As a child, and through my teenage and young adult years, I drew something every single day. My cousin Ariel, can tell you how I had folders, and folders and folders full of sketches, and scraps of things that I drew. A few weeks ago, as I had lunch with a co-worker/friend, So-Yon, she questioned why I had stopped drawing and encouraged me to get back into it. Then this past weekend, my boy Tim, reminded me about this craft, and he gave me the same words of advice. Is it a calling? I don't know, but I decided to start things off by looking through my old drawings and reflect on what was once my best friend, and my favorite thing to do. Now, since my move to the Boogie down Bronx, I haven't been able to recall what I did with all of these drawings, I know it was careless of me, but, I found two drawings that I did about 10 years ago. It's crazy when I look at them, because it brings back so many memories from that time.
Now these aren't original characters made up by me, but they weren't traced either, that's like artistic blasphemy. These two characters were from a SONY PlayStation game from back in the day titled "Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus", the sequel to Oddworld: Abe's Odyssey, two of my favorite games of all time. I'm not going to go to deep into who Abe was and what the game was all about, but I would let you know that Elum, was Abe's companion and "ride"; kind of like his horse.
The images were taken from a strategy book and as I recall, my rendition was about 5 to 6 times their original size. This took a lot of skill at that time, because I had to mentally enlarge every portion of their bodies, without the use of a grid as a guide; I refused to take the easy route. I drew them with a #2 pencil, and a black gel-ink fine point pen for the final outline. Believe or not, the shading was done with my fingers and a piece of construction paper. A little trick I learned from my 7th grade art teacher Ms. Goldstein. If you notice, I ran out of space on both of the drawings. This was one of the difficulties in enlarging things from their original size without using a grid to guide me, but I enjoyed the the challenge and appreciated the results. Elum was my favorite, not only drawing him, but the job I did with the shading. I was proud of the results back then, and still feel the same way now. Check out how I use to sign my name. Memories...
The images were taken from a strategy book and as I recall, my rendition was about 5 to 6 times their original size. This took a lot of skill at that time, because I had to mentally enlarge every portion of their bodies, without the use of a grid as a guide; I refused to take the easy route. I drew them with a #2 pencil, and a black gel-ink fine point pen for the final outline. Believe or not, the shading was done with my fingers and a piece of construction paper. A little trick I learned from my 7th grade art teacher Ms. Goldstein. If you notice, I ran out of space on both of the drawings. This was one of the difficulties in enlarging things from their original size without using a grid to guide me, but I enjoyed the the challenge and appreciated the results. Elum was my favorite, not only drawing him, but the job I did with the shading. I was proud of the results back then, and still feel the same way now. Check out how I use to sign my name. Memories...
Abe by J. Gomez signed 12/30/98
Elum by J. Gomez 1/4/99
I hope to have more to come. Hopefully some of my original characters.
Peace and Love.
