Reminiscing--Old Drawings and Writings

For the past few days I have been spending part of my vacation time at my parent's house visiting (we live in separate states, three hours apart) not only them but some friends of mine I haven't seen in a while, and one friend for a very long while. This morning I've been vegetating in my old bedroom used now as storage for all of my mom's junk (sorry mom, some of it really is!), and feeling nostalgic I decided to go through some boxes and folders containing old drawings and writings of mine.

And I laughed, and laughed, and laughed!

Usually when I come to visit I look through my old drawings, reminiscing the 'good ol' days' of my youth. I had always been an artist before a writer, but I loved to make up stories, too. I especially liked making comic books because they were the best of both worlds for me. I remember spending hours on those crappy comics I wrote and drew, and at the time (thirteen, fourteen years of age) I thought they were pretty awesome. They were what helped me to better learn to draw people, even if they were cartoonish. Several years later, I'm embarrassed to even admit I made those. The story lines don't make any sense, and the art is horrible--it's a toss-up as to which is worse! I was a kid when I made them, and even as craptastic as they are, I had fun creating them, and that was all that mattered. And no, I won't be posting any samples to embarrass myself on the internet. Sorry!

I noticed a progression, however, from the earliest ones I created to the later ones on how my drawing had improved. The faces didn't look so deformed, the hands and feet, still my nemesis, were being drawn in more correct positions; in other words, they started to take on a less double-jointed or broken finger/wrist/ankle look to them. Heh heh! Into my high school years I graduated from the cartoonish into actual comic book characters, my favorites being the X-Men, and had written some fan fiction. The X-Men drawings aren't as embarrassing and laughable because they were pretty darn good. I had even created my own characters to go along those already in the Marvel Universe, which, by the way, has crossed my mind to create their own stories in their own worlds.

It was those early comics that led to my writing my novel, in particular one character I had made into my own. I have mentioned in an earlier blog post how the character Alucard had become transformed into my main character, Vlad of Draculești. He's a character that has been with me for a very long time and will be with me for years to come. He's transformed a lot--oh an awful lot! Not just from the crappy comics of my youth to the first draft (equally as crappy) of my novel, which I had begun writing in 1996 and finished five years later along with the beginnings of the sequels, but he's changed with the rewrites of said novel I'm slowly progressing with. And who knows, in another fifteen to twenty years, I'll look back at what I have written and drawn now and say, what was I thinking? I'm so much better now than I was in 2012. That's the thing with art, and anything really. One is always improving with age and time.