With a friend when we were little. I’ve been absorbing a lot of adventure films and cartoons where the protagonist was a child set to overcome a huge obstacle, setting out on his own, and a montage of him filling up his backpack with all manner of supplies, weapons, and items he’ll be needing. To a child’s mind, this is reality. So after seeing a few movies like this, and I did see quite a lot of them as we owned the VHS rental shop on our street at the time, I also tried to set out on an odyssey of my own. I called up a friend of mine, and we crammed our backpacks with everything we would ever need in the so-called expedition we were about to embark on. We loaded up sandwiches, toys, coloring books and crayons, a toy sword and water gun, and everything else in between while wearing helmets and multiple clothes. Once we were ready, we set out and braved the afternoon air, out in the street and toward that invisible dragon we’re about to slay.

Sadly though, the real reality hit. After walking just one block from our house, we ran out of places to go in search of an escapade. Not only that, our back packs were quite heavy, and our doubled-up clothes weren’t helping as we were sweating in the Manila sun. Fellow kids were admiring how we looked at first, but it was not long before they realized it, too; that we just looked like a pair of idiots, trying to summon an adventure by dressing the part.

RUNAWAY KIDS is a series where I revisit that time in my life. It’s how we saw ourselves at that moment having to have a real adventure in mind no matter how short. Seeing ourselves trying to enter a quest to slay a dragon, save a damsel in distress, or just escape from a boring day, trying to run away from reality even just for a day... or a few minutes. There is no logic here, multiple samurai swords, riding on animals and paper boats, multiple cool toys we had and never did get.

Creatively, I used traditional techniques, color markers, pens, watercolor, and gouache even inks and pigments used for toy miniature painting along with the addition of utilizing image references from artificial intelligence technology to visualize what we looked like back then as a more exaggerated version of ourselves. It’s just wonderful fun, and if I did see these images if I was still a kid, I would completely relate to them.
-Marius Black