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,