I've always been someone who drew pictures, starting as young as I can remember. I was one of those top 2 or 3 kids that drew, in every grade school class, depending on what the cool thing to draw was at the time. Even into adulthood, I would pull out a pen and paper, and draw every once in a while. It kind of went in spurts, and from high school on (when I started drawing the outhouses some of you have seen), it was always pen and ink, with a plain, old, black Bic pen. I'd get into one theme, kind of drawing, and do a bunch over a couple of months, then not draw for a year, then get into something else for a while.
In the late 1990's, I remember seeing the a commercial for the the TV show OZ, about a maximum security prison. It was a brutal, hardcore show for its day. I also remember seeing a commercial for another prison show, or maybe a movie, where the prison was on an abandoned oil rig, out in the ocean. Totally isolated.
For some reason, seeing those, I wondered, "If there really are grey aliens somewhere, in some underground military base, and thought they'd be almost like prisoners. This weird train of thought intrigued me, and I kind of rolled with it for a while. "What would those aliens be like after years stuck underground, isolated? Would they form into gangs, like in prison? Would they have tattoos? Would they take on American/Earth habits, like watching TV, or some hobby like playing cards?" With this in mind, I drew a back view of a grey alien one day, with back of the arm tattoos that said, "Grey Pride" in a sort of Old English lettering. He also had a grey bandana on, gang style. That was probably in 1997 or 1998. I just found it amusing. I think I drew a better version later on.
I invented my Sharpie Scribble Style of drawing, while living in an indie art gallery in 2005-6. There's a post about that not too far back on this blog. By then the gangsta alien had morphed into a different idea. That idea was that a group of isolated aliens would wind up a lot like the people in the trailer I lived in outside of Boise for a year. That's the place where I got into BMX. When you're largely isolated away from most people, things tend to get kind of weird. People turn into characters. So I started drawing aliens again, this time in color, with Sharpies. Around that time, I stumbled across Bansky's Wall and Piece book, and I did a bit of street art of my own. I found grey aliens were a good little character that was easy to draw quick. I didn't use spray paint, I tried a few alternative methods.
Before long, the idea of aliens living in a trailer park, deep in an obscure part of some Area 51-type base, intrigued me. So I drew a simple grey alien with a cigarette in his mouth, and a wife beater T-shirt. It just made me laugh. "A white trash alien," I said. "Grey trash." I laughed some more. And I've drawn them now and then since. Not very often, but once in a while.
When taxi driving died, and I wound up homeless in 2007, I drew some at night, while sitting in a fast food place. The first Sharpie Scribble Style drawing I ever sold was one of these aliens. I sold it for $5 on Hollywood Boulevard in the spring of 2008. That was seven years before I started trying to seriously sell my Sharpie art.
Over the last couple of weeks, I've started drawing these guys (and one gal) again. Welcome to my weird little world of Grey Trash alien drawings.
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