Sometime around 1987 I drew a picture that I thought was inspired by artwork on the back of Dan Fogelberg’s The Innocent Age Album. I just searched that album and found the album artwork. The image I was inspired from is not on that album cover. Now I’m scratching my head. What did I base that drawing on? 

I know the drawing was created around 1987 because I remember showing it to my neighbor across the street while I was living in Harrogate, England. She was a painter, and at the time I was experimenting with oil pastels and Prismacolor pencils. Even though I’ve worked in oil, I never was a fan of oil paint, and for some reason I hadn’t yet embraced acrylic.

What I remember most about the lady across the street was her delight in finding a fellow artist, but also how adorable she thought the figures in the drawing were. The female figure she especially loved. I’ll be honest, I think she is adorable as well. 

Years later I recreated the drawing in Illustrator and gave it a solid fill making it more in line with a period silhouette. I’ve never offered it for sale because I could have sworn, I had pretty much recreated someone else’s art. I still believe that is the case, but now I’ve no idea from what. I’ve dumped the drawing into Google image search but nothing matching has come up. 

The version I’m including here is a scan of the original drawing but cleaned up in Photoshop quite a bit. I had drawn it on typing paper and the original has yellowed quite a bit. 

I still have the original drawing. One of the few I still have. Sadly, I lost just about all my early drawings. Artistically not a great loss. Many of those drawings were pretty crude, but they were a part of my art history.