This is my latest Sharpie Scribble Style drawing, motorcycle racer Kenny Roberts, known to many as "King Kenny." This is another project given to me by Sean Ewing, a lifelong BMX and motorcycle enthusiast and rider, and a guy who I've done several really cool drawings for. Sharpie markers on paper, 18" X 24",about 45 hours of work, #sharpiescribblestyle, November 2024.
Kenny Roberts rose up in California to become a great flat track motorcycle racer on the dirt tracks as a young man. He moved on up to road racing, got sponsored by Yamaha, and was the first guy to touch his knee to the ground while leaning into turns. In the late 1970's and early 1980's. Kenny went on to become the first American World Champion at road racing, long dominated by the Europeans at the time. Then he won the World Championship a second year in a row. Check the videos below for footage and the story of Kenny Roberts.
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.
OK, one Sharpie drawing and another weird skatepark sketch. Ken from NorCal liked the two "M.C. Escher Skatepark" drawings, and snapped those up. Then he asked me to draw this drawing of him on a golf course. The photo was taken on a trip that had a great personal meaning to him, and he was waiting for other golfers to play through. I loved this huge pine tree in the foreground. The yellow areas in the grass really pop in the photo, but are blended in better in the actual drawing. Sometimes certain colors pop really hard in photos with my Sharpie drawings. Below is a close-up of the tree bark, which took many hours to draw. This one is 18" X 24", #sharpiescribblestyle.
Another "M.C. Escher Skatepark drawing. Freehand isometric pen and ink, 9" X 12".
"It's 420 somewhere." It's Friday, so here's a drawing for the stoners out there. I only smoked weed for a year or so, right out of high school. But I'm 100% pro legalization (for all the the states still behind the curve).
"If you don't think you can make a difference in the world, far tin a crowded elevator and watch what happens." One person can change things. Somethings, anyhow. #greytrash, #sharpiescribblestyle .
The older I get, the more I believe this idea. "Most progress in the world comes from the freaks, geeks, dorks, and weirdos." Cheers to all the other weirdos out there.
This is Norbit, one of the three aliens that crashed in 1947 north of Roswell, now living in "Grey Valley" mobile home park, in a canyon hidden deep on a military base.
After going down north of Roswell in 1947, one crew member died in the crash, and the second died in transit to a U.S. Army Air Force Base in Roswell, months before the U.S. Air Force was created. This guy knew very little English, he was the engineer of the craft, not the crew chief. When the military asked what his name was, he thought they were asking him where he came from. He said, "In orbit," in the best English he could manage. They misunderstood him, and thought his name was Norbit. The name stuck, as the weeks passed, and he learned English, and the government personnel learned of his world and ways.
Yes, the Roswell crash was 75 years ago. But Grey aliens have a natural lifespan of about 150 Earth years, and Norbit was 35, in our years, when his ship crashed. At 110 years old now, he's got plenty of life left, comparable to a 60-year-old here on Earth.
Norbit has been working with various U.S. government agencies, mostly on engineering projects, since 1947. And yes millennials, he smokes. His planet actually has air that's quite toxic by Earth standards, and the Greys have adapted to it over thousands of years, and their bodies flush airborne toxins out much better than ours do. He picked up smoking in the 1940's, when many of the humans he worked with smoked, and hasn't stopped. He still shows no signs of lung cancer, and telling to stop smoking really pisses him off.
Norbit, overall, is really low key, like many engineers. He doesn't talk a lot, he likes solving tough engineering problems, and keeps to himself much of his off time. He enjoys playing backgammon and a few card games now and then, and watching science based shows on TV and YouTube.
While he was the first Grey to live here on Earth, among humans, for an extended period, he's not alone. It turns out that, as advanced as the Greys spacecraft are, our lightning here on Earth can really do a number on them, or at least the craft from a few decades ago. As more and more craft crashed on Earth, more and more Grey aliens crashed in the 1950's, 60's, and since. The survivors all lived in secret bases, deep underground, until the mid 1970's. At that point they had a bit of a mutiny, and demanded to be able to live somewhere on the surface.
After much debate, a well hidden little canyon, a ways east of White Sands missile range, in western New Mexico, was chosen as the site. Government officials moved in a bunch of single wide mobile homes, drilled a well for water, and put in the basic necessities. The 53 Greys in the U.S. at the time all moved in, and the place soon got nicknamed "Grey Valley."
Since aliens don't officially exist, they can't travel anywhere in public, so they're pretty much stuck in Grey Valley. There is a big cave next to their trailer park, with a pub in the front part, just out of sight. There are several lower levels hollowed out in it, for labs, machine shops, and tech rooms, for the various types of work they do. They had TV early on, and eventually got internet a couple years after it came out.
So now most of the aliens there are active online, using aliases. Several play multi-player online games, and interact with humans who think they're just another person on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram somewhere. They also buy a shitload of stuff from Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and other online shops. Everything they order gets delivered to a main gate loading dock, miles away, then transported by truck to Grey Valley. Most of them are into buying crypto as well, and several have become crypto millionaires, which doesn't make the U.S. government very happy. But they do their respective jobs, and otherwise keep low profiles. So the feds tolerate their online interactions, and crypto and a bit of stock trading.
After many years living as a small group in a trailer park, though, some of them are getting kind of weird. In the future I'll share with you my drawings of this odd, quirky group of aliens. They are the Grey Trash. Here are a couple more. There are many more to come, with their thoughts on different things.
Moron disclaimer: Just in case you're a complete fucking idiot (and many of you are, judging by your online posts), this story is all FICTION. The Grey aliens living in secret bases is an American urban legend at this point, and my Grey Trash drawings are my take on this idea. I have no idea if aliens actually exist, if the Greys exist, if a UFO is what crashed outside Roswell, or any of the other things people have heard about aliens. I started drawing aliens in 1998 or so, and first drew one smoking a cigarette in 2009. It just made me laugh, and the idea of "white trash aliens living in a trailer park," began to form in my head.
All three of these drawings are my large size, 18" X 24", drawn in my unique Sharpie Scribble Style. The tribute to the early days of Thrasher magazine (above) is one I wanted to do to promote my art to some new people. That's Chuck Treece with a layback on a sketched out backyard ramp, and a few other pics from 1980's Thrasher issues. I wanted to capture that vibe from the days when skating was still done only by weirdos, there wasn't much money in it, and backyard ramps and street skating were new. In the background are all the main names of skaters I could think of from that era.
One of the guys from the weekly HB Tuesdays BMX freestyle sessions in Huntington Beach, Sean Ewing, asked me to do this drawing below. It's Malcom Smith, the first legendary American motocross racer, hauling ass in the early days. I drew this from Sean's photo, of a painting, of the original panning photo. Trying to get the feeling of speed was the challenge in his one.
While I'm not a big fan of golf in general, I loved drawing the photo at the bottom. The pic has special meaning for Ken in NorCal. It was a great weekend of his life, a photo snapped while waiting for some other golfers to play through, who were taking their good ol' time. I love that big pine tree in the foreground, and all the shadows in the original photo.
These large drawings take me around 40-45 hours to do. I don't make much per hour for doing them, but doing about 100 of these drawings in the last six years has really honed my skills, and I keep improving, I'm working on a transition to work that takes less time, and makes more money, to get myself off the streets, and stabilize my life. Like any artist, I have a whole bunch of my own ideas I want to draw, on different subjects, stacked up in my mind. Getting an apartment and living like a human again, should give me a little more time to get to some of those ideas. But the large drawings look the best in my style. I need to raise my prices dramatically soon, to cover the hours I put into these things.
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.
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
The guy talking in this video is Richard Johnson, long time taxi driver, indie gallery owner (at the time), gifted storyteller, poker player, and self-proclaimed "fame-ass arteest." Richard's one weird and great character, and he offered me a uniquedeal back in 2005, because he needed someone to drive his taxi on the weekends. I took the offer, and wound up living in AAA Electra 99 gallery, where my creativity was reborn, and my Sharpie Scribble Style art technique was invented.
With the turn of the new millennium, in January of 2000, came a tough time in my life. After an injury, I quit my good paying, Hollywood lighting tech job, in late spring of 1999, and took time off to get a needed minor surgery. My insurance was all screwed up, I couldn't see a doctor, or get the surgery. I looked for a new way to make a living, without heavy lifting, and became a taxi driver in the Huntington Beach, California area. I was living three blocks from the ocean, in downtown H.B. at the time, and one of my neighbors told me, "Some taxi driver told me he makes $300 a day." "OK," I thought, "that sounds good, so I gave it a shot." I soon found out it was a really hard way to make a living. I learned you could make $300 on a really good Saturday. But you had to pay $115 of that to the taxi company, and spend another $35-$40 for gas. And that was the best day of the week for driving.
I scraped by for a couple of months, driving a cab at Orange County (aka John Wayne) Airport, working seven, 17 hour days, while dressed in black slacks, white shirt, and a tie.. I looked like a waiter, and made about $300 a week take home money, if I was lucky. I started hanging out at the downtown bar scene in Huntington Beach on weekend nights, to make extra money driving drunk people home.
I couldn't afford to pay rent anymore, after about two months. I wound up moving out of my apartment, putting all my stuff in storage, and living in my cab, in about October or November of 1999. I also quit driving at the airport, and became a "street driver." I could wear shorts and a T-shirt, and I had to find most of my own business, while paying the taxi company $600 a week to lease the cab. I also had to ante up about $300 a week, to pay for my gas. All my fares and tips blended together, and after I paid for lease and gas, what was left was my "pay." I made about $300 to $350 a week, but worked less hours than at the airport. I soon became an expert at "flagging" the local bars and nightclubs of Orange County, learning which bars were the best which nights of the week. I got really good at finding rides in places other drivers never thought of.
I switched to another taxi company, a new one, that had brand new Ford Crown Victorias, but they were natural gas powered. So I had to go to obscure places to refill, but I got free gas for months. Since it was a new taxi company, they had almost no business, but the lease was only $400 a week. I lived in that taxi, and easily made enough to pay my lease, but not much more. I was making about $200 a week, while living in my taxi, for six more months. Then the new company got the big O.C. Airport contract, and didn't have enough drivers for a month, as the drivers from the other company switched to our company. So I made insane money for three weeks, working back at the airport, and was able to rent a room in a house after that.
By that time, I knew how to make money in a taxi, and I switched to another company where I could rent the cab just on the weekends, for $115 a day, for three days. About 8-9 months into my taxi career, I rented a cheap room in inland Huntington Beach, I made about $300-$350 a week, and had four days off. Life was pretty good. Until Christmas 2000, when my driver's license got suspended suddenly, apparently from a clerical error at the DMV.
I wound up working odd jobs, and was homeless on the streets, while working a restaurant job for nine months. On Labor Day weekend, 2003, I was finally able to get my taxi permit again, and go back to taxi driving. Once again, I was living in my cab, and working 7 days a week, and taking showers at the gym as I kept getting fatter. It was around that time I met another cab driver named Richard Johnson. He was a long time taxi driver, a couple years older than me (I was 38, I think), and he was this weird, funny, driver I'd run into now and then.
At the taxi company one Monday morning, I saw a flyer by the window that said, "Taxi Driver Art Show," and asked the girl in the window about it. She told me Richard Johnson had a little indie art gallery, and wanted any taxi drivers who did artwork to do something for an art show. That's how I first heard of AAA Electra 99, and indie art gallery, museum, and co-op, or something like that. I rolled by the next Friday evening, and talked to Richard, checked out the gallery. Unlike traditional art galleries with their miles of cold, boring, white walls, Electra was crammed with all kinds of art. Artists paid $40 a month to rent a 4 foot X 8 foot section of wall space, and they could put up anything they wanted. There was no selection process, and only three rules, all begun because of Richard, himself. The three rules were: 1) No fire. 2) No live animals. And 3) No really bad smells.
I decided to do something for the taxi driver art show. I wound up drawing a hand made, taxi driver board game, sort of like the game Life, but with Matchbox cars as your markers. I can't remember what all was on it, except that one square said, "Party at Dennis Rodman's house, lose turn." I regularly picked up people at Rodman's Newport Beach house at the time, usually after the bars had closed. His and Carmen Electra's beach house was almost like an after hours club, so many people partied there. My board game got a few laughs, and I soon rented a wall, and put up prints of a bunch of my poetry, along with a poem written on a toilet paper roll. People would unroll it to read the poem, and then roll it back up. It was my homage to the great (and terrible) bathroom wall graffiti of the 1970's, where hand drawn dick pics and odd poems were standard in any public restroom. Before "graffiti" was spray paint tagging and colorful pieces, it was something we read while taking a dump in public.
I came to know Richard as a weird, old school punk rocker, artist, and funny storyteller guy, and started hanging out at the gallery a little bit on weekend evenings, before the bar business got going. He drove his taxi mostly in Anaheim and inland O.C. during the days, and I made most of my money from the H.B., Newport, and Costa Mesa bar scene fares at night. I hung out at the new Huntington Beach Hyatt during the days, catching a few rides from there, and sleeping when I could. Richard would roll by, and just jump in my cab and hang out, once in a while.
Soon after I started driving the cab in 2003, the company pulled our dispatch CB radios out, and replaced them with new technology, dispatch computers. Those computers totally screwed up the business, allowing the company to put more and more cabs on the road, mostly. So we had fewer calls, more cabs, and A LOT LESS business per driver. And we all had to lease the cabs weekly, so suddenly everyone was working 7 days a week. Before that, most drivers just worked weekends, and a few worked all week.
It got harder and harder to make a living. From Labor Day weekend 2003, to about the same time in 2005, I had 5 complete days off. Normal working people get two days off a week, I took five full days off in two years, and worked every other day. By late summer 2005, I was angry, burned out, and had gained about 150 pounds. When you drive a taxi, you either eat too much or smoke too much. I don't smoke.
That's when Richard made me and offer. He bought his cab, which meant he paid $200 less a week, but was responsible for all the maintenance. He drove mostly during the day, during the weekdays, and needed a good weekend driver to help pay for the cab. I needed a break from driving 14-18 hours a day, 7 days a week. The deal was that I would pay $270 a weekend, and drive his cab from about 6 pm Friday until about 4 am Monday morning. I made most of the money I made on Friday and Saturday nights, so I could make $200 or $250 to take home, after paying him, if business was decent. I paid him $50 a week for rent, and could live in his art gallery, which had moved to Anaheim, from Newport, by that time. I thought the deal over for a couple of days, and went for it. It's the location you see in the clip above, which is from 5 or 6 years later.
As Richard was helping move my clothes and stuff to the gallery to move in, only then did he ask, "Do you like cats?" I said, "Uh... sure. Do you have a pet cat in the gallery?" Richard said, "Yeah... well, technically, we have 8." Good thing I wasn't allergic to cats. They had a cat maned Pita, and then another stray female cat that just showed up, and started hanging out in the gallery most of the time. They called her "P.A.," for "Pita's Assistant." P.A. had just had a litter of six kittens, in the gallery a couple weeks earlier. So suddenly I had 4 1/2 days off, and lived alone in an indie art gallery, inside a typical small industrial unit, with 7 cats. By the time I showed up, P.A. had run Pita off, and it was me, her, and the kittens all week. The gallery was open on Wednesday nights, and then Friday and Saturday nights each week, when local garage bands played.
I moved in on a Wednesday, since Richard and his girlfriend were going on a trip to New Orleans for a long weekend. So I got a couple extra days driving his cab that first week. As it turned out, that was the weekend Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, so Richard and Michelle only made it to Chicago, and spent a weekend there, instead. Come Monday, they got back, he took the taxi, and I suddenly was surrounded by a huge room, jam packed with art from all kinds of local, unknown artists, and a couple from Europe who Richard knew. The bathroom was plastered with band flyers for shows at the gallery.
I slept for most of the first two days, I was completely exhausted from the two previous years of non-stop taxi driving. In the evening of the second day, I drew a little picture in pen, on a post-it note. It was the first creative thing I had done in about 2 1/2 years. The last place I lived, in 2002, I'd been playing around, doing artwork with markers. I had been making collages of BMX, skateboard, snowboarding, and rock climbing photos, with marker doodles in between. I was trying to find a way to shade well with markers, after trying to draw a big mural with them for my dingy room. Instead I made several huge collages.
I did this drawing in 2021, a reminder of my taxi driving days. Another driver drew a skull and crossbones, with the words "Drive, Die, Cash," above the visor, in pen, in one cab. That sums up taxi driving, so I remembered that basic idea, and drew this. Then I lost my storage unit, including this drawing, about a month go. Bummer. #sharpiescribblestyle
The next weekend, while out in the taxi, I bought a roll of big, white paper, the kind cheerleaders use to make banners in high school. I also bought a cheap set of 12 generic markers. I started spending my days trying different drawing styles, looking for something I liked. I soon bought a 24 pack of regular size Sharpie markers, in all their colors. About October of 2005, sitting in AA Electra 99, just me and P.A. and the kittens, listening to music and the rain on the roof, my Sharpie Scribble Style of shading was invented. That link is a blog post telling how that all happened.
My creative drive, abandoned for over two years while I tried to do nothing but make money in the taxi, and get my life back on track, was reborn. I just started drawing for hours a day, trying whatever ideas came to me, on 4 or 5 foot long sheets of that roll of paper. I mixed scribbles of different colors over each other, seeing what I ended up with, and figured out how to blend the colors to arrive at the final color I wanted. At first I wrote some of my poetry real big, then did designs in the background.
As I drew, P.A. and the kittens roamed the gallery. There was a stage at one end, and old couches on both walls. I slept on one of them, and once the kittens hit about 4 weeks old, they would venture from their box to my couch, and I usually woke up each morning with kittens climbing all over me. P.A. became my best art critic. She would jump up on the table where I drew, and sit on my drawings, while I was drawing them, in typical cat fashion. But she only sat on the good ones, and somehow avoided the crappy drawings.
We had a refrigerator and a microwave, and early, dial-up internet, at the gallery. I spent a little time trying to surf the web, but mostly I drew pictures, and read some art books that were there. At one point I drank some mini whiskey bottles, and then took photos of the kittens when they fell asleep in weird positions, with the whisky bottles around them. It looked like they had passed out at a party. I also start taking boxes and making a kitten amusement park. I made all kinds of little things for them to crawl through, play with, and explore. And I just kept drawing and playing around with my "scribble style" technique with Sharpies. Back then I was drawing things by hand, then shading with different colors, seeing what colors blended the best with the scribble style.
The Ramones, 18" X 24", one of the first music related drawings I did, in 2016. Hey, ho, let's go! #sharpiescribblestyle
My sister had taken me to see the movie Rent when I visited them in North Carolina, during the time I lived in the gallery. She loved the play and the movie, and was friends with Anthony Rapp, the filmaker guy in Rent. So I did a huge RENT logo drawing for her and my niece and nephew, about 2 1/2 feet high and 5 or 6 feet long. I put a bunch of quotes from the movie, handwritten in the background, which is something I still do today in many of my drawings. I had a 4' X 8' section of the wall in Electra, which was part of the deal of living there. So I kept doing drawings to hang up, and changing them out when I did new ones.
As time went on, the kittens grew up, and were sold off or given to people who came to the gallery to watch bands play. P.A. had another litter, 4 kittens that time, after the first litter was grown and gone. She would go out, and just wander outside, for one or two days, then show up at the door again, and want back in. Obviously she met some male cats while out and about.
On Wednesday nights, the gallery was open for 3-4 hours for The Spinning Head of Big Prizes, which Richard called "An open format poetry game show for people who hate poetry." Basically, each person would spin the big wheel (visible in the video above), and do what the wheel told you to do. It may be to sing or act something out, to tell some weird story of your life, read a poem, or to "tax Matt." Matt was a life size dummy in coveralls, made of wadded up paper and duct tape. "Tax," was supposedly an old jail term for beating up someone who disrespected you, or broke a rule. So when you hit, "Tax Matt" on the wheel, you had to attack and beat up the dummy, which was lying on the floor most of the time. That got pretty funny, at times. Most of the people coming to the gallery were in their late teens or early 20's, usually friends of one of the local bands playing. And artsy kids usually aren't big on violence, so some would barely hit Matt, while others would just go berserk on him like it was WWE wrestling. After doing what the wheel said, you got to pick a prize from a box of dollar store stuff.
Spinning Head Wednesday nights usually wound up with Richard telling crazy stories (for $1 each), the taxi driver in him felt people needed to be charged for everything. He'd also break into a closet of his albums, and play really obscure punk bands, like Nail, and other bands I'd never heard of, loud as can be. Since the whole business area was empty at night, no one cared how loud it got.
Richard, his girlfriend Michelle, and few others were also big into playing poker. The whole Texas Hold 'em craze was in full swing then, so Wednesday nights usually ended with me falling asleep on my couch and a few artists smoking and playing poker around the main table. Michelle usually walked away with most everyone's money, she was the sleeper poker shark in the crew.
I just kept drawing every day, and walking a bit, so I lost some weight while there. But I ordered way too many pizzas, since there wasn't a stove to cook, and I got sick of microwave food. But my health improved quite a bit, which was good.
Kurt Cobain, drawn for my first, and only, solo art show, in November 2017. The show was at a great indie music store, Earshot Music, in Winston-Salem, NC, and Phred the owner, used this drawing as a flyer. The drawing sold an hour after going up on the wall, the day before the art show. I started getting a lot of requests for drawings after that. #sharpiescribblestyle
After about three months of drawing the scribble style, I moved to the smaller, ultra fine point Sharpies, which worked much better, allowed me to do much more detail, fade colors well, and they lasted a lot longer. I lost some weight, walking a bit every day, and was feeling a lot better just because I was being creative, and not as stressed out from working 7 days a week. But I wasn't making much money, and couldn't make enough to actually rent a normal room, or my own apartment, and get back to "normal life."
So in June of 2006, I went back to working full time as a taxi driver, but this time I had a 12" X 18" art pad, and my Sharpies, in the cab, and would draw while sitting in front of hotels, or waiting other places. That helped a lot. I never could make a decent living in the cab, but I was less stressed out, generally, since I was drawing a lot.
I left a bunch of my drawings at the gallery, when I moved out. I also lost two sketch pads worth of drawings that I left on a bus about a year later. While they were all in my #sharpiescribblestyle, they were totally different types of drawings then I've done since. But I invented, and then learned the basic color combos, of my scribble style, while living at Electra. I kept drawing on and off since. Then in 2015, while living in North Carolina, I started drawing people, leading to the drawings I've been selling for the last 5-6 years.
This is my personal favorite, of all the 100+ large drawings I've done since 2015. Harley Quinn/Tainted Love. I had to sell this one cheap in Richmond, VA, to get a motel room, after a week long hospital stay. It was in a gallery in the Richmond Arts District last I saw it. #sharpiescribblestyle
I'm doing most of my new writing on Substack now, check it out:
I put this on Facebook last week, when I drew it, but I forgot to post it here on the blog. I'm going and busy now from 4-5 am every morning until 9 or so every night, doing blogging and social media for Block Bikes, my personal blog, and and a new project, and like everyone else, I need 48 more hours every day to get everything done I want to do. So I just spaced on posting this here. It's 11" X 14," about 12 hours of drawing, or so, and is the first scribble style drawing I've done in about a month, because of the move from Richmond, VA to Lancaster, CA. That's my longest gap in drawing since late 2015.
I've been wanting to draw John "Dizz" Hicks for quite a while. He was a cool guy, totally unique rider, and great character in BMX freestyle in the 1980's. I did this one small, so I could sell some copies, and I have two orders. On all the musician drawings I do, I put lyrics or song titles in the background, which gives it a texture that looks kind of cool. For this one, I wanted to try a bombed out building, post apocalyptic sky background, to see how that looked.
It's pretty cool, and I want to do a full size (18" X 24") drawing of John for an art show some day. Anyhow, I like the basic idea, the test worked, and I'm going to send this original to John (Dizz) for him to hang on to. Because I'm working so many hours doing other blogging/social media now, I'm going to stop doing drawings for hire, and focus on doing some really good ones so I can put on a solo art show in a few months. #sharpiescribblestyle
After commenting on their photos on a French Old School BMX Facebook group Monday, I got to FB chatting with Seb Ronjon and later Franck Belliot. They put on this amazing exhibit about BMX, skateboarding, and scooter culture in 2011-12 called Beton Hurlant, in France. Not only that, but they flew Bob Haro over to check it out and comment on the exhibit. You can watch that video here, it's 17 minutes.
In addition, they put on the "Bob Haro Master Class," the video above. Bob shows slides and talks about how BMX freestyle began, in his own words. It's an hour long, I watched it, and it's just epic. This is how all of our lives changed because Bob liked doing tricks on his BMX bike. So if you're an old school freestyler, make some popcorn, or get a pizza and a couple brews, and lock yourself in a room where you can watch this in peace. I've never heard this explained so in depth by Bob himself before.
Also, Tuesday marked three weeks that I've been back here in Southern California, and I finally got back to a little bit of my Sharpie drawing. I've been busy trying to adjust, settle in, and get the Block Bikes Blog and online store going. While I've done a couple Sharpie "doodle art" drawings recently, the black and white stuff, I didn't do and of my scribble style stuff in about a month.
That's the longest gap in drawing since I got serious trying to sell my Sharpie art in late 2015. I lost all my art supplies, some were stolen (most likely by "authority types with badges" in Richmond), and the rest were lost when Greyhound switched buses on us, on my trip here.
Armed with brand new Sharpies and a sketch pad, I did this 11" X 14" drawing. I'm calling it "Dizz-pocalypse." Just a new type of background idea, I wanted to try out. I just got the OK from John "Dizz" Hicks to sell 20 copies of these. So those of you reading this get first dibs. 20 high quality color copies, best I can manage, signed and numbered, for $20 each. California residents add 7.25% sales tax (Damn, that went up!) So that's $21.45 for CA people. Reply on Facebook or email to reserve your place in line. Paypal the $ to me at: stevenemig13@gmail.com (steven, with a "v", not steve). Poster tube and shipping is about $7.50-$8, so I'm not making a ton off these, but it will definitely help me get back on track. You guys know my story. Here's the drawing. The colors are brighter in person, I need to get photos on the new phone down, it washed out a bit.
#sharpiescribblestyle on Instagram, Google Images, Facebook, or Twitter to see the 100 drawings before this...
Here's the young Bob Dylan drawing I did for an art collector in North Carolina, and he's the guy that didn't pay me for this drawing before I left. Because of not getting paid that day, I wound up here in Richmond, and wasn't able to make it up to Chicago, where I was planning to go. It's a long story.
Heading down to the library yesterday, I noticed I could see one of my drawings, Bob Dylan above, in the window of The Mix gallery, which is at 12 West Broad, here in downtown Richmond. It's about three doors down from the big statue of Maggie Lenard Walker in the Arts District.
I ran into the guys at The Mix the day after getting out of the hospital back in August. I went into the E.R. with cellulitis, a fairly serious leg infection I'd had long ago. I ended up spending six days in the hospital, damn near dying, from a severe allergic reaction to a the medicine they gave me, which I'd never had before. Two days earlier, I could barely stand up in the hospital, I got that sick. I had to go to a homeless shelter for a night after the hospital, and, still sicker than a dog, I walked two miles, with nasty little blisters called pustules, popping up on my legs, in 93 degree weather, while carrying all my bags, to find my way back to the part of Richmond I kind of knew.
Someone I met told me there was an "African Store" in the arts district that loved Bob Marley stuff. So I went to the Arts district looking for this store, to see if I could sell a small drawing for some food money. I never did find it, I think that person who told me was talking about the bong shop near VCU. But while I was looking for it, I took a break to rest, and wound up talking to a couple of guys from The Mix, and they took me inside, and the man I talked to there ended up buying the Bob Dylan drawing and the Tainted Love/Harley Quinn drawing below. I sold them really cheap, compared to my standard prices, but I desperately needed to rent a motel room for the night to keep healing up. I really didn't want to part with Tainted Love, I drew that one for me a year ago. But it helped me get a room, and keep living.
I started stopping by the gallery now and then, and Jay asked me to do a Biggie Smalls drawing for them. Tonight I saw that all three of these drawings are up on the wall, and all visible from the sidewalk. So if you're local to Richmond, and want to check out some of my work up close and in person, head down to The Mix at 12 West Broad in the Arts District. Check their Facebook page for hours and info. They own these drawings, and I haven't stopped by there in a while, so I don't know if these are just on display, or if they're for sale. That's their call at this point. But it's really cool to see some of my work up and visible in the Arts District, and I'm stoked some people here will see it.
I haven't been down to The Mix in quite a while, not because of any issue with them, I've just been busy trying to stay alive as a homeless man, and to work on selling work so I can work my way off the streets and into a decent room somewhere. I'll keep everyone posted, in this blog, and on social, if I do more work with The Mix in the near future. Thanks to Jay and Ebani for hanging my work, and I'll come by soon and see what's happening guys. All three of these drawings are 18" X 24", done with Sharpies on paper, and drawn in my unique #sharpiescribblestyle. Check 'em out.
The stock market's down again this morning. The election is coming up and everyone's crazy. Blah, blah, blah, blah... Take a break for a second. Here's my work this morning at my homeless artist morning "McStudio." I'm doing my second 11" X 14" sea turtle drawing from one of Barspinner Ryan Brennan's free dive photos (with his permission). This one's sold, but I love this photo, and I'll probably do another version of it to make some prints of to sell more reasonably. It's being done, like my others, in my unique Sharpie scribble style. The drawing at the bottom is my first sea turtle drawing, also an 11" X 14."
#sharpiescribblestyle on Instagram or Google Images will show you a ton of my earlier work.
