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. 
 

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 paradox of being a homeless entrepreneur

Bad selfie, while sitting outside the downtown library in Richmond, Virginia, where I was living homeless, earlier this year.  I had just walked a long ways, carrying all my stuff, on a hot humid day, and I found this little ledge to sit down on and take a break.  I turned around, and saw this sign.  This photo just seems to sum up being homeless, anywhere you go, you're not wanted, it doesn't matter where it is.

For the last 20 years, since I left my good paying job as a "Hollywood" lighting technician, because of an injury, my life has been this crazy struggle, skipping along the bottom of society, struggling in and out of homelessness.  When I mention that, or people see me and realize I'm homeless, they jump to all sorts of conclusions, nearly all of which aren't true.

I've now spent about 10 years in some form of homelessness.  About 7 1/2 of those years, I was working full time, way beyond full time (70-100 hours a week as a taxi driver), or near full time.  Here's the kicker, I don't do drugs, legal or illegal.  I don't drink at all anymore.  I'm not an alcoholic who went through a program to quit, I pretty much stopped drinking (which I didn't do much, anyhow) while working as a taxi driver. After driving drunks home every night in my cab, I just stopped drinking, I just got sick of the world attached to beer and booze.

I did struggle with depression, in a serious way, after my dad's death in 2012.  That got serious, but I went through group therapy, took meds, worked through all that. I weaned myself off the depression meds a couple years ago, while a friend from group kept an eye on me in case I got sketchy. 

My main issue, the thing I've struggled with most, was simply not being able to find a good paying job after taxi driving went down the tubes in about 2003.  I struggled in the taxi until 2007, then had to quit for both health and business reasons.  Like millions of other people in other industries, the taxi industry got disrupted by new technology.  First computer dispatching replaced the old CB radios in the cabs, which changed the game, and then Uber and Lyft popped up.  Boom!  Business over.  Like millions of people who lost factory jobs in the 1970's, 1980's, and 1990's, I had to find a new way to make a living.  And I have struggled with that.

During that same time period, there has been a ridiculous amount of outside pressure and influence on my life, from a variety of sources.  I can't really tell the story of this, though it's been the dominant theme of my life for 17-18 years now, because it's so ridiculous.  Finally part of the story came out, and all this weird stuff happened, supposedly, because I scored absurdly high on an I.Q. test 34 years ago.  Someone, somewhere, decided they needed to control my life because of that.  Supposedly.  So I've struggled through nearly two decades of crazy adventures, busting my ass to simply survive, and I can't explain this whole mess to anyone.  The story is just too fucking crazy.  It would be more believable to more people if I said I got abducted by aliens in 2001, brought back ten years later, then dropped in the woods of Oregon where I lived with a Sasquatch family for a few years... and now I have to start over.  That kind of crazy tale is actually more believable than what's actually happened in my life.

So I have 20 years of craziness I can't really talk about.  Now I'm 53, homeless, living in the Hollywood area, with a mouthful of broken teeth (20 years of no dental insurance after a life of too much sugar), and working to rebuild my life and start a viable business around my Sharpie art and my writing. 

What I do have in common with many of you reading this (hopefully), is that I'm working to build a creative/artistic based business, and make a living from that.  What I don't have in common with most of you is my starting point.  I started actually selling my Sharpie art, 4 years ago, while living with my mom, in a small North Carolina town, literally without a dime to my name.  After applying for about 140 jobs over a year or so, and not getting called back, it became obvious a traditional job wasn't going to happen.  So I decided to focus on my Sharpie art, which made me a few buck now and then. 

I've sold over 80 major pieces of art in four years, nearly of all which took 35 to 45 hours to draw.  So while most people look at me and see only a complete failure, I've actually sold more pieces of art than most of the best known masters of painting in their lifetimes.  My drawings may suck, in your opinion, compared to the great artists, but 80+ people thought they were worth paying for.  That's something.  No I'm not making a "good living," at this, even after four years, but I have survived through some tough times, by selling artwork.  However lame my life may seem, there are thousands of people out there who wish they had sold 80 pieces of original art.  That's something.  Yes, I have a long way to go, but I have made quite a bit of progress in some areas.

So now I'm dealing with a weird paradox, as I work to build my art/writing business in a new area, in the cliche' of all cliche's, Hollywood, California.  On one hand, as a homeless man, struggling for food money, bus fare, and basic need money, day to day, my main focus is simply keeping my spirits up, and not getting deeply depressed.  The struggle of homelessness is a struggle not to succumb to depression and give up.  The hardcore street people you see in large cities have mostly given up.  I've found the way to keep my spirits up while homeless is to give myself little "gifts."  In my case, it's mostly food, I'll spend a little money on a caramel sundae at McDonald's, or buy a $6 pepperoni pizza at Little Caesar's.  Little gifts to myself help me keep feeling like an actual human being, a person who will do cool stuff again, some day, not the "homeless person," most people see me as.

But as an entrepreneur, trying to start a small business, I need to spend as little money as possible, to put every dime I can into my little business, buy more art supplies, or copies of drawings to sell, or money to promote somehow.  So my biggest struggle right now, is making small amounts of cash day to day, and to try not to eat too much, but to eat enough to keep my attitude positive, because I get really grumpy when I don't eat much. 

We all have our struggles, the things we battling and struggling with right now.  That's mine.  What's yours?  What's keeping you from the small business, or small creative business, you really want to have?

Taking my artwork to Laguna Beach First Thursday Art Walk

 I took one copy of my "I (heart) Sunny Days" VW bug drawing, and went to Laguna Beach for it's First Thursday Art Walk last night.  This is the first time I've hung out in Laguna Beach during the Art Walk, and I wanted to show off my work, and see what people thought. 

I learned years ago that people don't really buy original art for the beauty or look of it, for the most part.  People tend to buy the artist, and the artist's story, as much as the work of art itself.  So I had no idea how people in a city full of all kinds of very good (and some not so good) artwork, would react to the Sharpie drawings of an unknown, homeless guy. 

To my surprise, this simple drawing of a convertible VW bug stopped a lot of people in their tracks.  That's hard to do, and that's pretty freakin' cool.  Most seemed to think it was a painting of some kind as they walked up and saw my drawing at a distance.  When they got closer, quite a few people seemed to realize (because I wrote "Sharpie drawings" next to it), that it wasn't a painting, and it was done with Sharpies.  While most of the people walking by didn't notice, busy with their own stuff,  two or three dozen people stopped, looked closer, and gave me really positive comments.  Two or three people said they'd never seen anything like this (with Sharpies), and a couple called it "amazing."  I said, "Thank you," and told them no one else in the world draws in this style, it's my creation.  So while no one wanted to buy a drawing, or commission one to be done, the reaction from Laguna Beach passers by was really good. 

 I posted up on a bench on the corner of PCH and Forest, in front of an ice cream shop, and this gate hangs on a pole there, about 8 feet out of the ground.  I'm sure there's a story to it, but I don't know that story.

 This guy, who looked a lot like a pre-heart attack Kevin Smith, poured a little water on the ground and busted some dance moves.  Crazy as it sounds, he had some really good footwork, aided by the wet bricks.  He also had some print on canvas he was trying to sell, and showed me a video he edited for some rapper, who was having an online contest to make a video to his song.  Not epic, but quite creative.  There are a lot of weird characters wandering around Laguna Beach, and that's always a good sign.  There's also a lot of really boring rich people.  Gotta take the good with the bad. 

 A lot of people walked their dogs around during Art Walk.  This St. Bernard was the big guy, and the mellowest, of the four-legged bunch.  Remember, St. Bernards were some of the first "service dogs," they carried casks of brandy around their necks, seeking out people who were lost in the snow, in the French Alps, if I remember correctly.  Something like that. 

My little art portfolio sitting below the dog waiter statue beside the ice cream shop, in downtown Laguna Beach. 

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

It's a really long and crazy story.  At age 49, I wound up living with my mom in a small North Carolina town, and could not get hired for any job whatsoever.  I sold a drawing in my weird Sharpie "scribble style," now and then.  I decided to focus on making money with my art.  That was in November of 2015.  I literally didn't have a dime to my name.  I had my art supplies, a room in a small apartment, and a refurbished HP laptop still running Windows XP.

I still don't make an actual decent living from my artwork.  But in the last 3 1/2 years, I've sold over 80 of my drawings, most of them for $120 to $160 each, a few sold through a gallery for $250 each.  These drawings, 18" X 24," take me 35 to 45 hours each to draw, on average.  That's not much money per hour of drawing, mostly because I was homeless most of the time I've been drawing and selling these drawings, and have been selling them to pay basic living expenses.  Obviously, if you start in a better position than I did, and you art is of a good quality, much more is possible.

Here's how I sold those 80 drawings:

1.  I committed to doing what it took to actually sell my work.  I decided I was actually going to do the day to day work needed to make and sell my Sharpie drawings.

2.  I sat down at the computer one night, looked through all kinds of art online for about three hours, and asked myself, "What would I actually want to put on my wall?"  I simple stencil of my first childhood hero, Bruce Lee, was the answer to that question.  So I printed out the photo, and drew it in my style.  I knew then that I needed to focus on drawing picture of inspiring people.  That was the subject matter that worked best for my style at that time.

3.  I tapped into the online following I already had from my BMX freestyle blog.  I primarily used Facebook, my main social media platform at the time, to show people my artwork, and ask if anyone would like me to draw them something.  My first orders came within a week or two of doing that.

4.  I sold my art cheap to start with, and offered to re-draw any drawing people didn't like.  A lot of people will tell you, "Don't lower your price, your art is worth much more than that."  Those people don't actually sell art.  They may make a lot of it, and show it off on Instagram and Facebook, but they don't sell much.  Let people get a cool piece of your work for a reasonable price, and make sure they're happy with it.  My first few drawings I sold were 12" X 18," they took me 8 to 12 hours to draw, and I sold them for $20-$25.  The key word there is, I SOLD them.

Then I sold a bunch of 18" X 24" drawings, that took me 18 to 22 hours to draw, for $40 to $50 each.  Again, I SOLD them.  I got better at my craft, my drawings improved, and I raised my prices to $75 each, then to $100 each, then to the $120-$160 range.  I always offered to re-do the drawings if people weren't satisfied.  I never really want to re-draw anything, but I do want people to be happy with my work.  These days, after thousands of hours of drawing, that's not really an issue.  Guess what, not one person who bought a $50 drawing is bummed that my drawings later sold for $150.  I'm now at the point where I'm raising the prices to $350.  I'd rather not sell the original and sell prints at this point, anyhow.

5.  I started a Go Fund Me campaign early on, the idea was to earn raise $1,000 quickly so I would have money to make prints to sell.  I didn't just ask for donations, I did drawings for everyone who pledged money.  In reality, I did raise the $1,000, but I did it drawing by drawing over four months time.  The Go Fund Me campaign just became an easy way to order and pay for my drawings online.  The $1,000 goal encouraged people to help me out and order a drawing.  It also allowed me to draw every single day for four months straight, and get into the rhythm of being an actual working artist.  By the time I reached my goal, I got set up on Paypal, and just kept taking orders online.

6.  Moved to a city that had a decent art scene in North Carolina, though I couldn't afford any place to live.  I wound up living in a tent in the woods, which I definitely DON'T recommend, and scraped by.  Some guys who saw me drawing one day suggested I show my work to a local record shop, which I did.  They liked it, and I wound up doing a small art show there.  That shop, a really cool one, was Earshot Music, and Phred, the owner used my Kurt Cobain drawing for the online flyer (above).  Only a handful of people came to the show, but one was an artist and collector from the 1980's New York City art scene.  He bought the Cobain drawing the day before the show, and wound up buying three more drawings form me.  I also sold about 10 more drawings through the record shop, most to one couple.  That just shows the power of getting artwork out where people can see it. 

I also found one studio/gallery owner who really liked my work in the downtown art scene there, and she sold a few more.  I wound up having trouble getting paid for some of my work there, so that relationship wound up bittersweet.  She promoted my work a lot, but also had trouble paying me sometimes because her cash flow issues.  That's another risk of this that you just have to deal with as things happen. 

7.  When I moved into the tent in the woods, I had several blogs going.  I brought them all into one single personal blog, Steve Emig: The White Bear.  Though three of my blogs drew good sized followings over the seven years before that, I wasn't sure anyone would read a blog about old school BMX freestyle stories, Sharpie artwork, and my thoughts on the future and the economy.  But that blog just had its two year anniversary, and has 76,000 page views in two years.  My blog readers are where most of the early buyers of my artwork came from, and where I still keep getting some art sales from.  I highly recommend a blog, or for most people these days, a Vlog, to promote your artwork, in addition to Instagram, Facebook, and whatever other social media you're using. 

8.  I used Pinterest to help build my web presence for my artwork, and I found one good hashtag to use all the time, #sharpiescribblestyle.  I use other hashtags, particularly on Instagram, which I'm not very psyched on, to be honest.  But Instagran has a huge reach, and can definitely get you followers, and maybe sales.  Use the social media platforms most that you actually like most.  Nearly all my online sales I've done have been handled on Facebook from people who read my blog.  But I took the time to make sure that is you look up #sharpiescribblestyle on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, or Google images, you'll see A LOT of my drawings.  That just took work, day after day, of actually taking the time to put stuff on each platform, with tags and hashtags, day after day. 

Like I said, I did this while living much lower, and with less resources, than most all of you reading this will ever have to deal with.  I'll go into more depth on these ideas in this blog as time goes by.  But these 8 ideas above are the basics of how I sold over 80 major pieces of art, while homeless most of the time, in the last 3 1/2 years.  Hopefully soon I'll be able to finally get to a place where I can turn this writing and art into an actual, stable living.  I've had a lot of headwinds holding me back at times, but I've had a lot of people help me out, as well, at key moments. 

My battery's going dead, no place to charge at the moment, so I'm going to post this and proffread it when I can.  Sorry for any typos at the moment...

A few of my best Sharpie Scribble Style drawings

 Out of the 100 or so drawings I've done in the last three years, these are a few of my best.  "Tainted Love/Harley Quinn" I last saw hanging in The Mix Gallery in Richmond, Virginia's arts district on Broad.  I left Richmond about six weeks ago, and with help from a friend, made it back out to Southern California.  I sold this drawing cheap, to get a motel room, after spending a week in the hospital from a severe medicine allergic reaction.  I was homeless and just needed another night to recover, I didn't really want to sell it.  This my personal favorite drawing, it's one I did to hang on my own wall, someday.  I drew it while living in a tent, for a day when I eventually worked my way out of homelessness, and actually had a wall. 

 "Biggie Smalls" is another one that turned out really well, and sold immediately, for $120, I think.  Yes, these drawings are all done with Sharpie markers.  I blow up a photo I like on a copy machine, and tape the big pieces together to get a large version of the image.  Usually I put on the music or a documentary about who I am drawing, to get their vibe and story, and I shade the entire back of the large copy with pencil.  Then I position it over my actual drawing paper, tape it down with masking tape, and go over the basic outline with a pencil.  It's called a graphite transfer, when I go over the front of the photo copy, the pencil dust on the back leaves faint lines.  That's a technique I leanred in grade school, I think.  I transfer the basic outline, and where the main shadows are.  So yes, I cheat.  People who aren't artists, when I would tell them this, usually say, "Oh, you just trace it."  Actual working artists, then they see my faint penciling of the image would say, "That's not cheating, lots of artists trasnfer images in some way."  Mostly they'd say that, because they couldn't even figure out who it was a picture of.  I outline the shadows as much as the actual outline of the image in the photo, so it looks weird, and even I have trouble figuring out what line is what sometimes.

 Then I take a normal size, fine point, black Sharpie, and outline whatever I can.  Some outlines I end up doing with ultra fine points, or just with shading, if it's too subtle for a heavy black line.  Then I start the shading process.  In my drawings, every single color is actually 3 to 8 colors of Sharpie, ultra fine point scribbles, layered over each other.  I started playing with markers in 2002, came up with my "scribble style" shading in 2005, and kept working on and refining it for another ten years, before I started doing these drawings.

 Almost every area of the drawing starts with either lime green scribbles, yellow, or pastel orange.  I start with a color close to opposite of what the final color will be.  I may do half the drawing in lime green scribbles, to start.  But some will be tight scribbles, some will be medium density scribbles, and some will be wide, spread out scribbles, depending on what's needed to wind up at the final color necessary.  I do one pass of each color, at the density needed.  So my drawing will look mostly lime green for a while.  Then green-yellow, then orange.  I usually color in several large areas, that will end up being completely different colors, at the same time.  So during the drawing, they all look pretty much the same, until the last one or two colors are scribbled on top .

 Once I have the large areas at close to their final color, I start working on the smaller and more detailed areas.  After the original pencil sketch, it's all in ink, and I simply try to mess up as little as possible.  I almost always to the face last, so if I fuck that up, then I spent 30 or 40 or more hours drawing for nothing.  I like the bit of added pressure that gives.  Once I have the detailed areas colored.  Then I go back and blend the transition areas of the drawing.  My drawings can look like they're done, and I'll sit down and put 4 or 5 more hours in, getting the details the best I can.  Since it's ink, if I don't stop at the right time, I'll over-do it, which does happen. 

Unlike paint, I can't go over a whole color, or start again.  I get one shot at each layer of color, in each part of the drawing.  I do use one or two small dabs of white-out on every second or third drawing, usually no bigger than a pencil eraser.  That happens when I draw a black line where it should be, usually.  Then I'll draw 5 or 6 layers over the dab of white-out, to fix it.  I screw up something, actually several little things, in every drawing.  The trick is to make them blend in, so no one else notices the fuck-ups.  When I look at my drawings, that's what I see, the mistakes that I should do better next time. 

These drawings, on average, take 35-45 hours each, for an 18" X 24" picture.  The Beatles drawing (on my personal blog here), took about 55 hours, that's the record so far.  I've done around 100 drawings since I got serious and started doing these for money in late November of 2015.  I've sold at least 81 drawings in the three years since, most for $120 to $160.  A handful have sold in galleries for $250.  Several of the early drawings I sold for $40 or $50.  I sold them "cheap" because I was homeless most of the time I was drawing these, and I'd work a week, make $120, and live off that while I drew the next one.  I was living in a tent in the woods, drawing at libraries or McDonald's, when I drew most of these.  To see more of my work, search #sharpiescribblestyle anywhere, my stuff's all over the internet and social media.