"Rise above" doodle art drawing, 18" X 24", 2018?
I'm doing a workshop at a library today, to teach kids some techniques for drawing with Sharpies, and markers in general. Most of my work I do in my #sharpiescribblestyle, but that takes years to learn. So I'm going to guide the kids through drawing a cool doodle art picture today. Then I'll show them how I do my scribble style, if they want to try it at home. Once you learn to draw one thing that looks pretty cool as a kid, you realize, "Hey, I can draw!" Then you're more likely to keep drawing, and learn the basics, and maybe even get really good, over time.
About five years after I invented my Sharpie scribble style technique of shading with Sharpie markers, in 2005, I finally got around to looking up "Sharpie art" on the internet. It just never occurred to me to look it up before that. The coolest stuff at the time was the black & white work of Jessie Armand. I really liked his style, so I began playing around with "doodle art," as it's generally called. This one above, "Rise Above," which is both a Black Flag song, and a continuing necessity in my life, I drew in 2018, I think.
"The wave of change is about to break." I drew this on April 27, 2020. Can you remember back to the beginning of Covid, when we were told, "This will all be over in six weeks?" From my own reading and futurist/big picture thinking, I knew a big wave of change was headed our way. I didn't realize it was going to be tsunami, though.
Being homeless when Covid-19 hit American shores, everybody went into lockdown, and we were left on the streets, without many of the resources we depended on. It was tough, even as someone that had been in and out of homelessness for years. One continuous battle for homeless people these days is charging cell phones (and tablets of laptops for some). We need phones to apply for any government services, and lots of other reasons, but the only legal place to charge them was libraries and some fast food places. When Covid hit, those were closed. So homeless people learned where every open, outdoor outlet was, in their whole area. I drew most of these drawings below while sitting on a walk bridge that would normally take tourists from the Universal City train/bus station to the tram up the hill to Universal. There's a plug by each of the three elevators, for cleaning and maintenance people to use. With no tourists, us bums were allowed to use these to charge. It kept us pretty much out of sight, 20 feet above anyone driving below on Lankershim Boulevard.
To charge my laptop, which is how I do my blogging and social media work, I would sit in the hot sun for an hour and a half. Then I would take a bus or train to a spot where I could sit in a parking lot or on a sidewalk, and pick up some public wifi signal, in the shade when possible. That was my whole existence through two years of Covid in 2020 and 2021. Scounge up money to eat, go sit at a charge spot, then go to a wifi spot, blog, do my social media, sell some art when possible, And then do it all over again. Eat, charge, blog, repeat. For two years. These doodle art drawings were a by product of that time.
Since I was spending so much time just sitting and charging, I started doing these doodle art drawings a lot of the time, while I was waiting fo rthe laptop to charge. These usually take me 4 to 6 hours each, and I only needed a sketch pad and one regular black Sharpie. My scribble style drawings take 40-45 hours each, and I need a whole bunch of stuff.
I first did some of these in 2011 or 2012. Then I did a bunch while homeless in Richmond, Virginia. There I started adding a few words to them, usually about something happening at the time. My doodle drawings became a sort of art journal. Since surviving the Covid-19 pandemic while living homeless was what was happening in 2020, that's what most of these refer too. I lost the notebooks with my Richmond drawings, when all my stuff was stolen by police (including all my paperwork, sleeping bag, and clothes I wasn't wearing). But I still have this one beat up notebook of my doodle drawings from 2020-2021.
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