My “Ah-Hah!” Illustration Moment
1959 – I was in Miss Sporty’s kindergarten
class, and I happened to pick up a big picture book called “The Golden Book of
Dinosaurs.” The illustrations were simply amazing. The book literally began the
direction of my life because I started drawing, copying the dinosaurs in
crayon, over and over again, creating what was my very first serious art. By
Second Grade I was so good at it I was swapping T-Rex sketches for Twinkies.
1973 – I was attending a prestigious art
school in New England taking a Water Media Painting studio because (I was told)
the professor taught traditional egg tempera painting techniques, skills I
desperately wanted to learn. The professor was an elderly white-haired
pipe-smoking gent who tended toward bulky hand-knit sweaters and ran a very
low-key studio: you painted, he went one-on-one with you when you asked, and
you learned. His name was Rudolph Zallinger.
One day Professor Zallinger asked if we would
mind seeing some of his own work. The next class he arrived with a small,
framed painting covered in a towel. He set it on an easel, and lifted the towel
away, revealing a Jurassic scene of a T-Rex-type carnivore taking a bite out of
a Triceratops-type herbivore. My mouth dropped open, and I stammered, “That’s
an illustration from ‘The Golden Book of Dinosaurs’.” Zallinger smiled around
his pipe. “Why yes it is,” he said.
Circle complete.
Keith Minnion sold his first short story to Asimov’s SF Adventure Magazine
in 1979. He has sold nearly twenty stories and novelettes since. Keith has illustrated
professionally since the early 1990s, and has also done extensive graphic
design work for the Department of Defense. He lives in a small town in eastern
Pennsylvania. He is a former schoolteacher, DOD employee, and officer in the
U.S. Navy. Keith has a short story collection called “It’s For You” out in
print from White Noise Press,
and in all the electronic formats with Crossroad
Press. He also had a long story called “Island Funeral” published in
2011 in chapbook format by CD
Publications. His first novel called “The Boneyard” (published as “The
Bone Worms” in electronic formats from CD
Publications in 2011) will be republished in 2013, greatly revised, in
both soft and hardcover from Bad
Moon Books. Stories in Eulogies
II and Postscripts
are also forthcoming.
A note about the article: If you follow your passion wherever it leads, your hard work and dedication will bring you full circle. You might learn from the one who inspired you to start your journey. You might be sitting next to the writer you have always admired at a signing. If we don't forget what it was like to be that kid absorbed in a picture book, then we won't lose that sense of wonder and imagination. And what is art but the expression of our imagination? - Draven
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