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 

 

My 1990 self-produced BMX freestyle video: The Ultimate Weekend

This is the full video of The Ultimate Weekend, my 1990, self-produced BMX freestyle video.  This was the 8th BMX video I produced or edited, and cost about $5,000 of my own money to produce.  It sold about 500 copies in the U.S., through a sketchy surf video distributor, and I sold him the foreign rights.  I think he sold quite a few more overseas, but I have no idea how many.  

My Pinterest page with still shots from The Ultimate Weekend

This video idea actually started in 1986, when Andy Jenkins, my boss at FREESTYLIN' magazine, asked us other editorial guys if we had any ideas to produce a FREESTYLIN' magazine video.  Bob Osborn, aka "Oz," forked out a reported $40,000 to produce a video of the BMX Action Trick Team in 1985, Rippin'.  While it was well produced and had good riding, it didn't sell well, and lost a bunch of money.  So in 1986, if we mentioned video to Oz, it brought back bad memories.  

In that era, when you wanted to make a video, you hired a professional video production company, usually the kind that made TV commercials for local businesses, and industrial videos.  A mid grade professional camera could run $10,000 to $20,000 then, and a mid level editing system could run $50,000 to $100,000 or more.  "Broadcast quality equipment, like the local TV news and networks used, were much more expensive.  VHS home video cameras were still relatively new, and VHS editing systems weren't available.  To produce a decent quality video in 1985, you had to hire a pro team, and they were expensive.  Those teams didn't have a clue about BMX, so when they made this video for the BMX Action Trick Team, they did it in the traditional documentary style, with lots of cool close-ups, visually interesting shots, and a lot less riding than videos today.  While the video had great riding for its day, it just wasn't super exciting to BMXers.  In addition, a 30 minute VHS video could easily sell for $30-$40, retail price  A 1985 dollar is like $2.67 today, so paying $30 then for a 30 minute video back then is like paying about $80 today, for a video we could watch for free on YouTube, or stream for $9 a month from a service.  So that's the other reason they didn't sell a ton of those videos, they were really expensive for that time.  

So when Oz thought about videos in 1986, he thought of a big expense with little return.  But times were changing in video technology, VHS cameras were falling in price, and the smaller Video 8 camcorders were just becoming available.  It was the very beginning of the D.I.Y. video era.  A friend loaned Gork, the BMX Action editor, and my roommate, a video 8 camcorder.  Gork, assistant editor Lew, my other roommate, and me shot a bunch of BMX riding, and goofy little comedy ideas with it.  Gork edited a compilation, by tying it to our VHS VCR, and made a pretty cool home video.  It was entertaining enough that Andy got the idea to pitch Oz with the idea of producing a FREESTYLIN' magazine video, shot partly with Gork's camera, which would save a lot ton money in production costs.  So Andy called us other three editorial guys into an after work meeting, and asked us to come up with ideas for the video.  

My idea was simple, just follow our real life.  We spent our weekends going to contests and BMX events, or riding with some of the best riders of the day.  So in my concept, we would get off work one Friday night at 5 pm, and wander around riding with all top pros, on flatland, ramps, and maybe pools, all weekend.  Then we crawled in, tired from a great weekend of riding, back to work Monday morning, the end of the video.  Since we worked at the top freestyle magazine, and we all rode ourselves at some level, we did that anyhow.  The video would be us magazine guys having the ultimate weekend of BMX freestyle fun.  The other three guys promptly shot down my idea.  Their ideas were more exciting, and a couple sounded like they could be a cool video.  As things worked out, the idea never got pitched to Oz, and no FREESTYLIN' magazine video was ever made, except Gork's homemade video, which I'd love to see today, if it still exists.  

I got laid off a few months later, I just wasn't the right fit at Wizard Publications, and a couple months later they hired 17-year-old Spike Jonze.  He was the right guy for Wizard then, I went on to become editor at the tiny American Freestyle Association, or AFA.  The AFA was three people in a small industrial unit, in Huntington Beach, and we put on the local and national BMX freestyle contests at the time.  There were about 3,000 members of the AFA, and they all got the newsletter I edited every month.  

A few months into that job, Bob Morales, my boss, had me produce a 30 second TV commercial to air on local MTV, for a national contest in Austin.  Local commercial spots were cheap then, something like $25 each.  The commercial we not great, but pulled some more people to come check out the contest.  I later went on to produce six contest videos for the AFA that year, 1987, shepherded through the process by the people at Unreel Productions, the Vision Street Wear video company.  Vison sponsored our contests, and sent a cameraman to all the nationals, and part of the deal was that both Vision and the AFA could use the footage.  They did the editing for our videos, and I logged the footage, and picked the shots, and made sure the videos got made.  

After working on several AFA videos at Unreel, they hired me, when they needed extra help.  From December 1987 to early 1990, I was basically a production assistant at Unreel.  WE made all the videos needed for the Vision empire, which included Vision, Sims, and Schmitt Stix skateboards, Sims snowboards, and Vision Street Wear clothes.  Unreel had about 8 people, four of them producers, and I was everyone's assistant.  I spent most of my time making copies of video footage for people across the Vision group of companies, and running to pick up equipment or supplies.

Unreel was weird as production companies go.  Most production companies then were centered around one TV series, or made super cheap home videos.  Unreel was living off the crazy profits that Vision Skateboards were making during the 80's skateboard boom.  We shot a lot of footage, and then tried to figure out what to do with it afterwards.  We produced all the trade show videos, commercials, and random footage that promotions, the art department, or another department might need.  The company put out several home videos of skateboarding, snowboarding, BMX freestyle, and body boarding, like these:  Psycho Skate, Snow Shredders, Freestylin' Fanatics, Barge at Will, and Mondo Vision.  

Unreel also put out a syndicated TV series of six, one hour shows, called Sports on the Edge.  Action sports rarely got on TV in the 1980's, and usually only as a quick news segment.  ESPN didn't want to touch that series, though they had aired a couple earlier skateboard shows.  The quote from the suits at ESPN in 1989 was, "Nobody wants to watch skateboarding on TV, and what the hell is snowboarding?"  Unreel Productions was ahead of the curve.  

Unfortunately, in 1989 and 1990, skateboarding faded in popularity, the third big wave of popularity crashed, and Vision Street Wear went down in popularity, and BMX pretty much died.  The corporate money pulled out of those sports, and the business dropped dramatically.  While the Sports on the Edge series aired nationwide on local stations, thanks to our syndicator, and got good ratings, there wasn't money to do follow-up series the next year.  Instead, Vision dissolved Unreel in early 1990, and one woman and me, the two cheapest people on the payroll, were moved to the main Vision building.  She quickly found another job in Hollywood, leaving me sitting alone in a big office, with very little to do.  

I didn't really like the videos Vision was putting out.  There were pretty cool, but a little hokey, with older skating or riding, not the most current stuff.  Even though BMX freestyle had collapsed as an industry, the riding was evolving as fast as ever, particularly street riding.  The first well covered street contest was in the 2-Hip Meet the Street in the Spring of 1988, less than two years before.  I bought an $1,100 S-VHS camera on credit, and started shooting my own footage on the weekends in early 1990, just going wherever sounded interesting.  The idea of The Ultimate Weekend concept was still in my head, and that became the theme for this video.  

Initially, GT rider Jess Dyrenforth, who lived in Huntington Beach then, was going to be the main rider that the video followed from spot to spot.  But Jess was getting into inline skating then, which was still surging.  So when I called Jess to go ride and shoot video, he was usually busy.  A couple months into shooting, I met John Povah, an English vert rider living in H.B., and Keith Treanor, an unknown and super hungry rider, who had just moved to town from New Jersey.  Keith didn't have a job at the time, and was always down to go ride, and he ripped wherever we went.  So Keith became the standout rider of the video, with John close behind.  My flatland riding buddy from the H.B. pier, Mike Sarrail, went most of the places on the weekend, usually driving.  Mike was a really good flatlander, but didn't like being in the video.  

Little by little, word got around, and we went all over southern California, from the P.O.W. House backyard in Westminster, where guys like Chris Moeller, Dave Clymer, and John Paul Rogers lived, to the local jumps at Edison High school and Magnolia in Huntington Beach, to the Tijuana Skatepark, Mission Trails near San Diego, and the Nude Bowl, way out by Palm Springs.  There were no skateparks in southern California then, and street spots and backyard ramps were the main riding areas.  

I shot video from February or March of 1990 until the beginning of September.  I quit Vision out of boredom in July, but was immediately hired to drive their dually and ramp cross country on a three week skateboard tour.  As soon as I got back, I flew myself to Indiana for a 2-Hip halfpipe contest, and shot footage at Bob Kohl's halfpipe, in Chicago, on that trip.  I also met my music guy, Jon Stainbrook, in Toledo.  He was a guy in a punk band who could get music out pretty cheap, from several Ohio musicians,  Jon's house was a waystation for touring punk rockers, and he knew everyone in that world.  He and his guys even recorded two songs that I wrote the lyrics to, for the video.  While I was visiting him, The Stain was the stage band for comedian Howie Mandell, back when he had hair.  I was a roadie for that gig, and got to meet Howie.  The guitar and bass playing at the end of the video, with Jeff and Mark, is from backstage at the Howie Mandell gig.  The shot of Jon is out front of the theater, in Ann Arbor Michigan, as I recall.

I paid $1,000 out of my own pocket to rent a 3/4" editing system, in the back of a video store in Redondo Beach, and spent 5 long days editing this video.  I actually paid for the music (OK, I still owe Jon $400but I paid for most of it), because I was afraid of bootlegging music and getting sued.  

The thing to know about this time period is that regular people, BMX riders, didn't make videos then.  BMX companies, like GT, BMX Plus! magazine, and Bully Bikes, made videos. Only a couple riders had made super cheap videos. Eddie Roman had put out the super low budget BMX movie on video, Aggroman in 1989, and Mark Eaton had put out Dorkin' in York, and Dorkin' 2, which I think were edited with two VHS machines, in that era.  I hadn't seen either video.  There were only a handful of BMX company made videos coming out at the time, like 2-Hip's Ride Like a Man (produced by Eddie Roman, with a bunch of contest footage I shot while at Unreel, at the end), and the Bully Slow Ride video were the main two.  Crazy as it sounds today, magazines still ruled as the BMX media, and videos were just starting to be a serious thing.  Everyone kept asking me why I was making a video, since it wasn't for a bike company.  "I want to make a video that shows the real riding we do everyday," was my best answer.  No helmets while riding flatland, no balance tricks on a miniature golf courses while wearing leathers (like BMX Plus! magazine videos), just what I thought of as "real" riding.  

Because of that, every video in that era had a lot of firsts in it.  The Bully Slow Ride video, for example, had Mike Krnaich pulling the first tailwhip jump.  2-Hip's Ride Like a Man had the first 900 air by Mat Hoffman, and the first street peg grind on a rail, along a walkway.  I think Dennis McCoy pulled that.  In The Ultimate Weekend, I had several BMX video firsts as well.  Keith Treanor did the first handrail slide down steps.  I had the first the mini ramps in a BMX video, the H-Ramp, skaters Primo and Diane Desiderio's backyard ramp, and Mouse's ramp near San Diego.  Keith and Gary Laurent did the first riding over a spine ramp at Primo and Diane's , in a BMX video, followed later in the video by Jess Dyrenforth, Chris Day, and Mike Tokemoto riding the big spine at  Mouse's ramp.  Keith did the first 360 over a spine, followed minutes later by Gary Laurent.  John Povah did the first ice pick grind down a street rail, the small rail at the Regional Pool.  I was the first guy to have BMX footage of The Nude Bowl, an abandoned nudist colony out in the desert, with a pool that was already legendary in the skateboard world.  Along with Keith, John, and myself riding, I got skatepark legend Brian Blyther to come out and ride there, along with former Pipeline local Xavier Mendez.  I also had Mike "Crazy Red" Carlson doing the first tailwhip jump over a set of doubles in the video.  He dragged a foot on the landing, but rode it out.  There are a few more tricks that were firsts on video in BMX, most technical tricks.  

I also managed to get several top 80's pros in the video, like Martin Aparijo, Josh White, Todd Anderson, Ron Wilkerson Woody Itson, Pete Augustin, Jess Dyrenforth, Bob Kohl, and my personal favorite, Eddie Roman.  This was the first video to get footage of pro racers and top dirt jumpers, Chris Moeller, Dave Clymer, and the P.O.W. House (Pro's of Westminster) backyard.  Even the now iconic S&M Bikes shield logo was first seen in a video here, spray painted on the side of a VW bus as I walked into the P.O.W. House backyard.

BMX freestyle, the initial explosion of the 1980's, with helmets and motocross style leathers being standard attire in contests, was fading after its first wave of popularity. Street riding and dirt jumping were just turning into their own genre's, and riding was going underground, into what became the long, ramen-eating recession, of the early 1990's.  "BMX is dead" we were told, but us hardcore riders wouldn't accept that, and kept riding anyway.  We didn't know what the future held for BMX freestyle.  

As it turned out, Chris Moller's tiny garage company, S&M Bikes grew during the recession, and Hoffman Bikes, Standard Bikes, Eastern Bikes, and FBM were all rider owned bike companies, started during that recession.  Most of those, possible all, got their bikes built in the U.S., by the time the recession ended.  Even ESPN came around, near the end of the recession, and started the Extreme Games in 1995, changing the name to the X-Games a year later.  BMX, other action sports, and TV finally merged in a big way, and BMX freestyle exploded into its second big wave of popularity, with rider owned companies and rider-made videos now at its core.  

Eddie Roman, Mark Eaton, myself, and the Alder Brothers, who produced our own rider-made videos in 1988-1991, had no idea what we were doing at first, and no idea we would spawn a movement.  By 1993, every fledgling company was making their own videos, with Hi-8 video cameras and "prosumer" equipment making video production possible for everyone willing to do the work of shooting, logging, and editing videos.  

The Ultimate Weekend was not a blockbuster video like Eddie Roman's later videos, Headfirst with Mat Hoffman (1991) and Ride On (1992).  But everyone who rode then saw this video, at some point, and it had the best production quality of the rider made videos when it came out, in October of 1990.  Us early video producers in BMX freestyle, skateboarding, and snowboarding, made the kind of videos we wanted to watch, and the way we made our shot and edited our videos, crazy as it was, changed the TV and video production industry to some extent.  More action shots, showing people land tricks fully, close-up shots with wide angle lenses, riding skateboards with the camera to follow riders for tracking shots, and fast editing, and raw, punk rock influenced, DIY editing, and crazy comedy bits, all rippled into other productions in the years since.  

I started working on The Ultimate Weekend not sure I could actually produce a video on my own.  Just getting a finished video that was "pretty cool," with fresh, innovative riding, was my goal.  I did accomplish that.  I sucked at sales, so I didn't sell a ton of them, but the distributor did pretty well with them.  All in all, I lost about $2,500 making the video.  While this was not a monumental video in the history of BMX freestyle, it was solid for its day, and I'm proud to have it on my reel, as they say in video production.  In the years after, I went on to produce and edit the first two videos for S&M Bikes, Feel My Leg Muscles I'm a Racer (1991), and 44 Something (1993).  I also stumbled into TV production work, and wound up as a crew guy on American Gladiators.  Just over a decade later, I self-produced another video, Animals, to try and get back into the BMX world.  It didn't really work, though I did a better job putting the video together.  So that's the basic story of The Ultimate Weekend. in my Freestyle BMX Tales blog, I tell about some of the sessions for T.U.W. in more detail, starting with this post, and going back, earlier in the 2016 posts.  

I totally wanted to do a 20 year anniversary follow-up to The Ultimate Weekend in 2010, but life was super sketchy then, and it didn't happen.  Same thing goes for a 30 year anniversary video in 2020, I just couldn't make it happen.  I'd still like to do The Ultimate Weekend II at some point.  But it'll be a while longer.  Maybe along while.  We'll see.  I need to get my personal situation stabilized first, and that's a whole different issue.  Will it happen someday?  I hope so.