They had me a "donuts." This is one of my favorite talks about art and being a creative person, and the struggles that go with that. Maria begins the conversation with, "Let's talk about donuts..." a reference to a bit of Amanda Palmer's book, The Art of Asking, and Henry David Thoreau living at Walden. If you're a writer, artist, or any other kind of creative person, you may love this conversation. That's all I'm going to say, other than it's from 2014, shortly after Amanda's book came out.
I have a new blog now, about side hustles, gig jobs, small businesses, and making a living in this coming recession. Check it out:
Jessie Armand's black and white doodle art was THE Sharpie art style in 2011-12. Here's a cool time lapse of him doing an office wall.
My first attempt at a marker mural on paper, was in 2002, in a tiny room I lived in Garden Grove. It completely sucked. But it got me started making huge collages, and trying to find a cool way to blend colors with Sharpies. "Real artists" know that Sharpies dry quick, and you can't blend colors. I didn't bother asking any real artists. In late 2005, while actually living in an indie art gallery, I discovered my Sharpie Scribble Style. I've been evolving and pushing it for the 16+ years since.
As crazy as it sounds, I never bothered to google "Sharpie art" until 2012, after I had been drawing kid's names in #sharpiescribblestyle, and doing drawings for my niece and nephew. That was also about the time I found three skateboard decks by our dumpster, and did "Grey Trash" alien drawings, then mounted them on the decks.
When I did finally look up Sharpie art, this video, and a couple others of Jessie's work, are what I found. His style blew my mind. I started doing some black and white doodle drawings now and then to try and mimic his style, which I never came close to doing. My Sharpie doodles are pretty cool looking now, but not near as cool as Jessie's work from a decade ago. Check out this Lamborghini he did. Here's Jessie's website today. Wow.
Meanwhile, I kept drawing, and in late 2015, started drawing people, and trying to sell my drawings, since I couldn't make any money or find a "real" job. I'm still broke, but I've sold about 100 originals since. Here's one of my favorites...
The late, great, Stevie Ray Vaughn. #sharpiescribblestyle.
These are all 18" X 24" drawings, that took 35 to 45 hours each to draw, done in the Sharpie Scribble Style technique I invented. Above, Dave Vanderspek, full speed ahead, at the 1987 Palm Springs Tramway road GPV race, from the best photo I ever took. Below that,Vic Murphy's ultra classic 1 foot tabletop off a curb (from a black & white photo). Then Kurt Cobain drawing, drawn for my first little art show at Earshot Music in Winston-Salem, NC, 2017. Below that, Gene Simmons/KISS drawing at the same show. I drew the "KISS" in my tent in the woods, didn't have a reference of their logo, and yes, I know I did the S's wrong. It sold anyhow. Below that, Tupac Shakur. Then Jerry Garcia. #sharpiescribblestyle
Many years ago, Todd McFarlane was an artist who led a defection away from one of the big comic companies. He thought the artists should get a bigger chunk of the profits of the characters they drew day after day. So did the artists who followed him, and they started Image comics. Todd's first story was one he'd thought up when he was 16, it was called Spawn. The new comic took off, and Spawn now ranks as the 15th highest selling comic book series ever, with over 150 million issues sold. This interview is probably the best I've ever seen of a creative person taking the DIY route, and starting their own business. Watch this video if you have any interest in making a living at art, writing, or other creative works.
Starting from above, Lana Del Rey, done for the 16th birthday of a girl named Erin, whose mother interviewed me for the Winston-Salem paper, in 2017. Below, this is me standing on stage with the Maya Angelou drawing I did in 2018, at a 90th birthday party in Winston-Salem for Maya, a few years after her death, where she lived the last decades of her life. Dr. Maya Angelou's niece and archivist, Ms. Johnson, has a full sized print of this in her collection. Yoda, done for myself in 2016, and now living on a wall east of Chicago. The Princess Leia drawing is one I started a couple days before Carrie Fisher got sick, and went to the hospital. By some freaky coincidence, I was drawing this when she passed away. RIP Carrie Fisher (she's getting a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame this summer, BTW... finally). This is the second Johnny Cash drawing I did, and one of the earliest musician drawings. It was in the small art show I did at Earshot Music in Winston-Salem, in November of 2017. Bob Marley/One Love, done in 2017. The Blues Brothers drawing is another one I did for the show at Earshot Music, in late 2017, it sold a couple days later. The Ron Wilkerson drawing was the first large (18" X 24") BMX drawings I did in 2016, when I was just beginning to sell the drawings of people. #sharpiescribblestyle, #steveemigart
Friday, February 11, 2022
A few of the early Sharpie Scribble Style drawings that I sold in late 2015 and 2016. All of these are 18" X 24", and took 20- 35 hours to draw. Later drawings got more detailed, and now they take 40-45 hours each. The Ramones, Bruce Lee, Joey Ramone, Cam Newton, Prince. Most of these are drawings I wanted to do, and people later offered to buy them. By late 2017, after a small art show in Winston-Salem, I was doing requests almost exclusively, mostly musicians. #sharpiescribblestyle, #steveemigart
I started drawing aliens in about 1998. But the Greys smoking cigarettes started when I was experimenting with street art in 2007, and then with Sharpies in 2009, when I was living in a homeless shelter in Winston-Salem, NC, and looking for work. I drew one grey wearing a wife beater tank top and smoking a cigarette, and it just made me laugh. So I drew more. These ones are on some skateboard decks I found by our dumpster in 2012. The basic idea was, "What if there really are grey aliens living on some secret government base somewhere, and they got sick of staying underground?" The Feds would build some kind of small place for them on the surface, in the middle of nowhere, likely in mobile homes.
So we'd wind up with a bunch of aliens in a trailer park in Nevada or New Mexico, and they wouldn't be able to leave. Would they take on human trailer park characteristics? Would they turn into White Trash aliens in a desert trailer park? Would they become Grey Trash?
That was the basic idea. I started thinking about that, and then drew some. So I've been drawing a bunch of these guys again. With my laptop gone now, and a phone with no data, uploading photos is an issue. But more of these guys are coming soon...
The quote on the last board below is, "I'm not crazy, and if I was, I'd send my invisible ninja leprechauns after you." #greytrash, #sharpiescribblestyle
Giancarlo here was a stock analyst, advising real world investors on gaming and gaming oriented companies in particular. When he dug into NFT's in late 2020 and early 2021, he decided to give up on stocks, and focus on the NFT/crypto space, and start this YouTube channel. He's a really smart guy, and in my opinion, giving some of the best info on how the NFT world works, how it's evolving, and may play out in the future. If you're interested in NFT's, art, collectibles, or crypto/digital art, definitely check out this video.
Longtime hardcore BMXer, driving force behind FBM for over two decades, TV announcer, and all around cool human, Steve Crandall.
I think it was 1994 when I met Steve Crandall. At the time, I was roommates with Chris Moeller and Timmy Ball in Huntington Beach. Between Chris being one of the best known dirt jumpers, and owning S&M Bikes, pretty much everyone in BMX from other parts of the country and world called when traveling to California, asking to crash on our couches and floors. So it was normal for me to come downstairs for breakfast and have complete strangers sleeping in the living room. One morning I was pouring some cereal, and Chris was making tea, and he pointed to the couch, "Those are the FBM guys over in the corner."
I don't remember much else of that weekend, except we did a lot of riding, and little partying with those guys. From then on, I'd run into Crandall at events every once in a while. Then, many years later, when I wound up homeless in Richmond, Virginia in 2018, Crandall sent me a message out of the blue. "Meet me at Powers Bike Shop later, here's the address." He did what he could to help me out, along with Chad at Powers Bikes. I actually was trying to make some money and live there, but I couldn't get momentum. But there is a really cool BMX and art scene there. Got to know Steve better, and finally spent a day at the DIY World Championships event, one of the greatest days of BMX I've seen. Anyhow, watch/listen to this podcast.
A couple months ago, I started looking into these things called NFT's. I read some article on a magazine I found on a bus, about some musician named 3lau, who used these NFT things to fund a cool project. Within a day of my dive into the learning about NFT's, I saw these weird ape faces. Of all the NFT's, the funky Bored Ape Yacht Club characters are the ones I liked the most, just as art.
At the time, early December of 2021, the Crypto Punks, minted on Bitcoin in 2017, were still the coolest, and most expensive NFT's, in this weird new genre'. But in this fast moving NFT world, the Bored Ape Yacht Club, still only about 9 months old, have crept up, surpassing the Crypto Punks in "floor price," the lowest price you can get one of the collection for. In the same time period, crypto has sunk down nearly 50% from its high price level. But a floor priced Bored Ape NFT will still cost you about $200,000. They all sold for about $130 to $150 worth of Ether in late April and May of 2021. Some have sold for a couple million dollars.
Investing money in the S&P 500 stock index on April 30, 2021 would have earned you about a 3.46% return on your investment today. That's about half of the current inflation rate. But dropping $150 on a digital picture of a funny looking monkey at the same time, would have earned you about 130,000% ROI, minimum. What the fuck is going on?
Starting about four years ago in this blog, I started trying to warn people of a huge recession I saw heading our way, being the economics/futurist geek that I am. For 30 years I've been learning about obscure, ultra long term trends. I've been watching these for over 30 years now, and I saw these weird trends starting to converge. What that told me is that we were heading not only into a big economic crash, but a really crazy period of several years. So as this stuff happened, and I struggled to survive my weird personal circumstances, and blogged about what I saw happening in the mainstream economic world.
Since I've been a homeless blogger/artist, I was struggling to charge my laptop and get on wifi during the Covid era, often sitting outside a place with free wifi. I didn't have enough time online to do much research on the stuff I was already interested in, let along new things that caught my attention. As I was watching The Fed throw trillions of newly created dollars banks and the corporate world, to bail everyone out from the recession that started in late 2019, and which the pandemic took to horrific levels. Completely oblivious to me, an art movement was growing, actually exploding, in the crypto world. That was a world I had not dove in to learn about yet.
In late 2020, these things called NFT's, non-fungible tokens, were getting used to make money for artists. Crypto Kitties and the Crypto Punks had been around a while. Enterprising people in the crypto world started projects to put out huge collections, usually around 10,000 NFT's, of computer generated pictures of something. People in crypto world were starting to collect these pieces of art that are tied to a blockchain transaction. While the real world looked at NFT's and said, "What kind of idiot would buy a piece of "art" that doesn't even physically exist. But the crypto natives, used to paying for digital goods, like skins in games and crypto coins themselves, that don't really exist, physically. Money started being made as these NFT projects started selling out, and flippers made millions as these digital collectibles soared in price. As this was happening, in late 2020 and early 2021, celebrities started hearing about these things, and started buying them. The whole NFT art thing exploded in the crypto world and the mainstream art world in the Spring of 2021.
A group of former punk rock and hip hop infused skateboarders and BMXers, who were all crypto natives, from Miami, started an NFT project. Their brainstorming led to the idea of a club where bored apes, rich from crypto in 2031, and bored at life in general, hung out. The got graphic artist Seneca to draw up the basic ape designs, and about 70 other artists to do the rest of the artwork. The project launched pretty quietly in April of 2021, as crypto itself was hitting insane levels. A couple weeks later, word of the apes popped in some Discord group, and the things started selling, for .08 Eth, or about $130-$140 each.
Every one of the big NFT projects has a discord group, and a "community" you can be a part of. Most of these start with NFT speculators looking to cash in and make a ton of money flipping them for 10X or 20X returns in hours or days. But as the Bored Ape Yacht Club went on, and dozens of other projects came out with penguins, little dogs, and all kinds of other little Profile Pic (PFP's) NFT's, Bored Apes had a community that actually began to turn into a community. Then celebrities started picking up Bored Apes. Steph Curry, Shaq, Serena Williams, Jimmy Fallon, as well as entrepreneurs like Mark Cuban, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Tai Lopez bought Apes. Tai is giving one away right now, if you find his Discord group. Yeah, GIVING away a $200k NFT.
OK, I was going to write a big, long blog post, but I killed my laptop when it got hacked on January 1st, and I can't get enough time online to write much of anything using the library computer. I was also going to start dropping my own series of cheap and moderately funny NFT's in early January. All that got delayed. Reality is, I totally dig the Bored Apes, and would buy one in a heartbeat if I had $200 grand. Since The Fed and central banks of the world have pretty much killed the whole investment world, a Bored Ape NFT, even at $200K or more, is still probably a better investment than pretty much any traditional investment.
All that aside, NFT's are definitely a place to look if you're an artist who wants to make a living. I'll get there one of these days. Getting hacked was just another baseball bat to the gut, metaphorically, and I'm used to that. I'll write more on NFT's when I get a new laptop.
Right now I have a no budget art show to get up, and a big drawing to finish. Later folks.
