Been catching up with my friend from middle school, Nick Talbert. He's a self taught artist and graphic designer. He's got some cool shit, I'll plug his various accounts here at the bottom of this post if you want to check him out.
I met Nick in middle school, back in 2001. I'd been home-schooled up until the 5th grade. My parents were military, and had planned on having a bunch of kids, so homeschooling made sense, as the alternative would have been forcing me to get accustomed to new schools every time we moved (if you don't know, the military tends to ship its people around every few years)
As it turns out, all they had was me, and when it became clear they weren't going to have to move, they stuck me into the little Catholic grade school down the road from our house.
Now, when I say little, I mean little. Our 5th grade class was fifteen kids, including myself, and over the years until high-school we'd lose about one or more of that number each year. Nick himself left either near the end of 5th grade or at the beginning of 6th, I don't remember.
Still, he was basically the first friend I made in middle-school, and we've kept up off and on over the years. We mainly bonded over the fact that we both loved to draw. We spent most of our time in class (when we should have been taking notes or doing other things) drawing monsters and comic books.
In middle-school, I had this idea of making a big book full of monsters and their descriptions, sort of a sillier Magical Beasts and Where to find Them, and I would doodle a monster and leave room on the page to go back and fill in details about it. Except I very rarely followed through with that last part. I didn't really enjoy writing back then; I had atrocious hand writing and worse spelling.
Nick, however, followed suit, drawing his own monsters, except he would actually write out the descriptions of them.
In college, when I was going through some of my old stuff, I came across my monstrous manifesto, only the actual title I'd given it as a kid was "The Tomb [Tome] of Creatures", and boy. It was a tome alright. Basically, my methodology had been: fill up a note-book with school notes and doodles of monsters interspersed, and then, at the end of the year, tear out all the stupid useless notes and keep the pages with doodles.
These skeletal notebooks were then stitched loosely together by duck-taping backs to covers, ultimately forming this big shambling masterpiece. It was, however, totally falling to pieces, even from the get-go, and so when I re-discovered it, I took out the pages and rebound them into a three-ring binder, putting some of the more well-worn pages into plastic slips.
In going through this archeological dig, I discovered that, for reasons unknown, I had a handful of pages from Nick's parallel work, which he'd titled "The Monster Jaboree [Jamboree]". I really don't know why I had them. I think he gave them to me for some unknown purpose before he left our class.
At any rate, with Nick's permission I've compiled these ten pages of his into an imgur album, which you can find here. The descriptions are often quite witty and humorous, more so coming from a ten year old. Heres a selected quote:
"[Twin Snakes] find it easy to sniff humans out to find Blood. They also have
x-ray vision to see through humans or anything else. So if you live near
one of these don't plan to live anymore."
It's well worth a read-- I've transcribed the writing from each of the pages, as the poor photo quality makes it difficult to read on the images themselves. At some point, I'll scan in and make an album of higher quality images of these and other doodles of my own.
Having a collection of old sketches has been a cherished thing in my life, over the years. There's something about the creativity of childhood that makes for the perfect inspiration later on in life, once your mind has cemented into certain ways of thinking, and I'm always glad I've held on to this stuff all this time.
-------
My friend Nick Talbert has a healthy social media presence, but he doesn't have nearly enough followers, so get in on the ground floor while you still can!
- Nick's Instagram
- Nick's tumblr
- Nick's deviantART
And, if you're interested in commissioning him for design work,
- Nick's fiverr
No comments:
Post a Comment