This is M.C. Emig Skatepark #5, the first large drawing (18" X 21") I've done in this style. The "M.C." is a nod to M.C. Escher, whose work we are all familiar with, and inspired this general idea. But my name is Steve Emig, and this is a drawing of a possible (if not super rideable) skatepark. That's there the name came from. This post is how I came to this new direction in my Sharpie art.
I'm still writing this post... don't read it yet... not done!
I've been drawing as long as I can remember. I drew with crayons as a little kid, with pencils as a grade schooler, and basic black Bic pens and pencils while in high school. My dad was a draftsman that worked his way up to being a design engineer, so he drew big drawings of machine parts for a living. When I was a kid, he would occasionally bring drawings home to work on, and he taught me how to understand them, So drawing was natural to me, and I was always that kid doodling in his notebooks all through school. In second grade, drawing Speed Racer's Mach 5 race car was the cool thing. At another school in 3rd grade, Army jeeps, tanks, and halftracks were the hot thing. My dad taught me to draw jeeps while on a camping trip, which upped my game, making me one of the two best kids at drawing that year.
My mom did ceramics when I was little, and other crafts, so there were creative hobbies always happening in my house. But at the same time, working class people in 1970's Ohio had no love for people who called themselves "artists." When somebody like Andy Warhol would show up on TV, adults were quick to denigrate "those crazy, lazy people who didn't have real jobs, and just did art in New York City or Los Angeles." It was simply known in my childhood world that art was not something you could ever make a living at. Adults didn't have to tell us that, their attitudes about art said it all. People had to work "real jobs," often jobs they hated, but did because it was necessary to work and make a living. Decent working people could have hobbies, but not get arrogant and uppity, and think they could actually make a living with art of any kind. I only met one professional artist when I was a kid. A friend's dad made cool little sculptures, a group of seals laying on a rock, was the one I remember. I couldn't believe that he actually made a living sculpting. "But what does he do for a job?" I kept asking my friend. "Sculpting is his job," she replied.
One of the "M.C. Escher Skateparks" that I did earlier this year. Sketched freehand in pen, then shaded.
So I grew up in a world where I was often encouraged to draw, as a kid, but where doing any kind of "art" as an adult was simply not an option. Becoming a draftsman like my dad was the only way to draw for a living. Like a lot of people in Generation X and earlier generations, this led to an inner conflict when doing creative work. One part of me had a strong drive to draw or do creative work, and socially programmed side of me thought it was bad or evil to try and earn money doing creative work. I've spent decades working through those issues.
The M.C. Emig Skatepark idea, above, started when I was in high school, after I got into BMX the summer after my sophomore year of high school. I would sit in class sometimes and doodle little ramps, at a time when simple quarterpipes and halfpipes were the only actual ramps that existed. If a halfpipe had a channel or roll-in, that was as complex as they got in 1983 or 84. But I would sometimes scrawl little ramp set-ups on notebook paper while bored in one class or another.
I also took drafting for two years in high school, and pottery my senior year, and I was pretty good at both, getting all A's, I believe. While people think of pottery as a lazy person's, "easy A" class, it wasn't at Boise High School. My teacher, Mrs, Feuss, made it pretty easy to get a B, if you did the work, and tried your best. But even in pottery, we had to work to get an A. I not only got A's, I also made a bunch of whiskey jugs on the side, which I sold to mountain men, for $5 each. My best friend Darrin was doing that, and got me into both pottery, and selling the handmade whiskey jugs. So I got A's in pottery, and made a $5 profit, after paying the $40 materials fee for the year. I also aced drafting, which came pretty natural to me, thanks to my dad, and most people figured I'd be a design engineer, too. But there was a big difference. My dad could actually understand mechanical things, and fix them. I couldn't. He just got how machines worked, and I didn't. I could draw the pictures, but I didn't get how things actually operated. My interests lay elsewhere.
When I graduated high school in 1984, there was no money to go to college, So I "took a year off." I worked in a restaurant, and kept riding my bike, practicing freestyle tricks, and doing a few shows, part of the one trick team in Idaho, with Jay Bickel. A year later, my family moved to San Jose, when my dad got a new job. I worked my summer job in Boise, managing a tiny amusement park called the Boise Fun Spot. Then I packed up my land yacht, a 1971 brown, Pontiac Bonneville, and drove solo to San Jose, to join my parents and sister.
When I got there, I quickly found a job at a local Pizza Hut. I worked nights, rode during the day, and started a BMX freestyle zine to meet the other San Francisco Bay Area riders. The zine worked, and I soon met the legendary Curb Dogs team, the Skyway factory team guys, and a bunch of really good amateurs. Eleven issues of my zine, San Jose Stylin', landed me a job in Southern California. I flew to SoCal at the end of July in 1986. I had my bike, a suitcase, and $80 when I left. I started my new job at Wizard Publications, home of BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines, the next day.
I was used to being busy every minute at Pizza Hut, and Wizard was just the opposite at first. My primary job was to proofread both magazines, which was about one week's work each month. I had a lot of free time in my little office the rest of the time, for the first couple of months. I started reading the MLA Stylebook, to learn proofreading on the fly. I read back issues of both magazines, learning about the history of BMX racing, jumping, and freestyle. I also started drawing little ramp drawings again, isometric, "3D" looking sketches. Ramps were real simple then, and I drew weird combinations of quarterpipes and halfpipes, linked together in cool combos and at weird angles. One day I drew one, a completely crazy one, with ramps at completely unrealistic angles and directions. I called it an M.C. Escher Skatepark. My co-workers thought it was funny. And that was it. I drew a few more, just goofing around.
As time went on, I got busier, and didn't really have time to draw at work anymore. Over the years I would get a sketchpad and draw with pens once in a while, usually for a couple of months at a time. Then I wouldn't draw for many months. I made zines, produced low budget BMX and skateboard videos, and worked a whole bunch of odd jobs, from video store clerk to TV show crew guy, and I didn't draw much.
Then in 2005, while working as a taxi driver, another driver made me an offer. I could live in his indie art gallery, in an industrial building, and drive his taxi on the weekends. I'd been working nearly every single day, 10-18 hours a day, seven days a week, for 2 1/2 years. I was burned out, and took the offer. Suddenly I was alone all day, in a big room full of art created by several young artists, with a mama cat and six tiny kittens for company. On day two, I drew a little drawing on a post-it note. A couple days later, I bought a pack of generic markers, and a roll of banner paper. I started making big drawings, adding art to some of the poems I'd written. I tried to find a way to shade colors well with markers. I upgraded to a 24 pack of colored, standard Sharpie markers, and soon after figured out a way to layer different colored scribbles, and get more nuanced colors and shading. That probably happened in September of 2005. I kept playing with that idea, day after day. I soon figured out that the smaller, ultra fine Sharpies worked better. My Sharpie Scribble Style was born. I spent 5 or 6 more months living at the gallery, figuring out which colors blended well with each other to produce different hues.
I went back to driving a taxi full time in June of 2006, but I took my Sharpies and got an 11" X 14" sketch pad, and drew while sitting in my taxi, waiting for fares. I lived in my taxi, making enough money to pay taxi lease, buy gas, and eat, but not enough to rent an apartment. I drew a few different styles, and kept improving with my scribble style. Eventually, taxi driving took a dive, due to computer dispatching, and I wound up homeless, living on the streets. After a year, I took my family's standing offer to move to North Carolina, where they all ended up living. I quickly went into a deep depression, I couldn't find any job, and I hated living there.
I struggled with depression, lived in homeless shelters a while, drove a taxi for a year, and my dad had a stroke and later died. I wound up living with my mom, who I never really got along with. Again, I couldn't find any job there, even after putting in 140 applications over a couple of years.
In late 2015, I didn't have a dime to my name. I had a room of my own, in my mom's tiny apartment, a refurbished laptop still running Windows XP, a sketchpad, my Sharpies, and a pretty solid following from years of writing my Old School BMX blogs. I decided to step up my art game, and see if I could sell drawings to make a little bit of money for myself. I found a stencil of Bruce Lee, a street art drawing, and drew it in my style. I put it Facebook, and sold it for $20. Then I sold another. By the Spring of 2016, I was drawing every day, and making a couple of hundred dollars a month from Sharpie drawings. Unfortunately, my mom had a way of falling into a crisis that just happened to need the exact amount of money I had, time after time. I couldn't even buy art supplies much of the time, let alone money to get my own life kickstarted again.
M.C. Emig Skatepark #1, sketched freehand in pen, inked with a Sharpie, then colored with Sharpie Scribble Style, 9" X 12".
I eventually moved out, and lived in a tent in the woods of Winston-Salem, about ten miles away. I got a chance to do an art show at a cool, old school record shop, called Earshot Music. I spent a couple of months doing 8 big drawings of musicians. One sold the day before the show, and six more sold at the show, or shortly after. I was suddenly pounding out a drawing a week, making $120 to $150 each. Each drawing took about 40-45 hours to draw. It wasn't much money per hour, but I survived, and became a part of Winston-Salem's cool little Trade Street Art scene.
Since I drew several musicians for the music shop art show, people kept asking me to draw musicians. I've been drawing big #sharpiescribblestyle drawings, and scraping by as a homeless, but working artist, ever since. I left North Carolina, ran out of bus fare in Richmond, Virginia, and lived on the streets there for 9-10 months, then an old friend bought me a bus ticket back to California. I was working to help promote his online BMX store when I first got here. That project didn't go as hoped, and I ghosted out of there, and have been on the streets of the L.A. area, ever since the summer of 2019. I was selling drawings on Hollywood Boulevard pre-Covid, planning to survive the winter rainy season, and then promote my artwork full bore in the Spring of 2020. Yeah, we all know what happened in the Spring of 2020.
I went back into survival mode, and did sell a few drawings, just not very many, all through the pandemic. Now as we're coming out of that funk, I'm back to figuring out how to best promote my work, and raise my income level until I can rent a place of my own, again, and get back to "regular" life.
Since I've been doing drawings based on photos of famous people, making lots of copies to sell was never really an option. Copyright law, and 21st century use of images and files, are miles apart at this point. While I can make an artistic representation of someone's photo, and it's fair use, making lots of prints or posters can lead to a copyright lawsuit, whether frivolous, or serious. At this point most of my portraits come out really well, but I needed to find better subject matter to draw, something where it was all my work, using my own photos, or all my ideas.
As this was rolling around my head, I heard about NFT's, Non Fungible Tokens, or blockchain linked art and collectibles. When I dug into that world to learn the basics, I saw most people were doing big series of art pieces. Most of those were computer generated "profile pics" or PFP's. But the photographers doing NFT's and others that took off, were usually a series of similar themed work. I thought about what I could do as a series of similar pieces, to make NFT's out of. My aliens smoking cigarettes, which I call Grey Trash, came to mind. I've been drawing them since 2009 or so. I drew a whole bunch of those in early 2022, to see how many different types I could come up with.
One of the Grey Trash aliens I drew earlier this year, playing with different ideas.
Those were fun, and I wound up doing about 35 little alien drawings, each with a different saying. But nobody was really bowled over by the aliens, though I love them. Then, one day I was sitting at a fast food place, and I didn't have my Sharpies with me, just a black Bic pen, and a small sketch pad. I started drawing some isometric shapes, going way back to my drafting days in high school. Then I drew a couple of my M.C. Escher skateparks, like I did back in 1986, and put them on Facebook for people to check out. Much to my surprise, quite a few people liked them, and one guy wanted to buy the sketches. Then another person messaged me, asking about doing a collaboration. I told him I'd draw a new "M.C. Escher skatepark" for him. I sat down at the library to draw the next day, and listened to a couple of M.C. Escher documentaries while I drew. I looked at my drawing and thought, "This sucks. What if I tried to seriously draw a weird skatepark, something that was comparable in quality to Escher's work?"
This is the piece of cardboard I scribbled on one night, playing with the idea of doing serious, M.C. Escher caliber drawings. It was on this piece of cardboard that I figured out the repeating pattern of little hip jump ramps.
I was so stoked on the idea, that I grabbed a Sharpie, and scribbled ideas on a piece of cardboard, while at the place where I slept homeless, that night. That's where I figured out I could make a repeating pattern of little hip jumps, like in the top center of the drawing at the top of this post. I couldn't wait to wake up, and get to work the next morning. While I didn't have real drafting tools, like a drafting board, T-square, and triangles, I did have a protractor and a ruler. That was enough to draw a big, more complex, symmetrical skatepark. I drew it in pencil, with proper angles, and then inked the main lines with a standard black Sharpie marker. Then I spent the next couple of days coloring it, not sure how the finished drawing would turn out. M.C. Emig Skatepark #5, at the top, is the result. As soon as I got it done, I knew I was on to something.
So these designs, inspired by, but not copying, some of M.C. Escher's work, are the new direction I'm going with my #sharpiescribblestyle. There are so many directions to go with this basic idea, I just want to keep exploring and playing around with it. I like the idea of making a 3D looking, symmetrical design, that looks cool hanging on a wall, but is also a weird skatepark.
So that's where I'm at right now, and as of this moment, M.C. Escher Skatepark #5 is for sale, message me on Facebook or Twitter, if interested. Thanks for reading this long post, if you made it this far, and stay tuned for more weird "skatepark" drawings, coming soon.
I started a new blog, check it out:
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