Ed Emberley & Me
I imagine I'm not the only child of the 1970s who has vivid memories of Ed Emberley's many "instructional" drawing books. I was recently sorting through some of my papers and found a little booklet of my own copies of Emberley's drawings, which I had stapled together to give "to Grandpa"... okay, admittedly I have mixed feelings about not only this sort of nostalgia, but also the assumption that kids' artwork is interesting or of value to adults. Regardless, here are scans from Emberley's Drawing Book of Animals as well as my 6-year-old interpretations of them.
I'm not sure what's going on with these two lion heads -- the first one is clearly the work of my childhood self, but the second? I dunno. The certainty of form and linework seems a bit too much to be from the hands of a child. I'm wondering if the second head was drawn by my mom or dad... or maybe I just had a really good day.
Here's another puzzler -- what is a spider (dangling on its silk, no less) doing under water with a fish? Possibly I was confusing spider and octopus? Even then my mind was already starting to go.
I also recently realized that Emberley illustrated many of the covers, chapter pages and stories in several of my old gradeschool textbooks. Here are a few examples of such, though it's interesting how psychedlic and weird the work is compared to his drawing books. I have no idea what school books look like now, but I can't imagine they're this strange.
