Driven to Create: How I got into Art & Writing

My life has always been about letting my imagination run wild.

      As a kid I told lots of true stories, anytime I went to a new school and the kids were asking me about myself, I always ended up telling tons of tales from my life. I remember at one point in the 6th grade (my third school that grade), I had six plus kids sitting in a circle with me at lunch time while I told stories about my life, my family and the strange dreams I’d had. Which, even then, having such an audience struck me as bizarrely interesting. I dabbled in acting regularly the end of 6th grade and on until developing stage fright at a drama club orientation freshman year of high school, which fully put a kibosh on my plans to pursue that as a career, though I did go to a Hollywood acting class with a friend senior year. I lived out in Simi Valley with an uncle for a year. As the realization that I was way to self conscious to go after that I then started focusing more on the drawing and writing that I began getting really into in junior high.

      Whenever I played with my sisters, cousins or friends I always went out of my way to have some storyline going on always making up new games. We’d often play recurring storylines. The games I would make up would get fairly elaborate and I’d had plans to do more with my cousins at one point back in 2004/2005 I wanted to have a regular club for them to play these games and went so far as to make a little website and we made regular characters for ourselves and I did up some re-colored art for that. But it could not be kept up due to lack of funds and such.

      In my grade school years, there were always some sort of art supplies around the house and my mom had a bunch of thin Walter Foster books my sister, AJ, and I would try drawing from them. around 5th grade I tried my hand at Funny Faces Tracing books. The tracing helped me practice line work and such.

     When my mom was pregnant with one of my littler sisters either Holly or Nikki, she bought a book called What Shall We Name the Baby, that book became mine after Nikki was born and it started a lifelong habit of buying baby name books (I've got at least 10 now and if it weren't for being perpetually broke I'd probably have tons more). Anyhow, I'd spend hours making lists of names (each name had a last name attached to it) and characters began to lurk in the corners of my mind. Within the next couple of years I began trying to come up with story ideas for them.

     On Christmas 1993, AJ received an X-Men comic book, which was strange as I was the one who was huge into the cartoon. I was in 7th grade. Then summer 1994 we were bored out of our minds, to a point of desperation, and we knew not to go to our mom with our boredom because whenever we did that she would think up chores for us, and that just could not be allowed to happen. So we saw her comic book, which of course was mine before summer was over, and thought - hey let's make up our own comic book characters.

      Naturally hers instantly looked great, she was the one with the natural talent for drawing. Drawing with reference material in front of me again was a revelation, for the first time my drawing actually looked human. I was hooked hard, she got bored with it after a couple characters. So began furiously trying to draw often. I ended up continuing to create comic book characters to this day.  I began going out of my way to teach myself to draw, do other forms of art and to improve my writing. With drawing and art I aim to go fully pro and somehow build an empire that I can populate with the universes that live in my head. My ambitions with this company I wanted to make out of my stuff was born, though the way I wanted to do it didn't even exist at the time, at least not in any accessible way.

     My passion for writing and drawing, it's a calling, burning through my veins, pushing me to create. I have more worlds, characters and stories in my head than I will ever be able to unleash in my lifetime, unless maybe I somehow manage to get my hands on immortality. Of course if I get my hands on immortality I'll have no choice but to take some time off to go on a quest to obtain telekinesis, I want that so bad I can taste it, telekinesis is just the most versatile power, with my imagination, determination and love of learning, I'd take that to wild new levels, but I digress.

     Creativity and imagination are immensely prominent chunks of who I am and what drives me, it's the part of myself I like the most, it's how my self-esteem thrived and survived in the face of great adversity. I was born gifted with an expansive imagination and I feel honor-bound to use the holy smurfs out of it. But more than that I want to use my skewed empire to inspire others and even provide employment, freelance work and internships to other people. Though having actual employees is still a ways off, the way I want to do my company is at least existing and accessible and ready to start being visible and tangible.

~ Aurey Sorrow