Dragon Robot

“Do you want me to do a robot?” I asked. He brought home the book, “How to Draw Robots,” yesterday from the school library. 

“Yeah!” he exclaimed.

“You cannot do this, right?” he asked cautiously right off the bat.

I came over to see he was referring to an intro page with 7 complex robot people and animals. “Um, no,” I said.

He flipped through the book and came back to the intro page and asked, “Can you just to this?” tracing the outline of one of the characters with his finger.

“The dragon robot?” I asked.

“Yeah. Can you just do this?” he asked again, repeating the action of tracing his finger around it.

“It’s not in the book somewhere?” I asked.

“No,” he said flipping through the book to prove it to me. I flipped through it myself thinking he must have skipped a page, but sure enough, it wasn’t in there.

“Okay. I guess I’ll draw it from here then. I have the time today.”

This was a pretty cool robot. We couldn’t believe it didn’t have a page all to itself. Books like this one always break the process into steps that build the drawing in layers. They include blocking lines and basic shapes that are supposed to be erased when the drawing is complete. I never do that. Perhaps I’m doing it the hard way, but I pick a starting point and draw out from there completely free hand, simply following my 8th grade art teacher’s instruction to, “Draw what I see, not what I think I see.” At times my drawings are off alignment or out of proportion, but only sometimes. Usually, I do pretty well with the angles and proportions just by maintaining concentration. It’s especailly cool when I hit all the angles and proportions spot on like I was able to do this time.

“Oh, he looks super scary!” he said when he saw it complete. He studied it. Then he added out of the blue, “Sometimes you should make your own drawings. Is that going to be hard?”

“Yup.”

“You have to practice if you want to. That’s if you want to. But you don’t want to, right?”

“Not really. It’s just that it’s hard for me to draw something if I’m not looking at it,” I told him.

Perhaps one day I will start taking a turn at drawing creatively from my mind’s eye, but right now I don’t yet feel ready.