had two children of my own and have been blessed with five more grandkids, all of whom that also have the drawing bug that I had in my youth.

My youngest grandson, Escher, is the most talented and dedicated of all of them, and when he comes to stay for a weekend, he puts me through my paces as I try to keep up with him. We crank out many pages of things done in pencil, markers, and paint; he is up for it all.

Recently he has taken an interest in comics, particularly multi-paneled pieces that tell a story. I didn’t initiate this, he simply began doing it with no help from me. It’s very interesting to watch him construct his page with panels and then fill them up with a tale that it appears to have been in rough form in his head from the start.

This first example is, as I gather from him, about a video game (no surprise), which I, of course, have no knowledge about. I was again totally in the dark when my six-year-old granddaughter told me about K-Pop Demon Hunters, much to her dismay. Yes, Grandpa is hopelessly out of the loop with current events (not an accident), but I have made progress thanks to her.

Here is Escher’s two-pager, complete with a title page.

The Backrooms Story by Author/Illustrator Escher Collins. I’m not sure why he is signing his name as Escher. Collins. Artists!

Below is Escher’s transcript, typed by him on my Mac Studio. He wanted to type this out himself, and he had fair typing skills and punctuation. Not surprisingly, he has always been ahead on his age group in reading and writing as well as in artistic instincts. He told me to “go somewhere” so he could write, but every few minutes it was, “Grandpa!” and I would go back in to show him this or that only to be sent out again until the next problem arose.

(Person) What? Where am I? I need to find an exit now.

(Howler) GROWL!!!

(Person) What was that?!

(Howler) SCREECH!!!

(Person) What the heck was that?!

(Person) AAAHHHH!!!

(Person) Whew, I think I lost it.

(Person) I did not lose it!!!

GRAB!

THUMP!

(Person) Ow!

(Person) Nooo!!!

THE END

There would be no watching from the sidelines for Grandpa (the supposedly “retired” ‘toonist), and I was given my assignment, which was to, “draw a scary comic” like he was going to do. Come up with a storyline, pace it out, and have an ending in about 30 minutes. I swear this kid has always made me work hard since he could hold a pencil.

This is my scary comic strip, The Eye Who Came for Dinner. We did the line art one day and came back the next to add color using colored pencils. He doesn’t do things half-way.

The time before when he suddenly began doing multi-paneled comics, he came up with these pages…

And mine…

The studio metal storage cabinet is the defacto art gallery with examples going back years. The drawings are held up by little green magnets that say “DONE” on each on which came from Great Grandpa’s pattern shop toolbox. They would hold blueprints in place that they were finished with in a job. I had a whole box full of them when we cleaned out the garage at Dad’s.

Little sister Aven at age four, when seeing big brother’s work displayed, had to whip out a quick piece of her own and immediately hang it up herself, and join in the fun. She is a devoted crafter and also shows an amazing talent at drawing. Her work appears at the bottom of the cabinet: the little cartoon characters at the bottom left and several on the right—her talent is growing by leaps and bounds.

She’s 6 now. Here’s one she did last month of a little stuffed seal doll. Covered in spots and simply named, with a cute little face on that oddly attached head.

They decide what they want to draw; Grandpa’s here to make sure they have what they need: paper of different sorts, and their pencils are sharp, or the paint water is refreshed. If I am asked, I will draw too to give them ideas or show how you might approach a drawing problem.

Gamers will recognize Huggy Wuggy (upper left blue guy), a character that Mom decided was too scary for him, but Grandpa let him draw it anyway, (sorry Mom). With Huggy, he learned how to look at a reference photo bit by bit and copy what he saw in minute detail, specifically the individual teeth, which he did a fantastic job of reproducing. He is developing the artist’s eye; the ability to ignore the whole image and zero in on what it is composed of to reconstruct it on his own blank page.

There’s Mushroom Guy lower left, Escher himself in a self portrait at the beach, and the top two drawings are by Daphne, another grand daughter, who is now in high school art classes with her own showing at last year’s art fair at her all girls school.

These are two of her recent works. She’s a freshman in high school now.

Before she became a retired lady, my wife was a librarian in our small town. She ran the kids’ programs and became known as “Miss Vicky, the Story Lady”. For three decades, she came up with the summer reading program and the story time for the “littles”. I was enlisted to help by giving a cartoon drawing session during the special week of activities for the library.

I also did those chalk talks every year in the schools my kids attended, and for a couple of school “fairs” I would do a caricature booth. Doing forty or more faces in a few hours would leave me with tired, red eyes from looking up and down from the faces to the paper. I sympathize with the guys who do that for a living at theme parks!

I’m going to go out on a limb and say the featured book had something to do with dragons.

Drawing with kids is always fun, showing them they too can draw a character like Garfield if you do it step by step. I draw something, and they do the same marks on their paper that I am did—and every class, at some point, I liked to do something that had a lot of dots in it, like sand, and when the kids copied me doing those dots, the room would echo with the sound of 30 or so pencils making dots. It was a riot.

Here are some more drawings with Escher from a session of drawings we did from a movie we had just seen called The Sea Beast.

He was about five I think when we did these. He is very detail oriented when he draws, and is never intimidated by a subject no matter how complex it is.

This is pretty good effort on a sailing ship and has tons of detail from the sailors to the ship’s rigging.

The beasts enter the scene.

He will whip out sketch after sketch, and we amass a pile of work in an hour or two—I am exhausted! Here’s my ship, a rendering of The Inevitable.

Kids are natural-born artists. They have the freedom and spirit to draw as they feel without self-consciousness; time and society will erode that, convincing them they can’t draw, and then it’s up to art school to “teach” it back into them. But how much of their initial creativity remains and how much is supplanted by the influences of other artists they try to emulate along the way in their art education?

I try to let them go their own way with a little encouragement along with some media technical advice. Perhaps they will learn just enough to give them confidence in their own decision-making and have enough to accompany them through their journey of creation and learning.

It’s perhaps the most important part of my artistic legacy if I can seed my children and their children with the creative spirit so that they can one day teach their own children the things that Grandpa showed them. I will gladly settle for that.

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