The Past Reclamation Project, Part III

One day I forgot about drawing...
for 30 years!

Most kids begin to draw pictures in the years leading up to the start of school and continue all through early childhood. By the time they reach middle school, they've generally moved on from drawing and creative pursuits to chase more grown-up pursuits. Like most kids, I did my fair share of drawing in elementary school, but when I hit middle school I just kept going, drawing all sorts of crazy gizmos, fanciful inventions, elaborate battle scenes, and plenty of superheroes — imitating what I saw in the pages of comic books and cartoons.

At some point, between middle school and high school, my drawing style morphed from simple line art into doing pencil sketches of a more realistic nature. I became very prolific during that time, sketching in earnest using magazine photos, movie stills and other pictures as reference. By the time I entered high school I was firmly captivated by drawing and spent all of my optional credits taking art classes. I even selected a locker dead center in the art department hallway, and spent all my free time hanging out in the classrooms there. By the time I left high school I knew what I wanted to do for a living, and so I entered the Commercial Art program at the local college.

A scene from one of my favorite subjects back in the day, sketched on Thanksgiving Day 1977.

During all this time I was constantly sketching. In the corner of my room there was a built in desk where I spent after-school hours diligently sketching away. Family get-togethers, like Thanksgiving at my grandma's house, would find me curled up on a chair, sketchpad in hand, drawing and shading. Then, as I entered college, I kept on sketching, but at that point less for the pure enjoyment of it and more because I had assignments that needed to be completed. Eventually I graduated and things changed.

It was at this point, when I started my career as a graphic artist, that I stopped sketching all together. It wasn't a conscious decision; the idea of art for art's sake was just forgotten as I tried to wend my way forward through life, starting a new career, moving to a strange city, making new friends, and so on.

Cut to: nearly 30 years later, and I was going through a pile of old sketches that my brother had rescued from my parents' house when they purged everything and moved to retirement in Florida (at that time I was off living in San Diego and didn't get home to Wisconsin much), when suddenly it dawned on me — as I looked at the dates on the drawings — that I had abruptly stopped sketching sometime back in the early 1980s.

I realized that I haven't really sketched anything with pencils (that wasn't destined to be a commercial illustration) since I graduated from college. How did I manage to forget about the joy of drawing? How could I cast aside such a unique and valuable gift? The simple answer is that I didn't know I had stopped, I hadn't realized I was giving something up. I just never noticed. I guess because I had continued to do illustration in a professional capacity, with airbrush and pen and ink, and later, with the computer, that it didn't dawn on me that I had given something up.

One of my later sketches, showing a marked improvement.

The hard part, for me, is that, when I look through the surviving drawings from that era, I can see that I was getting quite good at it, for someone that age at any rate. And, if I had kept up with it for the last 30 years, I can imagine that I might be quite excellent by now. And while that level of sketching is good enough for 16, it's just not for someone my age. I should be better by now, I wish I was.

So, as part of my Past Reclamation Project to capture and do homage to that bygone era — and maybe to inspire me in the future — I've gathered the sketches that survived and am presenting them here for the first time ever. Most of the subject matter concerns every young boy's two favorite subjects: Star Wars (this was the late 70s, after all) and sports (particularly football, which was my favorite at the time), but there's a variety of other subjects as well, from animals to politicians to entertainers (most of these later, I suspect, were done for high school and college art class assignments). They're displayed in an XML-powered Flash viewer that I designed and programmed — which is the sort of thing that I do nowadays in my professional life (hopefully a fair sight better than sketching). For anyone that happens upon this site, I hope you enjoy looking at them as much as I did drawing them all those years ago.

Bob Schmitt
March, 2011

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