MY STORY 6.1

Drawing! I was fascinated by drawing. It has so many possibilities. How do you make a photo of a man walking on the wall? When drawing there is nothing to it. No drawn character ever gets hurt, or indisposed by sickness or is in need of a holiday

I was not aware of any lectures that suited my particular interest, so I taught myself. This started when I was seven or eight years old. My teacher, really, was comic books. Well, in those days some comic books were as violent as today's and I am the first to agree that the morals were often different from our standards at home. I was not surprised that dad began to toss out my comic books. I didn't really read the stories, but I was interested in the drawings. I only bought comic books from which I wanted to copy faces and techniques. One of my favourites was drawn by a guy who signed his work by "MAZ". But I had to hide them! Now that I think about that, I realize that there was a real communication problem there. How I wish dad had just once validated my point of view instead of using harsh language.

Enough about that!

On my own, I gave myself assignments, sort of. Facial expressions. How can you draw a person so he looks like himself from different angles? How do you make cloth look like cloth, and water look like water, etc? Another one was working with shadows. Every thing we see is a combination of light and shadows. To make a tree look round you have to work with a minimum of three different shades. Stuff like that.

Motion. How to draw a guy jumping? And the eyes; A drawing "vibrates" when the eyes are done right. It all takes practice. And then there is one moment that the drawing "comes to life" and you must not add anything further. In the words of Salieri : add one more note, in my case line and there would be diminishment. I was by no means perfect, but still good enough to illustrate the national Youth for Christ Magazine.

In the commercial art course there was great emphasis on lettering, and type-styles, ok... nowadays called "fonts". Coverage was another big one. Some designs you see just don't have enough colour "weight". And colour combinations that work.

When I started to work, I had the money to follow a university course on commercial art , and unknown to me my teacher was George Mazure (MAZ), the same guy who used to draw my favourite comic books!