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.
