A Leap of Faith
When
I was a kid I thought jumping off the roof of the house was fun. I would climb
up there, tie my cape around my neck and jump off. I jumped off the roof one
time and got pretty banged up but most of the time I felt safe because I knew my
cape would protect me. I remember building tree houses and digging ground forts.
We would get into B.B. gun fights, dirt clod battles, bike races, we did just
about anything we wanted to do too have fun. We would build ramps that we could
jump our bikes from and, just to make it more crazy, one of us would lay on the
ground at the end of the ramp and let their buddy jump over them just to prove
that we weren’t afraid. What we did was test ourselves and in doing so we
learned all about the consequences of our actions.
Kids nowadays don’t know how to play like I and my group of friends did. They don’t know how to spend the entire day out in an open field and have fun and that, I think, is a shame. These day’s kids are having their imaginations handed to them in the form of video games. They are not expanding their mind’s, they are simply reacting to what is going on in the game. I know of kids that will sit all day in front of these things and learn nothing.
I call this drawing “A Leap of Faith”. This kid has no idea of what is going to happen when he jumps but you can tell by his stance and the look on his face that he is going to jump no matter what. You can also tell that his friend is worried. His friend is looking out for him. Whether or not we realize it, we all have someone looking out for us and these kids know this.
I haven’t done this type of drawing in over 20 years and it sure felt good to get back to what got me started.