Who the heck is Steve Emig? The early years...

We managed to live in a small cottage on the end of Holiday Lakes, outside that small town of Willard, Ohio, for 2 1/2 years.  That was 6th through 8th grades for me.  We didn't have a boat, but I swam at the little beach all summer long with a bunch of friends.  This video was made by one of my little sister's good friends who still lives there.

Last Friday night, I FINALLY made it to the First Friday Art fest on Trade Street here in Winston-Salem, NC.  For a bunch of reasons, I'd never actually hung out on a First Friday, when the art scene here opens doors to everyone.  I had a few of my Sharpie drawings with me, and they got a surprisingly good response from everyone I showed them to.  I was really stoked on that.  So, since I've now introduced myself to some of the Winston-Salem creative scene, and told a few people about this blog, I figured I'd better give you an idea who I am.  This post will tell you a bit about my school years up through high school.  The next post I'll link a bunch of stuff I've done and worked on since then.

Early years- I was born in Ohio in 1966, making me one of the old farts in what's now known as Generation X.  My dad was a draftsman and worked into a design engineer as I grew up.  So I was raised looking at mechanical drawings my dad had done.  He also taught me to draw Army Jeeps when I was 8, which made me fairly cool among the artistic kids in third grade.  My mom was a housewife, who worked several part time jobs, and liked doing crafts.  Ceramics in the early 70's was the one she excelled at most.

But I was chubby, sucked at sports, had buck teeth, and couldn't say my "R's" and S's" well until about 7th grade.  I was also the shortest kid in class in every grade school, and super shy.  So I grew up as a dork, geek, dweeb... take your pick.  My family was more dysfunctional than most, less dysfunctional than some, and we moved to a new house or apartment nearly every year.  As I grew up, we bounced around Ohio and Indiana until 8th grade, then a year in New Mexico (culture shock!), then to Boise, Idaho, where I managed to go to the same high school for three years, though we lived in three houses during that time.

As a kid, I spent most of my time imagining, wandering the woods (later the desert), and drawing, and into things like being a Boy Scout.

In the summer of 1982, we moved to a trailer park outside Boise known as Blue Valley.  There were only three girls our age there, and the cute one had a boyfriend.  So all the junior high and high school boys didn't have much to do, so we started trying to out-do each other on our BMX bikes.  We started racing at the local track, and by the next year, BMX was my thing.  That little bike changed the course of my life.