My Journey as an Artist

Part 1: The very early years

As far back as I can remember my earliest days of being an artist came around 1970 in Oakland California where I grew up. Only at the age of 4 at that time I did manage to use the only means I had to create images at the time to come up with a couple of what I thought at the time were very unique characters. Not having a pencil or paper at the time I actually used to play with dirt outside of our home. The other siblings and I would get dirt from the backyard and spread it on the smooth cement on the ground sort of creating a dark canvas. We would then use popsicle sticks to draw pictures on the dirt canvas. I drew a lot of different things during that time however the two characters I remember creating at that time was a duo known as X and O.

X and O were two very simple characters basically based off of the tic tac toe game which I had recently just learned about around the age of 4. The characters themselves were loveable enough, however they were very opposites of one another.  X, being the out-of-control loud boisterous type one, and O being the quiet calm and very steady handed one. They were created around 1974 and I would make comics of them throughout the rest of the 70's. I would draw their stories using typing paper and just drawing lines up and down the page looking like the tic tac toe game as cartoon panels and would tell their stories that way. Growing up in the 70's and just finding out about movies I would actually give the comic stories motion picture ratings that they did for films at that time. Of course, being just a young kid at the time nobody really saw these stories except for family members, but just by doing it the way I did it was obvious that I was thinking of marketing characters like this and in this way in the future. 

As we go into part 2 in a future post, I will share how my journey as an artist became a little more defined in the very late 70s and what type of cartoons I was doing at that time. Stay tuned for that and always feel free to comment. See you in the next post.  

Paul Kent Sewell- Artist

https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/7745615066191694595/6820613590827210028

Click above for Part 2