Why Content Creation is important these days

The land rush scene from the 1992 movie Far and Away, starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. 

In 1889, the United States opened up a huge chunk of land, what is now much of Oklahoma, to homesteaders.  By the order of President Benjamin Harrison, on April 22, 1889, about 50,000 people lined up on the borders of this huge area, ready to grab a free piece of land.  At noon, cannons and guns fired, and trumpets sounded, that was the start signal, and people raced into the region, which is what this movie scene is about.  The deal was,  people would find a piece of land they wanted, and plant their flag.  By doing that, and then registering the claim soon after, these people could claim 160 acres of land.  They had to live on that land, and make improvements on it, for five years.  If the homesteaders did that, they would receive the title of that 160 acres of land, for no money.  This is one way that the U.S. got people to claim the former Indian lands, and encouraged settlement of those lands.  You can learn more about the Land Rush here.

If you own a small business, do some kind of creative work, or maybe are an athlete who makes money from some kind of sponsorship deals, you're ignoring "free land" and free promotion for your business, work, or ideas, if you don't create content on many of the platforms available in today's world.

So what does this Oklahoma land rush of 1889 have to do with the internet and social media?  It's a pretty good analogy.  When you open an account on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube, or create a blog or website somewhere on the internet, you're claiming your own piece of the cyber world.  Like the Oklahoma land rush, you're staking your claim and saying "This area is mine." 

Once you have your little piece of the cyber world, you can share your ideas through text, photos, audio, and video.  You can also share other people's ideas and content, drawing attention to that content and those ideas.  When you do that, you're "creating content," as it's now known. 

Why create content?  There are a whole bunch of reasons.  Getting Likes is one of the worst reasons, but a popular one.  Some people just want attention.  Some people want others to like them and validate them.  Everyone has their own viewpoints on many different subjects.  A lot of people have specific info, or some skill or experience in some area, that can help other people learn a new skill, entertain people, expose people to something new, or share ideas. 

For most of human history, there were very few ways for an average person to share their knowledge and ideas with very many people.  But the internet and social media have democratized media, and now, nearly everyone can get their ideas out and make then available to a huge chunk of the people, in the entire world.  For centuries, there were "gatekeepers" who let only certain people have a voice to large groups of people.  The gatekeepers may have been a TV producer, a magazine publisher, a newspaper editor, or someone like that.  Now, in today's world, there are no gatekeepers.  Virtually everyone can put stuff out on the web, or on social media. 

Because of this, there's a ton of crap out there to look at, and there's a lot of really good stuff, too.  By creating content, the best stuff you can put out, you can take advantage of one of the greatest opportunities in all of human history.  But hardly anyone really does it well, or puts much effort into it.  Nearly everyone shares stuff on the internet's websites, and social media platforms, today.  Most people go through their days spitting out mostly lame and crappy content.  But very few, even those people who are trying to promote something, take the time to learn to do this well, and work at creating good content on a consistent basis.  All kinds of business are in trouble, or going out of business these days, because they don't create good content regularly.  With the rise of the internet, social media platforms, and smartphones, people of all kinds now expect businesses and organizations of all kinds to put out good content. 

This has changed the business and social game.  In effect, if you own a business, creating content has been part of your job since about 2000-2005.  Before then it was helpful.  But since about 2005, you're leaving a great deal of money on the table, if you're not consistently creating good content, and a lot of it.  If you want to promote anything; your artwork, your business, yourself as an athlete, your favorite political candidate, your band, whatever, content creation is simply a necessary part of the game now.  If you don't get good at it, the person who takes your place, or puts you out of business eventually, will get good at it.  So that's why it's important in today's world. 

How I sold 80 major pieces of art, starting without a dime, while homeless

Sumatran tiger I drew in late 2018, for my first First Friday Art Walk in Richmond, Virginia.  18" X 24", I sold it last spring.  I love this one, I need to draw more animals at some point.  #sharpiescribblestyle

by Steve Emig, #sharpiescribblestyle

My life up until late 2015 is a really long, and ridiculously crazy story.  It may or may not involve aliens, sasquatch, government conspiracies, taxi driving, time travel, the American Gladiators, BMX freestylers, pro skateboarders, porn stars, and circus clowns.  Whatever the true story, by late 2015, I was 49 years old, and living with my mom, in a small two bedroom apartment, in Kernersville, North Carolina.  I couldn't find a "real job," despite three big pushes to do so, and filling out over 140 applications in the area.  That was something I'd never had happen, so I was pretty baffled by the complete shut-out on the job front.  I got hired for every single job I ever applied for, up until age 28, and most of those I  applied for after that.  Whatever the case, another means of making money was in order.

My mom and I didn't get along when I was a kid, and 40-some years later, the living environment still had a Chernobyl level of toxicity.  I was pretty miserable, and needed to find some way to make some kind of money.  I did the guy things around the apartment, and drove her to doctor's appointments and on six hour shopping expeditions regularly.  But the only thing that made me any money was doing an occasional Sharpie scribble style drawing of a kid's name, usually for a mom at our church, or sometimes drawing a cartoon character for a friend of of friend's kid.  Here's one of those you'll recognize.

Cowabunga dude!

Now, like a lot of moms out there, my mom has issues.  We're talking more issues than the  magazine rack at Barnes & Noble.  She also has a wall of denial when it comes to admitting those.  I'm not talking about a brick wall, more like a ten foot thick wall of steel reinforced concrete, covered by a foot of chromoly steel, covered by Teflon.  Nothing penetrates that wall.  Yes, that's a horrible thing to say about my mom.  But it's true.  And yes, I have plenty of my own issues.  The main difference is that I spent 25+ years of my adult life working through most of my issues.  My mom never saw the point in that.

The other thing to note is that my mom got progressively worse at handling money as she aged.  She spent her Social Security check, more than enough to live comfortably on, within three days of getting it, each month.  When she needed money the other 27 or 28 days, she came up with really bad ideas to come up with some.  Those ideas usually started with selling some overpriced kitchen machine she bought on QVC 2 or 3 months earlier.  The ideas quickly went downhill from there.  It was ridiculous. 

If I made any money in any way, my mom would nag me until I confessed the exact amount.  The next day some "crisis" would come up that desperately needed that exact amount of money.  If I had $23, a crisis popped up that needed exactly $23.  If my mom knew I had $1.76, a crisis popped up, usually involving chocolate, that needed exactly $1.76.  As if living in Kernersville, North Carolina, as a long time Californian actions sports guy, wasn't bad enough, living in those conditions made it ultra-miserable.  But my mom's a good cook, so I tolerated it.  It was a classic case of justifying staying in a toxic situation that already had put me on depression meds.  I had to find a way to make my own money, and get out of that situation.

The first Bruce Lee drawing I did, my Sharpie scribble style take on a Bruce Lee stencil.  Drawing this changed the course of my life.

One night, in November 2015, I decided to focus on trying to make money with my Sharpie art.  I put a few of my earlier drawings in that last post, and as you can tell, they were alright, maybe, but a long way from great.  I knew I needed to step up my art game.  Step 1 was simply to ask myself, "What would I want to put on my wall?"  I sat down at my mom's computer, it was faster than my $65 refurbished HP laptop, which was still running Windows XP.  For 2 1/2 hours, I looked at all kinds of art online.  I started with some classics, like Monet, Renoir, Degas, daVinci, Michelangelo (the artist, not the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle), and others.  Great painters, but they don't do much for me.  I looked at some 20th century people, like Picasso, M.C. Escher, Georgia O'Keefe, Frida Kahlo, and such.  Pretty cool, buy not what I wanted on my wall.

I spent most of the time that night looking at graffiti and street art, because that's the stuff that gets me psyched.  I checked out Banksy, Shephard Fairey, the early New York graff writers, big wall bombs, urban murals, and much more.  Being a BMX/skateboard guy, I also looked Bob Haro's BMX drawings, sticker and T-shirt designs, at skateboard graphics, like Marc McKee's epic World Industries deck art.  I also looked up my former FREESTYLIN' magazine boss, Andy Jenkins, I love his old Wrench Pilot comics.  Finally,  I found a simple stencil of Bruce Lee.  He was my first hero as a 5-year-old kid in Ohio, shortly before his untimely death.  Yeah, I wanted to draw my version of that Bruce Lee stencil, and put that on my wall, so I did.  That's it above.

Cam Newton's infamous Superman pose, done in my Sharpie scribble style.  One of my first paid drawings, from early 2016.

That's how it started, drawing a Bruce Lee drawing, in my style, for my own wall.  Since that night night in late 2015.  I've drawn over 100 original drawings, most of  them were 18" X 24", and took 30 to 45 hours each, to draw.  I've sold over 80 of those originals, and over 120 smaller copies of drawings in the four years since. Most of the other 20 drawings were given away, a few were lost in my travels.  My Sharpie scribble style artwork is now hanging on walls in 10 or more U.S. states, several countries in Europe and Scandinavia, Australia, Taiwan, and even Russia.  In the last six months, while homeless, my art has sold on 5 of the 7 continents.  That's crazy.  I wondered if I could even sell one drawing, when I first started back then.  I'm currently looking for buyers in Africa and Antarctica, so if you know any, email me.  I need to get art on those other two continents.

I started in November 2015 with a bunch of Sharpies, a dollar store pad of sketch paper, my crappy, slow laptop, and a little card table in my bedroom, to work on.  I literally didn't have a dime to my name.  Not even a penny, actually, because of the mom situation.  I had no reputation as a visual artist at all.  Hell, I didn't think of myself as a visual artist for about two more years.

So how did I manage to sell 80 major pieces of art, starting with nothing, while homeless most of the time, in four years?  Here are the steps I took to make that happen.

- In 2008, after some really tough times, I was unemployed and living with my parents in Kernersville.  The taxi industry went downhill until I could no longer make money, and I was homeless for a year in SoCal, before I took up my family's offer, to go live with them a while.  As fate would have it, I went to North Carolina in November 2008, right when the economy was collapsing, and jobs were nearly impossible to find.

Once there, I started blogging about my times in the 1980's BMX freestyle world.  I had no intention of ever becoming a working artist at that point.  I was depressed, had time on my hands, and started writing little stories about things that happened as a rider, and an industry guy, in that world.  Within a few weeks, I began to re-connect with a lot of old school BMX friends, and met new ones online.  I became a part of the Old School BMX freestyle community online.  At the time, I was such a Luddite, I didn't even know there was an old school BMX community online.

-I blogged consistently, mostly because I liked doing it, and partly because I was bored and had lots of time.  I had no one with similar interests to talk to in NC, so it was also good connecting with old friends online.  I also had a computer (my parents' desktop) with the internet, for the first time in my life.  Because no one else in the world was really blogging about Old School BMX stuff, I wound up with the two top Old School BMX blogs in the world.  I became #1 in my niche, worldwide, without trying to.  I was just writing about things that were interesting to me.  I gained a steady following, with my main blog getting 3,000 or so page views a month. That's not stellar in the blogosphere, but it my little niche, it was really good.

-One day in 2009, someone, I can't remember who, emailed me and said, "You know, people actually make money with blogs, right?"  I didn't know that.  I was in my own little world, my only social life in NC was online, and I didn't know anything about the larger blogging world.  I did know, from working doing zines, and working at magazines and a newsletter, that I'm a writer at heart.  But I had no idea how to be a writer in the 2009, 21st century, internet enabled world.

-So I started learning, self-educating.  That's how the vast majority of practical, real world, viable learning takes place in today's world.  Over the 10+ years since, I watched thousands of YouTube videos, how-to's, TED Talks, and keynote speeches by guys like Seth Godin, Mitch Joel, Gary Vaynerchuk, and many others.  I signed up for email lists to get free ebooks about internet marketing.  I couldn't afford to buy the brand new ebooks, but many internet marketers would give away their old ones for free, to get you on their mailing list.  I read a bunch of those.  I began to learn about the larger blogging world, building/serving online communities, search engine optimization (SEO), why tags matter, and all the basic ins and outs of blogging, and later various forms of social media.

-Years later, when I sat down to look at all the art on the computer in November 2015, as I mentioned above, I asked myself one simple question, "What drawing would I want to put up on my own wall?"  It turned out to be that simple Bruce Lee drawing above.

Kurt Cobain drawing, which was used as an online flyer, which I did for my first little art show at Earshot Music, a great, old school record/music shop in Winston-Salem, NC,in November 2017.  This drawing sold a hour after being put up on the wall, the night before the show.  I stepped up my game with this drawing, and it led to selling dozens of musician drawings, nearly all commissions, since.

-I made a commitment, that night in November 2015, to focus on making money with my Sharpie art, no matter what.  Full commitment.  This is probably the most important step on this list.  While art seems like a lame way to try to make a living when you're already broke, I had no other option that seemed to give me more hope.  It wasn't that I said, "Hey, I want to be a famous artist,"  it was simply the only thing I did then that made me a little bit of money now and then.  So I doubled down on that.

-I put a photo of that Bruce Lee drawing on my Facebook page, where I interacted with a bunch of my blog followers from my BMX blogs.  I asked if anyone would like me to draw them something.  In internet marketing terms, I had already become a well known, and reasonably respected member of an online community, and I offered my service to that community.  This is the game in the 21st century.  Create a community, or become a known member of one that already exists, and serve that community.

-I offered to draw pictures CHEAP.  Another key.  When you're just starting, make it worth someone taking a shot on you.  I originally did 12" X 18 drawings for $20 I think.  Maybe $25.  Those drawings took me 12 to 15 hours to do then.  So I was drawing for $1-$2 an hour.  That sounds horrible, I know.  But...1) I was unemployed, couldn't get hired for any job in my area (for whatever reasons), so I would be sitting around watching TV, and getting nagged by my mom, if I was not drawing.  2) I was getting paid something to draw pictures.  That's an improvement.

Me with a Jimi Hendrix drawing I did for a couple who wound up buying 9 drawings from me.  In the photo, I'm in the Gallery at 625, part of Winston-Salem's cool Trade Street art scene.

-I drew the one or two pictures people ordered, and I put photos of them on my blog, and on Facebook, the main social media platform I used then.  I showed my readers/friends I was doing art.  If I didn't have a paid drawing to do, I drew something else I wanted to draw, and put photos of that drawing up on my blog and Facebook, and asked for more orders.  They began to trickle in.

-In early 2016, I did a Go Fund Me campaign to raise $1,000.  I didn't have Paypal then, people were actually sending me checks by snail mail for drawings.  I offered drawings to everyone on Go Fund Me.  I wasn't really asking for donations, I was asking to draw picture for people for a slightly higher price, and telling them I was working on turning my Sharpie art into a business.  My plan was to get $1,000 in a couple weeks, buy the basic supplies I needed, get a business bank account, and become a legit little art business.  What actually happened is that the Go Fund Me campaign helped encouraged people to let me draw them something.  It also worked as an order taking and payment website.  Two people had me do several drawings for them, one old school BMX friend, and one new Facebook friend, also an Old School BMXer.  The drawings I did then were 18" X 24" drawings, that took 20 to 25 hours, for $50 each.

In effect, Go Fund Me became my art business website for a while.  I started getting consistent orders, and I got enough work so that I was drawing, every single day, for four months.  I was also making a little money while doing it.  It was far from a real living, but I became a "working artist" during those four months.  One big problem with artists is that they think, "my piece took me 20 hours, it MUST be worth $250."  Or whatever price.  News flash, Your art is worth what someone will pay for it, right now.  Period.  Every product, especially art by an unknown artist, needs to be marketed to find an audience.  I knew this, and I knew I was in it for the long haul.  So I was more interested in actually selling art, even if I sold it cheap, then drawing something that looked cool, but sat in my bedroom for a year.  One more thing...

Not one single person that bought a drawing from me, for $50 in 2016, has complained that I now charge $400 for the same size drawing.  People like it when their artwork goes up in value, even if that had nothing to do with why they bought it.

-Because of the sketchy money situation with my mom, which I wrote about above, I could not re-invest the little bit of money I made, to give me any chance of actually getting ahead.  Every dime I made was needed for some "emergency."  So I left my mom's house, and moved into a patch of woods in nearby Winston-Salem.  I simply had no other housing options, no friends with spare rooms to rent cheap, or couches to surf.  That's a really extreme measure, and it sucked, but in my particular case, it was the only way I could get off on my own, and earn some money for myself.  The job market was so terrible there, that there was no chance at all of me getting a good paying "real job."  So I slept in a tent in the woods, scrounged money for food and bus fare, and kept drawing at libraries or McDonald's, all day, every day... for months. Three weeks after moving into the woods, I started a brand new blog, bringing my BMX stories, my Sharpie art, and my thoughts on the economy and the future (longtime geeky hobby of mine), into one blog.  

-One day a couple of hippy guys were stoned and eating at McDonald's, while I drew one of my pictures at a nearby table.  They told me I should show my drawings to the guys at a record shop across the street.  I knew the shop existed, but hadn't been in there.  "Your drawing is way better than the art on their walls right now," the one guy said.  So I took their advice.  I went to the shop, and showed my work to the manager.  He said to come back the next day to see the owner, so I did.  He liked my drawings, and called up the woman who handled art displays for the shop, they showed off work by local artists.  They put two of my drawings up before long, which got a good response.  That led to me doing a small show at Earshot music a couple months later, as soon as I could draw 8 big pieces.  That little show led to six drawings selling quickly, for $120 each.  It also led to many commissions, and I was suddenly drawing all day, nearly every day, one paid drawing right after another.  I also got an artist's profile in the local newspaper.

Dr Maya Angelou lived the last 30 or 40 years of her life in Winston-Salem. So when I was asked to do a drawing for the front window of a gallery, for Black History month(even though I'm a white guy), she was the obvious choice.  Dr. Angelou's only niece, and archivist, now has a print of this drawing in the Maya Angelou collection.

-In the winter of 2017-2018, I managed to finally make it down to the First Friday Art Walk in Winston-Salem's Trade Street art district.  It's a great little creative scene, and I met a few people and showed them my drawings.  One woman was really excited by my stuff, and I soon had drawings on the walls of her studio in the art scene, as well as at the record shop.  She priced me stuff higher, and they didn't sell often, but I kept busy with commissions from the record shop and personal contacts, and occasionally online. While I built my name as an artist online, having works hanging locally in the studio and the music shop, got attention from local people.  One guy became a collector of my works, buying four drawings.  Another couple bought one, then went on to commission eight more.  Return customers are big in selling art, I learned.

 -Unfortunately, my blog posts about the economy and managed to piss off some of the good ol' boys in that area.  The people who run North Carolina really don't believe in the whole freedom of speech idea, you know, that right that  all Americans have because we simply exist.  Hey, The South is still The South in many ways, so I got a lot of pressure put on me, and wound up leaving Winston-Salem and catching a bus as far as I could afford to, which happened to be Richmond, Virginia. Richmond has a ton of murals, and a larger, and more  spread out, group of art scenes, than Winston-Salem.  I had to really struggle to survive while in Richmond, still homeless, but I kept drawing daily, and sold most of my drawings on Facebook, though 3 or 4 wound up in Richmond galleries.

This "Tainted Love/Harley Quinn/Joker drawing is my personal favorite of the 100+ original drawings I've done from 2015-2020.  I did it for the Earshot Music show, but it it didn't sell.  I planned to keep it for myself, but wound up having to sell it cheap, in Richmond, to get a motel room, after a 7 day hospital stay, due mostly to being given a medicine I turned out to be really allergic to. 

In April of 2019, an old friend from the BMX world paid my way back to California, and gave me a room to stay in.  The plan was to help him promote, and drive traffic to, a new online business he had started.  Ultimately, that turned into a job that really needed a full scale digital marketing firm to accomplish.  I wasn't the right guy for that job, and we didn't have the budget needed for the quick and big results required.  With no real income, I went back out to the streets, this time "back home," in the L.A./Orange County area.  I lived in SoCal, mostly in and around Huntington Beach, for 21 years, most of my adult life.  I still making some money drawing, but not enough to rent a room full time, and really get a business off the ground.  Being homeless through most of this time period, I just wasn't able to raise money to actually start a business, stabilize my life, and get on to more and better work.  I've done drawings mostly for other people, while doing an idea of mine when I could find the time.  This drawing of Biggie was a photo I wanted to draw for quite a while, and finally did.  It sold in a few days.

 Biggie Smalls, The Notorious B.I.G., lookin' Brooklyn, in this famous shot that I drew.  This is another of my personal favorites of all the drawings I've done.

Four years after I committed to do whatever it took to start making money with my Sharpie art, I'm still not actually making a living.  On the other hand, I'm back in California, I have this huge body of work that I've done, nearly all online where anyone can check it out, and friend from years past has let me stay in a spare bedroom for a while, giving me a chance to take things to the next level.  I haven't even begun promote my work in Southern California, I'm still unknown here, outside the old School BMX world.  Along the way, I got really good at content creation, and pretty good at marketing online and on social media platforms.

 Four years ago, I would never have imagined selling as many drawings as I actually have. 

On one hand, you can write me off and say, "Hey, Steve's just some loser who draws other people's photos, and is too lazy to get a "real job."  You can say that because these last four years have not been financially successful for me, and I've spent most of the time homeless.  Keep in mind, I started without a dime, in a small town in rural North Carolina.  It wasn't a hotbed of the art world.  

Or, you can check out nearly all of my drawings in these 23 posts ( 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 the later ones are best) on my personal blog, and you can see why I am now known for being a Sharpie artist.  You can search "Steve Emig Sharpie art" or my main hashtag, "#sharpiescribblestyle" on Google images.  Or search the hashtag on Instagram, Pinterest, or Twitter.  Over four years, I slowly, but steadily, built a new reputation as a pretty good, and completely unique Sharpie artist.  I didn't build that reputation by drawing 100 Sharpie pictures.  I built that reputation through content creation, in blogs and using social media.  AND... I actually sold over 80 original pieces, and over 100 copies of my work.  Not a lot of artists can say that.  I managed to make that happen, even in ridiculous conditions.

When it comes down to it, I sold 80 major pieces of art, most that took a week or more, each, to draw.  I did that because I made a commitment to do it, and every day I did the work needed to survive that situation I was in, focus most of my time on creating something, and then promoted myself and my work in my blog, and on other platforms.  I created content, day after day, to show what I could do, and I asked people if I could draw them something.

My situation is still super sketchy (no pun intended) financially.  But now I have a huge body of work.  It's online, and on social platforms, where people can easily see it and check it out.  I've sold the majority of the pieces I've created, including most of the ones I originally did for myself.  I'm a much better artist, technically, then I was four years ago.  I'm in a much better physical location, for me, Southern California compared to Kernersville, North Carolina, than I was four years ago.

Four years ago, I started drawing pictures, without a dime to my name, living in an absolutely horrible situation, in a place I couldn't stand to live, and these 100+ drawings are what I have to show for four crazy years.  I can live with that.

It's safe to say, nearly everyone reading this is in a better situation, with more resources, than I was in back in late 2015.  My question to you is, what can you do in four years, if you focus on what's really important to you?

I'm looking for places to workshops to teach how I managed to sell 80 pieces of art, and how you can use my ideas to help you sell your artwork.  If you're interested in a workshop, or know a good (and super cheap) place I could do a workshop, email me at: stevenemig13@gmail.com , or hit me up on Facebook (Steve Emig).

My lame Sharpie art from before 2015

Tyler was a baby that my mom babysat for in about 2012-13 in North Carolina.  At the time, unable to find a "real job" in Kernersville, North Carolina, while living with my mom, I occasionally drew kids' names, like this, and sold them for $20 each.  This was the first thing I made money drawing in my Sharpie "scribble style."  These took me 4 to 5 hours to draw.  Yeah, it's a long way from what I draw now, but I had to start somewhere.

The Birth of my Sharpie Scribble Style
A few days before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and the gulf coast in 2005, I was sitting in my taxi one morning, near the entrance of the Huntington Beach Hyatt hotel, a block form thre Picific ocean.  A taxi driver I knew walked up to my cab, from where he parked at the back of the line.  Richard was a weird dude, in a good way.  He was a long time taxi driver, which was a crazy way to make a living, even in good times.  He was also an old punk rock influenced guy, and a highly creative and controversial artist.  He owned and ran a small indie art gallery called AAA Electra 99.  Here's a taste of Richard at the Anaheim location of Electra.

I knew Richard from the taxi company, and I had drawn some stuff for a couple of taxi driver art shows he had, and was an occasional visitor to the gallery.  So Richard walked up, hopped in the back of my taxi, and said he had a deal for me.  The deal was I could live in the art gallery for $50 a week, and then drive his taxi (he owned his cab, within the company we worked for) on the weekends.

When he offered me this deal,  I was working 7 days a week, homeless, and living in my cab.  I worked 16-18 hours a day Tuesday through Saturday.  Sundays I'd work from about 7 am to about 2 or 3pm.  Then I'd go rent a motel room for the night.  I'd get a pizza, watch some TV, and sleep for 10 to 12 hours.  I'd wake up at 5 am, go catch a couple of Monday morning airport runs in the taxi, go back to the motel room, and chill and watch TV until checkout at 11 am.  Then I'd work in the cab from 11 am Monday until after bar close at 2 am.  I had been doing this, week after week, for two years straight, as the taxi industry went down the tubes due to computer dispatching.

That adds up to about 100 to 120 hours a week of work.  Yeah, it wasn't physical work, "working" in a taxi mostly meant sitting and waiting to hit a button on the computer when a call popped up.  We couldn't leave the cab, or we might miss that $40 ride that would make the day profitable.  Not hard "work" but monotonous.

In two years, I had about five days off.  I don't mean that I had weekends off like normal people, and then took five more days off.  I mean I literally had five days off in two years.  To say I was burned out is a huge understatement.  In the year 2000, I could rent a taxi on the weekends, work 40 hours in three long days, and pocket about $350.  I rented a cheap room, lived in a beach city, and had four days off.

But in 2003, the taxi company took the old CB radios out of the cabs, and put in dispatch computers.  Overnight, the industry completely changed.  That's when technology really began to disrupt the taxi business, years before Uber and Lyft entered the picture.  We all had to either quit, or work 7 days a week.  Meanwhile, the computer dispatching let the companies put more and more cabs on the road, so there was less business per driver.  So it got harder and harder to make money, and we all worked more and more hours.  AND I was homeless, living in my taxi, and sleeping in parking lots six nights a week.  I'd bulked up to about 370 pounds, did nothing but work and sleep, and I was burned out, fat, pissed off, and miserable. 

I took Richard's offer, and I moved into the Electra gallery, the small industrial unit in Anaheim you see in the link above.  I've always been a highly creative guy, but had done nothing creative in two years.  Suddenly I had 4 1/2 days off, and was surrounded on all sides by art from some of Orange County's most weird, fun, and creative people.  I started drawing with markers huge pieces of paper, cut from a roll of banner paper.

I was never was much into painting.  I got into drawing with markers in 2003, when I saw a thing on MTV's House of Style about putting butcher paper up on your walls, and drawing on it to make "doodle art" walls.  I lived in the little room, and tried to make a mural with markers.  It sucked.  So I wound up making big collages with the paper instead, cutting photos from my old BMX, skateboard, snowboard, and rock climbing magazines.  In between photos, I doodled, trying to find a cool ways to shade with markers.

Back in 2005 at the art gallery, I drew a little drawing in pen my second night there, just a doodle.  My creative floodgates opened, and I began drawing all day, every day.  I went back to experimenting with markers.  A couple of months later, while drawing a tree, I scribbled with one color.  Then scribbled over it with another.  Then another.  I wound up with these cool shades of brown that actually looked like tree roots.  That's when my Sharpie "scribble style" was born, October or November of 2005.  I had finally found a way to shade with Sharpie markers.  I soon found the smaller, ultra fine Sharpies worked much better for this.  So I had a cool and unique way to color and draw with markers.  I just wasn't sure what to do with it.

I lived in the gallery for about 7 months, playing with the Sharpie scribble style idea most of that time.  When I went back to full time taxi driving, I got a sketch pad, and would spend many of the hours sitting in my taxi drawing.  I wound up losing all those earliest drawings, dozens of them.  But here are some of my drawings from 2008 to 2015.  They're a long way from the kind of drawings I do now.  But you have to start somewhere.

 Something about aliens smoking cigarettes just makes me laugh.  I started thinking one day, what if there really were aliens in some underground base.  In effect, they'd basically be prisoners, it'd be kind of like a prison mentality, so maybe they'd evolve into gangsta aliens.  Then I thought, no, they would be living off government money, and they wouldn't have to work.  It'd be like a trailer park, everyone getting a Disability check, playing video games and doing drugs all day.  You know, like West Virginia.  The aliens would turn into white trash, but they're aliens, they'd be Grey Trash.  So I draw a whole bunch of these aliens smoking cigarettes and wearing wife beater T-shirts.  Not great art, but it was amusing.  This one is for the skateboarders.

 Here's my dad's drafting/engineer influence, mixed with my early influence by M.C. Escher's work coming through.

 The "tile drawing" phase.  Lame, just an idea to try for a while.

The "Georgia O'Keefe" phase.  Getting a little closer to something kind of cool. 
 

World War III is a bad idea... just sayin'

Bruce Srpingsteen, in a performance from my teenage years, covering a song that was written when he was 20, and I'm sharing it for today's teenagers, as a madman in the White House puts everybody's lives in the world at stake.  Do we really need to play out this stupid scenario yet again?  #nowariniran

"War.  What it is good for?  Absolutely nothing.  Say it again..."

-Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, 1969

When the world gets crazy, step up to meet it.  It's getting crazy...

 My Sharpie drawing I did recently, as I watched the stupidity of our world build.  #sharpiescribblestyle

My photos of Street Art 1/6/2020 #1

 I'm pretty sure this is a real Banksy, it's on the side of the legendary Amoeba Records shop in Hollywood, and when the wall was last painted, they actually painted around this piece. 

 To the best of my knowledge, this is the first photo ever of BMXers doing an over/under double wall ride.  That's Randy Lawrence going opposite up high, and me down below.  The wall was long known as the Blues Brothers Wall.  It's one of the beach retaining walls below the bike path, across from 14th Street, in Huntington Beach, California.  Still from my 1990 self-produced BMX freestyle video, The Ultimate Weekend. 

 One of my shortest poems, which I scrawled with kids' sidewalk chalk on the sidewalk at the garden party in a Winston-Salem, NC park, celebrating the 90th birthday of Dr. Maya Angelou.  "It's one great play, go find your part, someday you'll realize, the world is art." 

 Another shot of the Blues Brothers wall, with a bit of the Three Stooges painting, also a still from my BMX video.  Wall ride over my sister Cheri's head.  Huntington Beach 1990.

Wildman graffiti in the Shockhoe Bottom district of Richmond, Virginia.  2019.

Not street art, but art on the streets, drawn by me, a homeless guy living in a tent at the time.  Me posing with the Sharpie drawing of Dr. Maya Angelou at the 90th birthday party for her, four years after her death.  Winston-Salem, NC, 2018.  

Weird painting, Shockhoe Bottom district, Richmond, Virginia, 2019.

Be weird... it's fun

"Most progress in the world comes from the freaks, geeks, dorks, and weirdos."

- Me.

As I was drawing my Sharpie art pictures for other people to try and earn a living, over the past four years, I did one just for myself, now and then.  Two of these drawings I did from old, weird, public domain photos I found in some archives.  While all the cool people are living and dying by their Instagram posts and likes, I find Insta pretty damn boring.  Yeah, I 'm on it, throw some photos up there, because some people look there for my drawings.  But personally, I like Pinterest a lot more. 

Collecting photos on Pinterest tonight, I happened to run across the source photos I used for these two drawings, which are a bit different for everything else I've drawn.  So I decided to do a quick blog post of these two drawings.

"Do the impossible, it really pisses off normal people."

- Me.

I did both of these drawings just to try an idea out, just for myself.  But, as I tend to do, I wound up giving these to a friend in Ohio.  Last I heard, they were on the wall of her office at work.  That's cool.  If you go to my WPOS Kreative Pinterest page, you can find these next to the source photos.    #sharpiescribblestyle

The Universe understands...

I've had an incredible amount of outside influence on my life for about 20 years.  It's a long story, I can't really go into it, just some stupid shit that happened because there are a lot of douchebags in this world.  About three weeks ago, thinking hard about all of this crazy stuff, I wrote this piece.

The Universe understands...

Sometimes the plans and actions of others come down on you so hard, that the very best you can do is simply survive.  It takes a super human effort just to keep going.

Sometimes, the obstacles are so big, and you're so outnumbered that survival IS the win.  No matter how hard you try, no matter what level of effort you put in, the very best result is to simply survive.  There are circumstances where nothing more is possible.  In those circumstances you do your very best just to survive.

The cruel trick of fate is that once you've made it through hell, once you've survived the unsurvivable, there will be people, very average people often, who can't understand why you're in such sorry shape.  And there's no way to explain to them just how tough your path has been, just how lucky you are to still be alive at all.

Then you have to march past all those people, and slowly rebuild, and slowly accumulate the things needed for a simple, average life.  And you can never tell them, all of them, just what you've been through, and how hard it was, and how many times you just wanted to lie down and give up.  But you didn't give up.  You hung in there and wrestled the forces of evil into submission.

You just have to march on, moment by moment, step by step, and keep rebuilding, from the streets, back up.

They'll never know.  They'd never understand anyway.  But you know what you've been through.  You know...  and the Universe knows.  And once in a great while, when no one's looking, the Universe will give you a wink.  And it will reach down and give you a hand up, a little ways, as far as is needed.  The Universe has struggled, it has been there, too.  Even if no one understands, the Universe does. 

Photos from the L.A. Blue Line Train- part#2

 Palm trees over the hood.  Near Watts, I think.

 Not straight outta it, just passing through.  There are brand new, quite nice looking, apartments in Compton, right next to the train.  Looks a lot different than old rap videos from the train.

 Tiled mural at the Compton train station.

 Used to be a church.  Apparently God moved out a while back.  Downtown L.A..

 High end condo tower in the background, homeless person tarped domecile in the foreground.  Both end of the spectrum.

 The new towers going up in downtown.

I got a better shot of the  Kawhi Leonard mural on the way back up there New Year's Eve.  Photos by me, Steve Emig

Photos from the L.A. Blue Line Train-part 1

With the offer of a room to stay in in Newport Beach, and the end of the month/year/decade coming up, I needed to move my small amount of stuff to Newport.  This involved two trips up and back on buses and trains.  The Red Line and Blue Line trains, and two buses in Long Beach and Orange County.  So I packed the backpack, a shopping bag, and skateboard decks (for art), and made the trek the two days before the New Year.    So here's me looking stupid on the Blue Line train. 

 Colored leaves, through the train window.  Downtown L.A.

Not Glen Plake.  Train rider with a red Mohawk.  7th & Metro station under L.A.

 New skyscrapers going up, downtown L.A.

Kawhi Leonard mural, heading for the hoop.

 L.A. skyline from the Blu Line.

Mural in South Central L.A. area.  Photos by me, Steve Emig.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker movie premiere-

Did mention I was at the premiere of the new Star Wars movie that just happened?  Yeah, I was there... right out in front on of the Kodak Theater, on Hollywood Boulevard, trying to sell art skate decks.  I didn't sell any that night, and the other vendors didn't sell much either.  The whole block of Hollywood and Highland was blocked off, and there was a huge white tent right on Hollywood Blvd. Everyone coming to the premiere entered the tent at the end of the block, and there were bars and things to see, and places to hang out inside it.  All of that was hidden from view from tourists and people walking by. 

I worked at the company that did the lights and red carpeting for most of the movie premieres back in the late 90's, and I worked at a couple of them.  But this Star Wars premiere was HUGE.  They probably spent a million bucks just on that event, it was insane and took over the whole area.  And Hollywood boulevard is a really expensive area to take over. Here's a few pics from that night.

As all the celebrities, and people invited to the premiere, left the big tent, and they had to cross this open area, basically to walk across the sidewalk on Hollywood Boulevard.  The little tented thing above is the tent over the sidewalk, which had to be kept open for tourists and everyday people.  So the guards would block off the sidewalk for a few minutes, and the dignitaries at the premiere would walk through, into another tent leading up to the entrance of the Kodak Theater.  So this is tourists, phones in the air, trying to see and get photos of famous people walking by.  Somebody said Adam Driver walked by about the time I snapped this shot.  Woooo.  Famous people.  Whatever.

Here's my little set up, earlier in the evening, trying to sell my two Harley Quinn fan art skate decks.  I got a lot of interest, several people commented on them, but none were ready to throw down money.  The guys just past me were selling bracelets with names on them.  You can see the big tent, that all the premiere attendees went through, on the left.

 Here's a huge canvas, an original painting of an orangutan getting glammed up, left on the boulevard by the artist.  I saw another canvas by this artist a couple days earlier.  Some guy was standing next to it, so I figured that was the artist.  In my time hanging out and selling (or usually not selling) art on Hollywood blvd., I made friends with several of the "characters."  People, some kids from the hood just trying to make money, and some actors looking to make extra cash, dress up as well known characters, and take photos with tourists for tips.  So I got to know Edward Scissorhands and Freddy Krueger pretty well, along with a few others.  Both thought my artwork was pretty cool. 

Anyhow, the night of the Star Wars premiere, Freddy told me this artist was painting these huge canvases, and just leaving them on Hollywood boulevard for some one to pick up and take home for free.  A little free marketing to promote his work, I guess.  So these huge canvases, like five feet high and twelve feet long, just sat there.  This one, and the one below, Freddy said, had been sitting there for three days.

This painting, of zebras fucking in the rain, was sitting about 30 feet from where the tourists were watching for celebrities.  Obviously, it's hard to miss a twelve foot long painting of zebras fucking, and lots of people were checking it out, it was getting all kinds of reactions.  Later in the evening, maybe 10:00 pm or so, a couple of young women, maybe 19 or 20 years old, were checking this out and taking selfies in front of it.  The two were dolled up, high heels and all, out with their boyfriends for the evening. 

I told them, "Hey, the artist left this here for someone to take home, it's free.  I said that to several people that night, just joking around.  Much to my surprise, the two girls just looked at each other, picked this huge painting up, and walked down the street with it.  They were both maybe 5'2", and the huge painting dwarfed them, and they were in high heels.  But they decided they needed fucking zebras on their living room wall, and just walked off with the painting.  It was pretty funny to watch. 

About ten minutes later, some young guy who panhandles there, asked where the painting went.  For a minute, I thought he was the artist.  I told him that I told some girls it was free, and they walked off with it.  He was pissed.  "Man, I was trying to sell that thing."  What can I say, Hollywood boulevard is a weird place.  It's actually as crazy as Venice Beach these days, I think, maybe crazier.  You never know what you'll see there.

I still haven't seen the new Star Wars movie.  Or the one before that, for that matter.  Maybe I'll get the chance.