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
