One of the things that I did as a child that I have enjoyed well into my adult life was learning how to draw cartoons. I remember sitting at my kitchen table with nothing but a sketch pad and a pencil for hours upon hours each day. I used to give the cartoons that I drew to family and friends as gifts when the holidays came around or when they had birthdays. My mother has a few different scrap books that she has kept the cartoons that I had drawn in and still pulls them out to look at today.
To this day, I still love to pull out my sketch pad and try to come up with interesting and creative cartoon characters that I have not drawn before. I do not really give them out as gifts anymore, but I do still enjoy drawing them.
I have a son who has shown a lot of interest in my cartoons. He has helped me come up with some story lines and we have made some of my characters into little comics. We have a few favorite characters that we work with and try to keep up with creating new comic strips with them at least once a month.
I have been trying to teach my son how to draw cartoons so that he can create his own characters. He has done really well learning the basics from both what I can teach him as well as the different websites that I have pulled up to help him learn. He has come up with a couple of very cute characters that he has named and created stories behind.
Each weekend, I look forward to the time that he wants to spend with me at the table writing and drawing and using his beautiful imagination. There are stories that pop out of his little mind that I could never come up with.
We have been working on a project that we can give to his dad for Father's Day this year. So far, we have nearly fifteen pages of cartoons with a great story completed. Each time I think that we have the story pretty much complete in writing, he comes up with some new idea that we have to incorporate into the existing storyline. In all honesty, I am not sure that this story will ever end. By the time we complete it, it could very well be a hundred pages long.
My son could have a future in writing children's books or even becoming a novelist with the level of creativity that he has. If he continues to work hard in learning how to draw cartoons, he could even become a comic book artist or maybe even a cartoon artist for one of the big movie companies out there.
No matter what happens in the future, I am enjoying every minute of the time that we spend working on our little projects together and I am sure that his father will hold on to the gift we are creating him now.