Early childhood was more carefree. Fortunately, I got good parents. They were not perfect – a bit flawed – but they did their best to educate me, and they even somewhat succeeded. Unfortunately, there is not much to show on the subject of my early childhood, as the quality of the drawings was too low for publication, but I can say that it was dominated by Disney’s creations. My favorites were “The Lion King” and “101 Dalmatians”, although I also liked “Bambi”, “The Little Mermaid” and “Mulan”. A special place in my early childhood was occupied by ducks from “Duck Tales”. For some reason, I grew too attached to them, and thanks to drawing those little ducks I learned how to properly draw different angles of the cartoon face.
Late childhood was filled with video games. The very first video game I played was with a childhood friend, and it was “Super Mario Brothers” for the old Nintendo, but those games were rather toys for me than something really intriguing. I used to play the same “Mario Brothers” at my cousin’s, until I had the chance to peek at “The Neverhood” for the PC, which sparked my interest in games in full seriousness.
My parents, however, were not enthusiastic about it, and my mother in particular considered computers to be something “demonic”, so I had to look for places with computer games on my own. Due to discontent of my parents, I had to save up money that I had been given to buy a bun for lunch at school (25 kopecks), but used them to secretly go to a computer club during the weekend and play video games there.
At the time, those were games for Sega Megadrive (Genesis) and PlayStation. I enjoyed playing “The Lion King” on the sega and “Crash Team Racing” on the PlayStation, until I saw “Sonic-3” and fell in love with that game. It was the same computer club where I met a little babbler who later became the prototype for one of my negative original characters (OCs) for the Sonic Universe.
I got seriously interested in this sonic hero, and I waited a whole week in my dreams of returning to Sonic’s worlds over the weekend. This is when I drew pictures that reminded me of his games:
Apparently, after seeing these drawings, my parents took pity on me and bought me a Sega. But I still went to the computer club, although a different one – with the Sega Dreamcast, where you could play then newly released “Sonic Adventure” and “Sonic Adventure 2”. These games really impressed me, and I was thinking about them all the time, and drew characters from there, waiting to go to the club all week. Since I didn’t have access to the official Sonic books, I made up most of the story in my head by myself, guided by the levels and scenes from the games, the scenes from cartoons I could catch a glimpse of, and the single book from Ladybird that that blabber boy gave me.
Later, my parents also bought me a Sega Dreamcast, and I spent days playing Sonic Adventures because I had already graduated from high school and enrolled to the specialty school on a contract for which we had no money… So I just continued to learn about the world of games and computers, and practiced drawing on my own, which eventually gave me a high-paying job.
A few drawings from that time period can be seen in the gallery below. Each picture corresponds to a small page with a description:
