But I think always my pictures were trying to accomplish something. I wasn’t just drawing a flower. I wanted that flower to be part of a scene that was maybe telling a story just in the picture. It wasn’t just a flower; maybe it was a flower that was walking through the city to buy a hotdog. You know, it had to be — there had to be — it had to be more interesting than just a flower. So that was a big — a big part of it.
And I was also — I wasn’t reading all that much. I really wasn’t. I wish I could say that I was the best, biggest reader ever, but the books I was most interested in were books by Ed Emberley, which those were books that were these kind of like step-by-step guides of how to draw. They’re sort of almost cartooning in a way, but he teaches you how to simplify the things you see.
It’s not — you don’t have to draw a horse realistically. He says look at this horse. It’s just rectangles. It’s, you know, a rectangle this way and then skinny rectangles for legs and maybe there’s a triangle in there and you’ve got a horse. And I would check those books out every Friday from the school library, work through them all weekend, bring them back on Monday. And for several years that was my thing.
And so that’s a little bit of the kinds of stuff I was doing. Oh, and I was watching a lot of TV, which I’m not going to dismiss TV all the way because for me in the years before closed captioning I was still watching a lot of TV, but I understood none of it except for what I could see on the screen. And so I filled in a lot of blanks for myself.
You know, I would just make up what was going on, and I think that actually enhanced my storytelling abilities. It wasn’t lazy watching; it was watching and trying to figure it out and then coming up with my own possibilities for what was happening. For example, M*A*S*H when they wear their surgical mask, no idea what they’re saying. So I’m like well, what could they possibly be doing down there?
And, you know, you just start making things up, and maybe your story was even better than the M*A*S*H writers. I doubt it, but — so there was a lot of TV thrown in there too, lots of TV.
