My Son, Milton, loves to draw, and specifically he looooves drawing marvel characters. I have a wall of my studio covered in little drawings of Iron-man and Thor and Hulk, and they represent the tip of the ice berg of his efforts. Little dude just draws all day.

I do it for a job and even I trip out on how much he draws. We have a few kiddos, and while they all like to draw and paint, its just really taken a hold of Milton in a noticeable way. He’s 5 and has the attention span of a 5 year old for pretty much everything else, but he will spend HOURS and HOURS in the playroom at his art desk just drawing piles of stuff. He’s fascinated by it and loves making breakthroughs.

Its super cute and inspiring. I try not to hover and I never push, but if he has a question he knows he can always come to me and I can usually provide some answer. He listens too! Whether its shark anatomy or how tires on a car look in perspective, he totally digests and implements it. His passion and interest in drawing is definitely beyond what mine was at that age, and I’m pretty sure he draws better than I did at 5. I hope he keeps up with it, but if he doesn’t that’s fine too. I’ll just love him less. KIDDING!

I just bought him his own brand spanking new copy of the classic “how to draw comics the marvel way” and It was SO cool watching him thumb through it for the first time! You could see him just getting sucked in and those wheels turning…It totally took me back to the first time I got a hold of it in 5th grade when a classmate brought it to school. I took one look through it and was like “can it borrow this?”

Ill never forget, I’d never seen anything like it. The breaking things into simple forms, the gesture stuff, the compositional section…I POURED through that thing, and it helped me to make some of those first big jumps in drawing, not just on posing comic book characters, but also thinking about composition, and construction and things I just wasn’t familiar with before.

Looking through it with Milton earlier today, I was taken by how so many of the illustrations are burned into my memory. So many of the poses and stuff I still use can be traced directly back to those pages…just weird how formative it was looking back. I’m not even really a comic guy, but that book transcends comics…or more I should say “comics is a discipline that requires an informed knowledge of picture making, and therefore it is a surprisingly informative book.”

Was kind of a crazy experience revisiting it with my son. Even though I just bought the paperback off amazon, it felt like I was passing something down to him.  I hope he gets something from it.

Oh and I think I might be about done with this painting too. Or done for now. Is anything really ever finished? Anyway it was a fun one that i think i learned some new stuff on.