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| Blast from the Past, Part I; The Early Years: 19?? – 1987 | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Mar 18 2008, 05:03 AM (244 Views) | |
| Jos | Mar 18 2008, 05:03 AM Post #1 |
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Prologue Alter EGO Press is going to publish a book with sketches made by me, which is of course good news for me. I decided to use ‘The Sketchy Weijmer’ as a working title . Now, we all know the art and sketch books from various artists of both fame and infamy, and this should be something like that. It’ll probably be a collection of my work until 2007, which is a lot. In 25 years of work as an illustrator you collect a lot of material. We agreed that it’d be a good idea to accompany the drawings with remarks and some history of how they came into being, a well as an overview of my career. This resulted into some rater funny text examples, and we’ll probably present the book in a chronological format, as many of the older drawings are still strong enough to entice interested readers, I hope. Because of this project, I decided to get every scrap of drawing I ever made, mainly to see what I could use for the intro about my pre-professional work. I also decided to finally digitize all my older work which had until now gathered dust in the more obscure sections of my cellar. So I geared up and descended into the crypts of my basement. I shall spare you the heroic details of what I had to go through to collect all that stuff. Suffice to say that after many days I had amassed piles of paper containing almost all I have ever drawn from he late ‘70’s until present day. I will share some of the thoughts and memories I have on this stuff on this forum, starting with the very beginning. ![]() 'Chinopet' - © Jos Weijmer 1987 Blast from the Past, Part I The Early Years: 19?? – 1987 Haha. I remember how it all started. I could say my first drawings and comics held the promise of greater achievements in the future, but well… you can call crap anything you want, but it’ll still smell as crap. I am sure there have been many 12 year olds who displayed much more skill by that age than me. Let me tell a bit about this period in my life before saying more about my drawings at the time. I always drew a lot. When I wasn’t playing cops and robbers. or cowboys and Indians (when that was still politically correct), I would be drawing. That extended all through school, and my way of time management was to blatantly neglect my studies. The only reason I made it through there was because my mother relentlessly badgered me into at least doing some homework. You may know the drill… ‘Stop drawing those stupid comics and pass the year! You cannot make any money with that, so better do something useful!’ Well, anyone who knows me realizes that such things stimulate me as nothing else to pursue my chosen path. So, in a way… thank you for getting me here, mom . Anyways, the good thing was I passed school without having to do any year over again, so at the age of 17 I moved to go study Economics at the university in 1985.thus I left home at the age of 17, yet even for my age I was rather naïve and a bit shy. I decided to remedy that by joining the most raw student society there was at the time, and well… I had a great time and my personal development over the next two years went very well for me. Of course, my studies suffered accordingly. This was mainly because I hated Economics. Therefore I decided to switch to Law, which interested me a lot more at the time. In fact, that study went very well until my parents cut off my school money because my mother wanted me to return to the parental nest and switch back to Economics. I never quite got that. I am sure that having a lawyer for a son is so much more humiliating than having an accountant as son… :rolleyes: Well, as independent spirits refuse to be tamed, I took up several jobs in the weekends and evenings to pay for my study and bills. I worked in bars, restaurants and factories and it didn’t hurt me at all. In fact, it broadened my horizon in ways I would normally never have imagined. Over time I decided the legal system didn’t fit all that well to my ideas of justice and fairness, and I started thinking seriously about starting a career as an artist and illustrator instead. This finally happened around 1988, when I made my first professional paintings and illustrations. Around that time I also got married, so my life radically changed by then. Back to the drawings… When, after facing perils beyond comprehension, I managed to salvage the huge box containing my work until 1988 from the crypts of my current home, I was amazed to see that there was almost nothing from before the late ‘70’s. In fact, it all begins with… Star Wars and Star Trek (insert insane amounts of copyright and trademark notices here) drawings and comics. I can only imagine that there never really was a fixed subject I was interested in before that. In fact, I didn’t draw all that much until Star Wars entered my life. As far as I can remember, I joined the Official Star wars Fan Club (TM, ®, © and so on) and they hooked me up with a pen pal. This is how I met a pen-pal named Bobby in Florida, who drew insane amounts of Star Wars comics. I got caught up in this and from that time on drawing became a significant part of my life, much to my mother’s dismay (my brother always had been a superstar student who panicked if he didn’t get an A. He was the Ferrari amongst the students at that school, and I followed him there as the shabby Volkswagen Beetle with two flat tires. Not that I was that much dumber but I rather spent my time playing and drawing than studying. Seemed the smart thing to do at that time and actually still does ).Anyways, here I was swapping home made sci-fi comics about my favorite movies with my american pen-pal. The first ones look so horrible that it is almost funny. The only thing worse than the drawings are the scripts. They all have about the same structure, which goes like this; ‘Start in middle of story where the action is. Flashback. Back to present. Main character(s) die. Introduce Deus ex Machina. Introduce Time Travel. Better still, combine both in one super being. Heroe(s) revived again, or timeline resets. Start over.’ This however became a very handy tool when my pen-pal wanted me to join in a comic he started. It was called the Bounty Commandos *snigger* and it actually starred ourselves as the two main characters. Now, I never felt any need to portray myself as a superhero, being certainly at that time quite the opposite, but I went along with it for three issues or so. Now my storyline became a bit different: ‘Start in middle of story where the action is. Flashback. Kill Bobby’s character. Multiple times. Introduce Deus ex Machina and/or Time Travel. Bobby revived again. Kill and revive Bobby at least five times this way before climax, then kill him one last time and end comic as cliffhanger. Will he stay dead this time?’ I fear it wrecked the nerves of Bobby, and also put him a bit off, so I quit after three issues. With a cliffhanger. We artists are a nasty lot. Gradually I started making drawings about scenes from my favorite books. I almost devoured sci-fi and fantasy books (mostly sci-fi at that time) and had a personal library of at least some thousand books by 1988. Not to mention my comics collection (containing mostly European but also a lot of American comics). By the time I neared graduation at my home school I was writing and drawing my own comics. This is when my art finally started to show very significant progress, but well… by then I had produced hundreds and hundreds of comic pages and drawings. I drew cartoons for the school paper and generally had become ‘that guy that draws well’. Bugger me if I know why I went for Economics. I must have been brain dead after all those exams. Anyways, at the university and student society I did cartoons again for the papers and stuff, and some nearby shops. Slowly this progressed until finally I decided to start a career in art. I started my first business and moved in together with my girlfriend and later wife and even still later ex-wife. End of part I ![]() 'Elianor' - © Jos Weijmer 1985, 'The Lycanthrope' - © Jos Weijmer 1985 |
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![]](http://z1.ifrm.com/static/1/pip_r.png)
. Now, we all know the art and sketch books from various artists of both fame and infamy, and this should be something like that. It’ll probably be a collection of my work until 2007, which is a lot. In 25 years of work as an illustrator you collect a lot of material. 
. Anyways, the good thing was I passed school without having to do any year over again, so at the age of 17 I moved to go study Economics at the university in 1985.
).




2:05 AM Jul 11