Going nowhere fast

I really like this song.  The movie, "Streets on Fire," had an incredible cast of rising actors when it came out in 1984.  And yet, almost no has heard of the movie.  It bombed at the box office, and was never heard of again.  Almost.  A producer I worked with at Unreel Productions loved the movie, and we used "Nowhere Fast," and scenes from the movie, in some Vision Street Wear fashion videos that played at trade shows, in 1988-89.  In my job as The Dub Guy at Unreel, I made many copies of those videos, which meant I heard this song over and over.  I became a fan of this song.  Personally, I think this movie was just ten years too late.  In 1975, it might have been a great movie.  In 1984, New Wave was dying, metal and hair bands were rising, and nobody really wanted to watch a 1950's movie.  It's actually a decent movie, if you want something old school to watch between your Netflix and Prime binges.  

What does this have to do with me?  As I said in a previous post, I'm taking a break from doing my Sharpie Scribble Style drawings for a while.  Not forever, I still love doing them.  But for 6 1/2 years now, I've been going nowhere fast, trying to earn decent money with this form of art.  I've become much better at it, and it helped me scrape by for a period when I couldn't get much else going in my life.  

I sincerely appreciate everyone who bought a drawing, or gave me some props for one drawing or another on social media.  But, it just takes too damn long to draw these pictures to earn enough money to get my life going again.  Why don't I get a "real job?"  After not being able to find any job while I was in North Carolina, I literally have no work history now.  I was doing some kind of creative work pretty much the whole time, but my resume' is pretty much blank as "real" work goes now.  And I'm really fat and old.  Those pretty much keep me from a good enough paying job to turn things around.  

Because of these factors, I've been trying to create my own job.  I had no idea if anyone would buy a single one of my drawings when I started trying to sell them in late 2015.  I've managed to become a "working artist" since, selling around 100 originals, but a homeless working artist.  I now have one or more drawings on 6 of the 7 continents, so when I get going again, I need to get my work to Antarctica and on the International Space Station, so I can truly call myself "global."  But those are goals for the future.

For the time being, I'm going to focus on some other forms of creative work for a while, and try to finally jumpstart my financial life.  I just need to make a basic living again, get a stable place to live, and all that basic stuff.  We're at a really weird time in the world economically, socially, and technologically, and I see a ton of opportunities in the coming months and years.  I want to take advantage of some of those, if I can.  

For those of you who bought one of more of my drawings, I'm standing by my guarantee that all my drawings will sell for at least double what you paid for them, by the year 2343, or one day after the Apocalypse, whichever comes first.  

Early this morning I destroyed a couple of my unsold drawings, tossed (literally) all the Grey Trash alien drawings, and threw away all my Sharpies and  art supplies.  It's not that I didn't want the stuff around, I just got sick of having to carry it all everywhere I go.  That's part of the whole homeless logistics thing that most people would never understand.    There will be more #sharpiescribblestyle drawings, someday, I already have the next one lined up.  I'm just not doing any more four at least a couple of months, maybe longer.  We'll see how my other ideas go.  I'll keep you updated on this blog.  

If you want to check my drawings out, here are most of the ones I took photos of, on my Sharpie Scribble Style Pinterest page.

Harley Quinn/Joker/Tainted Love drawing.  This was my personal favorite, one I did for myself.  Unfortunately I had to sell it, to get a motel room for a night, after a week in the hospital for an allergic reaction to a drug they gave me.  Shit happens...  #sharpiescribblestyle

Check out my Sharpie Scribble Style Pinterest page

I did this drawing of an old, 80's Thrasher cover featuring Chuck Treece, and I sent the original drawing to Thrasher's office.  They also publish Juxtapoz art magazine.  I figured it was time to let "the art world" know that this crazy scribbling with Sharpies exists.  That was a few months ago.  I haven't heard anything back yet.  Maybe someday I will.  Or maybe someday I'll do a show and some skater will come up and go, "Wait, you did that?  I have that drawing on my wall, I stole it from Thrasher's office."  #sharpiescribblestyle    Check out my Sharpie Scribble Style Pinterest page.

Don't mess with a woman holding a blaster.  The Princess Leia that us Gen X people remember. #sharpiescribblestyle 

David Bowie with a Bowie knife.  Cutting edge.  2019.  I left this at a bus stop, by accident, in Richmond, Virginia.  #sharpiescribblestyle

I hadn't drawn animals in a long time, and my skills had improved quite a bit, so I drew this Sumatran tiger in 2018.  #sharpiescribblestyle

 

I'm stepping back from my Sharpie Scribble Style drawings for a while...

David Bowie with a Bowie knife Sharpie drawing.  I accidentally left this finished drawing at a bus stop in Richmond, Virginia one morning in 2019.  Being homeless, I didn't sleep well, and I was just half asleep.  After having breakfast at a McDonald's, the bus came, I grabbed my backpack, and just spaced out, leaving my sketch pad behind.  I fell asleep on the bus, and didn't realize I left the sketch pad until I was across town.  18" X 24", #sharpiescribblestyle

In 2002, living in a tiny room that I rented, on the side of a Mexican family's house, I saw an episode of MTV's House of Style where they talked about doodle walls.  The idea was to get big rolls of butcher paper, and draw things on it with markers.  My little room was like a cave, so I got this idea to draw a mural, like I was looking out the mouth of the cave at a sunset.  I had never really painted, but drawing a mural on paper with markers seemed like something I could do.  So I got a pack of 12 generic markers, and a roll of banner paper, like the stuff high school cheerleaders use, and I taped it up on the wall.  I started drawing a sunset.  But when I started to color it in, it just looked like shit.  So I tore the paper down, and I put smaller pieces up, cut photos out of my BMX, skateboard, snowboard, and rock climbing magazines, and I started making huge collages of sports photos.  It was just really fun.  

But it bummed me out that I couldn't do the mural.  I figured that there had to be some way to shade different colors, blend colors with markers so they didn't look lame.  On the collages that I made, I tried weird little squggles, circles, lines, and dots, and tried to figure out a way to do better shading with markers, but I never found anything that worked.  

I was drawing rock stars a lot, and wanted to try a cool looking animal, so I drew this Sumatran tiger in 2018.  18" X 24", #sharpiescribblestyle

In 2003, I got my driver's license again, it got suspended in late 2000 due to a clerical error at the DMV.  I went back to taxi driving.  I was homeless at that point, so I went directly into living in my taxi, with all my stuff packed into a storage unit.  So I stopped drawing, and worked 7 days a week driving my cab, for the next 2 1/2 years.  During that period, I only took 5 full days off in 2 1/2 years.  I gained about 150 pounds, working more and more hours, eating to deal with stress.  I was working 80 to 110 hours a week, by the end of that period.  I got really, really burned out.  

Then, in the late summer of 2005, another taxi driver offered me a deal.  I was still living in my taxi, because the industry was changing, and the companies were putting more and more taxis on the road.  More cabs meant less business for each driver.   So we had to work more and more hours to just survive, to pay my $550 a week to lease the cab, and by $300 or more in gas each week.  Into that burnout time, a driver named Richard offered to let me live in this indie art gallery he had, if I would drive his taxi on the weekends.  He owned his cab within the company, but still had to pay $335 a week in lease.  So I drove all weekend, 2 1/2 long days, and what he charged me paid most of his taxi lease, then he would drive the cab during the week.  I made $200 or $250 a week, and paid him $50 a week rent to live in the gallery.  At the time, it worked well for both of us.  Monday morning through Friday afternoon, I was in this industrial unit in Anaheim, surrounded by local artists' work, and a momma cat, and six kittens.  

On day two of sleeping in the gallery, I drew a funny little picture on a Post-it note.  Within a week I bought some more banner paper and generic markers, and just started playing around with ideas.  So I would crank the music, and just draw a bunch every day, trying different things.  I upgraded to regular size Sharpie markers, a 24 pack of colors, and went back to trying different ways to draw with Sharpies.  One day, in the Fall of 2005, I was drawing a tree.  I scribbled several different colors over each other, and it looked pretty cool.  I got not only the color, but the texture like tree bark.  Sharpie Scribble Style, as a technique, was born.  I kept playing around with that idea, doing big drawings on banner paper.  Eventually I bought the ultra fine Sharpies, which worked much better for the scribble style, and lasted much longer.   

I started trying different ideas, and began learning which colors blended with which other colors, to produce a final color.  I always start with pretty much the opposite of the final color.  If something is going to wind up orange, the first layer of scribbles is lime green, then yellow, then I work towards orange.  I lived there in the gallery for about 9 months.  Around June of 2006, I went back to driving full time, but I took a small sketch pad, and would draw sometimes, while sitting in front of the hotel where we hung out in the taxis.    

This is a drawing I drew for myself, Harley Quinn and the Jokercombined with the "Tainted Love" song lyrics.  This is still my single favorite drawing.  I had to sell this to get a room one night, after spending a week in the hospital, then a night in a homeless shelter.  I went to the ER in Richmond for cellulitis (leg infection), and they accidentally gave me three full IV bags of a medicine I was allergic to.  That led to anaphylactic reaction, my throat nearly closed up, and I got incredibly sick.  I could barely walk to the bathroom for about four days.  So they kept me for a week, trying to save me from the reaction.  I damn near died.  I still had cellulitis when I got released, and had pustules all over my chest and legs, little blisters that were drying out and opening.  It was 95 degrees out, and I had to carry my bags everywhere.  I sold this drawing, and another one of Bob Dylan, to a gallery in the Arts District of Richmond, to get a motel one night, and try to recover a bit more.  18" X 24", 2018, #sharpiescribblestyle

From 2006 to 2015, I moved around, and in late 2008, I wound up living in North Carolina, where my family somehow ended up living.  I drew now and then, and I'd figured out which colors worked best with my scribble style, but I wasn't sure what to draw with it.  I drew dark pictures with weird little characters, then I drew big, Georgia O'Keefe style flowers, which looked pretty cool.  But I didn't like drawing flowers.  Then I drew goofy aliens smoking cigarettes, something that just made me laugh.  I called them Grey Trash, in 2009.  The idea was they were aliens who got stuck on Earth, so the government built them a trailer park way out in the desert to hide them.  Eventually the aliens turned into trailer trash.  Instead of White Trash, they were Grey Trash, and I drew a bunch of them just for fun.  Then I drew two or three animal drawings, starting with a tree frog.  I didn't draw that often, and I tried a bunch of different ideas.    

My drawing, of a painting, of a sketchy early 1970's photo, of motorcycle legend Malcom Smith, hauling ass.  Sean Ewing asked me to do this one, and then donated to Malcom Smith's shop.  So it should be on a wall in their collection by now.  Sean had a little fun with Photoshop in this pic.  18" X 24", 2022, #sharpiescribblestyle

I wound up living with my mom, in a tiny town, in North Carolina, after my dad's death in 2012.  I couldn't find any job, not even a cashier or part time restaurant job.  I needed something to make some kind of money.  So in November of 2015, with some Sharpies, a dollar store sketch pad, and a refubished HP laptop that was still running Windows XP, I started trying to sell drawings.  I spent three hours on the internet one night, looking at all kinds of art, asking myself, "what I would want to put up on my wall?"  I kept coming back to graffiti art and stencils.  So I drew a drawing of a Bruce Lee stencil, in my style, and put it on Facebook.  Somebody bought it for $20, I think.  Then somebody wanted another one.  And it just kept going.  I've been selling Sharpie Scribble Style drawings pretty much continuously, for 7 1/2 years now.

I've drawn over 200 drawings total, the first 50 or 75, got lost one place or another.  But I've done over 100 drawings that I've sold, and my skills have improved a huge amount over the last 7 years.  My drawing sales price plateaued at about $150-$200 each.  But the big drawings take me 40-45 hours to do.  So the math still works out to $3 an hour to do something no one else in the world does.  

Maybe my art's cool, maybe it's not, that's anyone's call.  But my stuff is unique, though I've mostly worked from well known photos of rock stars.  That's what people kept asking me to do.  I needed to make money to eat, so I kept drawing things people asked, mostly rock stars.  Every drawing had some little part of it that gave me a new challenge, and I just did the best I could on each drawing, and kept progressing as an artist.  So I've managed to become a "working artist," when I was not at all known for artwork before 2015.  But I have just barely scraped by financially, and I've been homeless most of that time, unable to get totally back to "normal life."  

At this point, I'm just taking a break, because I need to figure out how to make a living of some kind, and then get back to drawing once I get that going.  I like doing the drawings, but I also like eating, and renting apartment again would be really cool, too.  So I'm taking a break for a while, maybe a couple of months, maybe longer, to work on some other ideas.  I'll get going again when the time feels right.  You can check out most of my drawings that I've taken photos of on my Sharpie Scribble Style Pinterest page.

Kobe Bryant face close-up.  This is a small section of a much larger Kobe Bryant tribute drawing I did, after his death in 2020.  This is the single best piece of Sharpie drawing I've done.  All around his face, there are the words "work ethic" over and over, under the shading.  I sold this drawing to a business that has a two story mural of Kobe and Gigi on their wall.  

Check out my Pinterest page 

 

Some of my favorite Sharpie Scribble Style drawings #1

Not many people have seen this one.  Stevie Ray Vaughn, the guy Austin, Texas has a statue of on their jogging trails by the river.  I actually got to see SRV play in a bar on 6th Street in Austin, in 1988,  I had no idea who he was.  I was down there for a BMX freestyle contest, and some locals took us to 6th Street.  We did tricks for the crowds for a while, and then locked up the bikes, and went into a bar for a couple of beers.  When we came out later, I said, "Man, that bluesy guy on the guitar was pretty good."  One of the locals said, "Pretty good?  That was fucking Stevie Ray Vaughn!"  18" X 24", 2018, #sharpiescribblestyle

The late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsbuerg, aka, The Notorious RBG.  Yep, like Biggie Smalls, she's from Brooklyn, and even has her own music video.  I drew this shortly after death, actually planning to send the original to someone in the media who was a huge fan of hers.  I put it up on Facebook, and it instantly became the most popular drawing I've ever done, out of about 100 big drawings.  18" X 24" 2020.  #sharpiescribblestyle

This is one of the recent ones I've done.  As crazy as it sounds, there's no really good photo of Evel jumping (and landing it).  In all the photos he's tiny, compared to the buses or whatever he's jumping.  I drew an Evel drawing in about 2016, and it sucked.  The only good close up photo is him going over the bars at Caesar's Palace.  But this wheelie with a chillin' photo of him worked well.  18" X 24" 2022.  #sharpiescribblestyle

Way back in the 1980's, I used to sketch isometric drawings of all kinds of ramp set-ups, when a quaterpipe or basic halfpipe was all that actually existed.  One day I thought, "What if M.C. Escher designed a skatepark?"  So I drew a few sketches.  Early this year (2022), I didn't have my Sharpies with me, and I sketched a few more, just screwing around.  I put them Facebook, and somebody wanted to buy them.  After a few sketches, I decided to get a pencil, protractor, and ruler, and draw a real one.  This is the first of those big ones I drew.  18" X 24" 2022.  #sharpiescribblestyle

I've done about 8, maybe 10 art decks.  This one of Kobe I did in early 2021, and put the original drawing on the deck, like and idiot.  It sold on Hollywood Boulevard in like 20 minutes, to a crew guy setting up for a movie premire (a job I used to do BITD).  Sharpie Scribble Style drawing and acrylics on a blem skate deck.  A wall hanger, not meant for skating.  2021.  #sharpiescribblestyle

This is the original art I did for an autograph card for Hall of Fame skateboarder Robin Logan, of Logan Earth Skis.  About 5" X 7", I think.  #sharpiescribblestyle  

Check out my Pinterest page

Some of my favorite Sharpie Scribble Style drawings #2

My name is Steve Emig, and I drew this Harley Quinn drawing in November 2019.  "When the world gets crazy, step up to meet it."  Then down below, in pencil I wrote "Shit's about to happen."  I'm a futurist as well as a Sharpie artist.  I had been writing about the crazy, "coming recession" for a couple of years at that point, and I knew things were about to begin getting crazy.  That wasn't some mystical revelation, it was 30 years of reading books, watching trends, and trying to figure out why things play out the way they do.  

Harley Quinn drawing for a skateboard art deck.  You can see about 175 of my Sharpie Scribble Style drawings on my Pinterest page (because Pinterest is way cooler than Instagram).  #sharpiescribblestyle, #harleyquinn, #fanart, #steveemigart

Thrasher magazine drawing, that I sent to Thrasher mag's offices, to show them what my #sharpiescribblestyle was.  I never got a single word back.  I hope somebody is happy to have it on their wall.  I also hope every old school skater that sees it says, "Dude, can I get a copy of that?"  Because that's what my friends said when I showed it to them.  18" X 24", 2022,  #sharpiescribblestyle

One of my latest drawings, the late cat of a librarian I know.  She said one of her other cats stared at this framed picture, appearing to recognize the cat had once lived with him.  I can't tell you what that cat was thinking, but it's cool to hear stories like that after spending 45 hours drawing something. 18" X 24", 2022.   #sharpiescribblestyle

Classic Jimi Hendrix picture of him burning his guitar, with "Hey Joe" lyrics in the background.  18" X 24", 2018.  #sharpiescribblestyle 

This is a teenager named Erin who got my drawing of Lana Del Rey, her favorite singer, as a 16th birthday gift.  Lisa, Erin's mom, wrote an artist profile of me for the newspaper in the Winston-Salem Journal, for my first art show, in the fall of 2017.  We chatted a couple of times, and then she asked me to draw this a few months later.  She said Erin was "over the moon," when she got this on her birthday.  That's another cool thing to hear, after spending 45 hours drawing it.  I was living in a tent, in the woods, across the street from Hanes Mall, when I drew this picture.  I worked all day, every day, drawing, at a local McDonald's, or one of the libraries in Winston, drawing this picture and many others.  I was drawing about one drawing a week, to survive at the time.  I also became a fan of Lana Del Rey's music that week.  18" X 24", 2018.  #sharpiescribblestyle

One of my better drawings of my first full year trying to actually sell my drawings, 2016.  I invented my Sharpie Scribble Style technique in 2005, while actually living in an indie art gallery.  I played around with the technique for ten years.  In late 2015, I decided to try to start trying to sell drawings, which meant dramatically steeping up my artwork.  I started selling drawings online not because I wanted  to be a famous artist, but because I could not find any "real job" while living in North Carolina.  I could think of no other reasonable to make any money, at the time, in that situation.  My Sharpie art, and the social media marketing and blogging skills I learned along the way, brought me back to Southern California, where I lived most of my adult life, and plan to live the rest of it.  

 Princess Leia, which I started drawing right before Carrie Fisher got sick, and I was working on this drawing when she actually died.  Yeah, that's weird.  But when you're a serious artist, you know synchronicity is a thing, and weird stiff happens on a regular basis when you do a lot of creative work.  18" X 24", 2016.  #sharpiescribblestyle

Check out my Pinterest page

 

Doodle art- Things I drew in 2020-2021 while charging my laptop and phone

"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. 

"Corona virus"  This one is from March 2020, I think.

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.

"We are all interconnected" 2020

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. 

No words on this one, just playing with different design ideas, 2020.

"The country is coming out of lockdown!"  I drew this one on May 23, 2020.  Yeah, a little early on that.  It's hard to even remember when we thought everything would be back to normal by June... of 2020.