My Sharpie Scribble Style Art 2005-2019 - #6

I struggled hard with depression for three years after my dad died in 2012, while living with my mom.  Things got crazy, I still couldn't find any kind of job in NC, even a lame, minimum wage or restaurant job.  My mom lives in perpetual financial crisis, which made things harder.  In mid-November of 2015, I decided to create my own job.  My Sharpie art was the only thing that made me any money, and I liked doing it, so that's what I chose to do.

I knew that the first step was to step up my art game, beyond the cigarette smoking aliens, the "tile" drawings, and some weird trees I was doing then.

So I asked myself, "What drawing would I want to put up on my own wall?"

A simple question, with a big effect.  I got on my mom's computer, which was faster than my crappy, ancient, laptop, and looked at all kinds of art for about 2 1/2 hours.  I looked at some classic stuff, marble statues, Monet, Renoir, and those guys.  I looked at DaVinci and Michalangelo's work, then Picasso and more modern stuff.

But I spent most of the time looking a big, colorful, graffiti murals, street art of all kinds, skateboard graphics, and stencils.  I loved Banky's stuff, and the sense of humor he ads to his work.  Surprisingly, I kept coming back to street art stencils, Banksy's, of course, but also other, simple, black and white images, from all over the world.  I liked the simple, high contrast look.

I found the stencil of Bruce Lee, above, and decided to draw that, because he was my first hero as a 5-year-old kid.  I printed it out, and, even though it was really simple, I enlarged it, and  transferred the image on my paper.  I added a bunch of his quotes, written freehand in the background to give it some texture.  It was simple, but I totally dug it, and I actually did put it up on my wall.  I knew I had to draw people, preferably from high contrast photos.  The drawing of Bruce Lee above changed the entire direction of my artwork.

Next I wanted to do a drawing of Travis Bickle, the crazy cabbie a young Robert Deniro played in the 1976 movie Taxi Driver.  He summed up the craziness of that weird career that I'd spent many years doing.  When I was blowing the photo up, I accidentally made a large copy that chopped off half his face.  But it looked cool, so that's what I drew.  I added the yellow, and a checker pattern, both older associations to taxi driving.  I was stoked on this one as well. 

With those two drawings under my belt, I wanted to see if action sports photos would work with my style.  I tried the skater's Smith grind above, which was kind of cool.  Then I did the Superman seat grab BMX guy, below.  I was a hardcore (if not all that great) BMX freestyler, for 20 years, and I wanted to draw some BMX pictures.  That one pretty much sucked, so I began to figure out what kind of drawings wouldn't work well with my style.

So for the next BMX guy drawing, I wanted a closer up, more high contrast, photo to work from.  This lookback above came out much better, even thought it's a horrible photo of the drawing.  Again, I put words in the background as a visual texture, something I first did in 2005.

A couple years later, while I was still going to church with my mom, I drew a pic of the church, an 8" X 10", I think.  My Sunday school teacher wanted to help me out, and ordered this one from me.  #sharpiescribblestyle