How does a kid become attached to something so specific? This kid loved firetrucks. For the year that I worked with him, firetrucks were all he drew. He drew them rapidly, then hung them on the wall witha piece of tape and then drew another one. He’d also imitate the siren, doing it suddenly and startling the kids around him. He drew them fast and with complete focus. What is drawing doing in this situation? Something that was inside is now made visible to the outside.
There is a big difference between someone who has just turned four and someone who has been four for most of a year. This image was drawn by someone who just turned four. She showed me the drawing and asked me to write her name and what is going on in her picture. When I draw with kids, we use Black flair pens on index cards. I love the way the black pen lets me really see their line work. I find myself gazing at the drawings they make. They give me something I have a hard time naming, but it’s tied to what I’m doing when I’m drawing comics.
The line confidence kills me.
Many of the four year olds I work with have something they are especially interested in. The kid who drew these fire trucks rarely drew anything else. He’d finish a drawing, tape it up, and start another one. Working in series is something my professor taught me when I went to college. It’s something that seems to have old roots that need reviving once we leave the neighborhood of childhood.
A four year old I was drawing with pointed out that drawings of fruit and drawings of numbers looked similar. He thought a lot about fruit and vegetables.The first time I saw him he was holding plastic fruit in both hands. For the entire year that we were together, he was usually carrying at least one piece of plastic fruit.
One day he told me he could teach me how to draw dragon fruit. I didn’t know what dragon fruit was. He drew it slowly so I could copy him. Then he showed me how to draw more fruit. One of my favorite things to do is copy kids in real time while they draw.
When he asked me how to spell chayote, I was sure he meant coyote. It took him awhile to convince me there was something called chayote I didn’t know about and you could eat it.
The kinds of line we use to make our comics are very much tied to some of the first lines we make as children.These are by a four-year-old. There is a steadiness in the curving shapes that disappears once people become self conscious about their drawings and begin to draw with a hesitant series of feathered short marks. The line in this drawing is the one I call a skating line. It’s a sure line made by a hand that stays in motion for the entire gesture.
One of the reasons I’m so interested in the lines made by four year olds is because drawing and writing haven’t yet split into two different things. When we make comics by hand, one of the things we have to re-learn is to write our words with the line we use to draw our images. When we letter something, we’re drawing the letters, paying attention not just to their shapes, but also to a feeling of creating individual characters. This doesn’t mean perfection in the look of the letters, but rather a feeling for them, for their aliveness. Handwriting has a voice. Adults tend to automatically dislike their own hand writing in the same way they dislike their drawings. If we take away the option of liking or disliking these lines that make words and images, what might we find?