The Birth of my Sharpie "Scribble Style"

When I first heard of the idea of a Doodle Wall in 2002, it was much more random than this.  But this time lapse gives a quick look at the idea.

It was 2002, and I was renting this tiny room that a Mexican family built on the side of their house in Garden Grove, California.  Basically, they would just rent it out cheap to young Mexican guys new to the country.  But I worked with the dad of the family, and when I got booted from my old place, he said I could move in.  It was dark, and felt like a cave.  One day on MTV's House of Style with Cindy Crawford, I saw a segment about making a doodle wall.  The idea was to buy a roll of butcher paper, tape it up to a wall, and have you and your friends just randomly doodle on it.

So I had the idea of drawing a mural on the wall.  I wanted it to be like I was sitting in a cave, looking out at a sunset.  I've never been a painter, so I bought a cheap pack of 12 markers, got a big roll of paper, taped it up on the wall, and started drawing.  It completely sucked.  The marker colors just weren't cutting it.  So I started making big collages of photos cut out of my old BMX, skateboard, and rock climbing magazines.  In between the photos I would experiment with different kinds of doodles, trying to find a good way to shade with markers.   I ended up getting booted out by the Mexican family, and put all my stuff in storage.  So I stopped drawing.

In late 2003, I cleared up a problem with the DMV, got my driver's license back, and went back to taxi driving.  I lived in my taxi, figuring I could save up enough to rent a room in a few months.  But the taxi company took out the dispatch radios and put in a computer dispatch system.  That completely screwed up the business, and I lived in my cab, worked 70 to 100 hours a week, and scraped by for over two years.

I was burned out, really fat, and hating life.  At that point, a cab driver named Richard offered me a different deal.  He had a little indie art gallery housed in an industrial unit in Anaheim.  He said I could live in the gallery for $50 a week, and drive his taxi on the weekends.  I took the deal, and suddenly I was sleeping on a couch in a big room whose walls were covered with art by Orange County artists.  On the weekends, the gallery was open, and local bands played.  But it was quiet during the week.  Most of the time it was just me, a cat named P.A., and her six kittens.  So I became the janitor/kitten wrangler and artist in the gallery.  In the crazy years of full time taxi driving, I totally gave up on doing anything creative.  I just struggled to make $600 a week to pay the taxi company for the cab, $300 a week to buy gas, and food money for me.  On my second night in the gallery, I drew a little picture.  I just kept drawing, making big drawing with markers, taking up where I'd left off 2 1/2 years earlier.  One day while drawing a tree, I scribbled a bunch of colors over each other, and it looked pretty cool.  I kept playing with the idea, and my "scribble style" of shading with Sharpie markers was born.

Here's a later clip of the AAA Electra 99 Gallery (and museum), hosted by founder Richard Johnson, where my creativity was reborn in 2005. 
AAA Electra 99 was so far underground in 2002, you needed spelunking gear to find it.  That's part of what made it great.