Director of Sodivone
DESOSED
aliases
Des
My Journey Through Art
WHEREABOUTS
I was born in Nigeria, and moved with my family to Namibia when I was 3 years old. After 4 more years in Namibia, we moved again to the UK, where I’ve been living ever since.
CHILDHOOD (1997-2001)
The 4 years I spent in Namibia were the most vivid years of my childhood. A war broke out where we lived, with my father being a doctor, and my mother being a nurse, they sent me and my older siblings to far away boarding schools for safety. My earliest memories of drawing as a hobby began at my boarding school in Namibia.
EARLY ADOLESCENCE (2002 – 2006 – 2011)
After growing up in Namibia, adapting to Primary School and High school in the UK was a strange experience. I made many good friends and memories, but the candidness between teachers and students, among a list of cultural differences, was something I struggled to get my head around.
When I wasn’t playing Runescape or watching Power Rangers, drawing kept me occupied, and it soon became something that drew attention to me from my peers. My high school art class in particular became the first class in the school’s history to take on College level art programs for our final year.
COLLEGE (2011 – 2013)
Despite my love for art, I didn’t have any concrete long term goals of what I wanted out of it. Attaining new personal levels of beauty was a difficult and fulfilling enough challenge on its own, but understanding the importance of that experience wouldn’t come till much later. At this time, people had more to say about my art than I did.
The 4 UK college courses I studied were AS Maths, Physics, Art, and Graphics design. In my final year of my college, my aspirations shifted between being an Architect and being an Animator, but I somehow ended up picking Graphics Design as the course I would major in heading into University.
UNIVERSITY (2013 – 2016)
2012-2013 was the period were I really got into animation and manga. I binge watched One piece, Bleach, and Naruto over the course of a summer, and really became hooked on comics as an artform.
I later joined a small online fan group who were colouring the Naruto manga weekly after releases for fun. It was an exciting experience that also developed my painting skills and understanding of colour. We called ourselves Colorkage.
In contrast to the fun I was having colouring manga, two years into my undergraduate course, I didn’t have much personal drive towards what I was doing there. I didn’t know what else I was expecting out of the course but I knew I wasn’t enjoying it.
Absent-mindedness was a frequent occurrence. I kept having dreadfully enlightening dreams that upon logical inspection, really made no sense, despite them feeling realer than the real. I sought out fiction, ancient myths, and my faith for answers, and then I slowly thought up the idea of constructing a fictional cosmological framework, to help me make sense of things I was seeing, that didn’t seem well documented.
It was also around this time that I finally started paying attention to how a lot of the media and entertainment I consumed were made, asking questions about why they were made. There wasn’t much motivation for me to sit down and draw towards my own soup of imaginary ideas, because it’s not something I even knew where to begin with, but then I came across Jake Parker’s Inktober challenge.
Upon seeing the challenge, I decided to take it on. I really pushed myself to create random characters and backgrounds everyday for the month of October.
To my surprise, after I took a step back to look at what I had done at the end of the month, I had quite a revelation in regards to my own art. The drawings themselves didn’t leave a lasting impression on me, however, the overall experience had expanded my mind to reach out to important experiences that I previously thought were intelligible, and to try to bring them to life. I started to feel the weight of art, beyond just being a source of income, beyond attracting praise, and even beyond chasing a personal sense of beauty.
This was the birth of Terravitio as an idea; a fictional world full of tales to explore the questions and mysteries brought to me by dreams.
POSTGRADUATION - (2016+)
After I graduated University with my Graphics Design degree, aside from what would prove to be some very useful technical skills, what I took away from it was that I didn’t quite want a graphics design job.
With my newly invigorated passion for storytelling, I spent some months working on the prologue of a comic called David’s Gate, that would introduce people to the world of Terravitio, on my art blog. This comic project wasn’t getting anything in the way of funding, and at the time I was on a UK “Universal Credit” business plan to help me become self employed. The idea of the project being something that could monetarily sustain me was my best case scenario. And that came closer to reality after I submitted a few pages of the comic as an application for the 2018 Creators4Creators grant and won.
Winning the grant enabled me to further pursue this project. It gave my supporting family tangible confirmation that there might really be something to what I was doing, and it gave me more time to read and study, to better understand the inner visions that I felt compelled to pursue through art.
SODIVONE (2021)
On a strange journey of discovery, I created Sodivone, in the hopes that I can begin to actualize my visions of Ilẹ̀ Aiyéṣà.