When I was little, my grandparents gave me and my sister a copy of Ed Emberley‘s Drawing Book of Animals. We spent hours following his fun yet deceptively simple visual instructions on how to draw pages of crocodiles, lions and tigers, cats and dogs.
As I’ve grown up and become an artist in my own right, I’ve come to appreciate how much confidence Emberley’s early drawing instructions gave me. I felt like I could draw all kinds of creatures from my imagination because I knew they were just shapes, lines, dots and squiggles.
Since the 1970s, Emberley has created dozens of books for children—both drawing and story books. In 2017, the Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts hosted a major retrospective of his life’s work. I highly recommend watching this inspiring short documentary about the project. He’s still creating at 93!
If you’d like to play around with shapes and lines, and learn how to draw the “Ed Emberley way”, join me for a free on-line workshop on Sunday, April 6. All the details are on my Upcoming Workshops page.
Profoundly Creative 
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