Creative Life: June 16, 2021

OK, so it wasn't THIS much of a lock down...  But let's face it, we all feel a little bit like Jake right now.  It's time to get the band back together.  Hell, it's time to see a band play live again. A LOT of live bands...

The pandemic lock down in California is now officially over.  The pandemic is not over, but we can start opening back up fully again.  In theory, everything will open back up, we'll get back to "normal," but it will definitely be a new normal.  Over 34 million Americans got sick, over 615,000 Americans, and over 62,000 Californians, died in the pandemic.  The smart people are pretty much vaccinated now, but there's still hope more stupid people will die from it.  

In addition, over 400,000 small businesses went out of business in the last 15 months.  Millions of Americans are losing the unemployment that helped keep them alive soon.  Millions more will be affected by the ending of eviction moratoriums, and we could see a huge new wave of homelessness nationwide over the next few months.  It's been a rough 15 months for everybody. But on the bright side, the super rich are now much more superricher than they were a year and a half ago.  Doesn't that make you feel better?  Yeah, me neither.

I was homeless when the pandemic hit U.S. shores.  Pure and simple, we were left outside to die.  And there were definitely a lot of people hoping this pandemic would wipe out most of the homeless population.  Not all of you, I know, but there were definitely people in that mindset.  Cue Nelson.  

As it turned out, that virus doesn't travel well outdoors, and living outside, as fucked up as it is, helped keep us homeless people at less risk, much of the time.  The Universe has a weird sense of humor.  Still, last August I got sick, and wound up in a negative pressure hospital room for a couple of days.  I didn't have the virus, I had bacterial pneumonia (from a bacteria they could not identify- WTF?), and cellutitis, which I've been prone to since my taxi driving days.  I got shipped to a warehouse turned homeless shelter for sick people (decent food and Netflix for 5 days), and bailed back out to the street as soon as my medicine ran out.  The streets are better than the shelters, but that's a whole different issue.

Before that funky looking little virus attacked us, I had a general plan.  I would squeak through the chilly California rainy season, and start promoting my artwork to local galleries in the Spring of 2020.  So... that didn't quite work out.  Instead, the shutdown closed most of the bathrooms I used, it closed down the library where I could plug in and get wifi at the same time, and actuallyt work to get my life back on track.  It shtudown most of the power outlets I used to charge my laptop and phone.  I'm an artist and blogger.  I'm actually pretty damn good at those two things.  But it's hard to blog with a dead battery.  The same goes with promoting my art on social media.  Luckily, a bunch of people came through and ordered drawings, or just plain helped me out last spring, and to a lesser level since.  

I seriously was worried that I wouldn't be able to survive one month of businesses being shutdown, last March.  That's because my whole existence depended on fast food restaurants, the library, and other places that got shutdown.  For 15 months, I've actually been working more hours than at most of the jobs I've ever worked.  My life became a continuous search for useable bathrooms, power outlets to charge up (nearly all of them outside), and wifi spots, so I could communicate, blog, and keep selling some artwork online.  

For over a year, I've been taking a bus one place to use a bathroom in the morning, then another bus to another place to plug in, sit there for an hour and a half, and charge my laptop, and sometimes my phone (when I could afford to pay for service), and then take another bus (luckily the buses have been free) to another spot, where I would sit outside, on the ground, and check my social media, and blog when I had enough battery life.  There were many hours of sitting outside blogging in 50-60 degree weather, shivering.  The only times I've had 24/7 power and wifi were when I rented a motel room. 
 

I did manage to qualify for pandemic unemployment, which got me a room for about 10 weeks over the winter.  That helped a lot.  But my unemployment got frozen 5 weeks after it got approved, which was 4 1/2 months after I applied for it.  I got about half of the total I qualified for, and lost $1,500 when it got frozen.

So here I am 15 months after this all got going.  I have more drawing orders than I can handle at the moment, but I make about $2 an hour doing my drawings.  I'm now pivoting to earning money from writing, rather than art, because that's my only chance of ever making a decent living again.  To make that happen, I have to turn my little creative work into a legit business.  

What about a job?  It would take a $20 an hour job, 40 hours a week, to be able to rent a weekly motel room, the only room I could get these days.  And afford food.  There's no job anywhere near that pay scale I could get these days.  An apartment is completely out of the question.  Renting a room in someone's else's house or apartment is technically possible, but that conversation would start with, "So I'm homeless now, and I make money from Sharpie art and blogging..."  That's not likely to go very well.  If I go get a restaurant job,then I'm a fat, homeless guy with no place to wash my uniform, making less than I make from artwork, and spending more hours doing it.  You NEVER... EVER get off the streets with a low wage job, period.  The cost of living is just too high, unless someone lets you stay somewhere for free for several months.  

So that's where I'm at.  Sounds depressing.  But I'm stoked on my new ideas.  The new blog idea, Crazy California 43, is taking off, and will offer multiple ways to make money in the coming months.  Yesterday I went to three banks, looking to get a "real" bank account, the next big step to getting my life back on track.  None of them would let me open an account, without "proof of residence."  So I need an apartment to get a bank account, so I can make enough money, to afford an apartment.  Catch-22.  I need to figure that one out...  My life has been one obstacle after another for so long, that's just my normal now.  Anyhow, another day of working doing the shit I'm meant to do.  Onward!

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?

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...