I got interviewed by the Kernersville News, the local newspaper where I live last Tuesday. It's a three times a week paper still pumping out local news on paper. I was initially contacted by Jennifer, the lifestyles editor in mid-September, and since I hardly use email anymore, I didn't see the email for two weeks. But I replied, figuring I wouldn't hear back. But I did, and I took several of my drawings to their office for the interview last week. I was expecting a 15 or 20 minute interview and maybe a single photo in the paper, along with a few column inches of text. Very much to my surprise, the article ran last Thursday, October 20, 2016. It started on the lower left front page and covered nearly the whole back page of the first section. A couple Facebook friends expressed interest in it, and I looked it up online only to find just the title and one sentence. So I'm going to type the whole article here for those of you online who want to check it out. Big thanks again to Jennifer Owensby Eminger, Kernersville News Lifestyles editor, for finding my Go Fund Me page, and deciding to interview me.
Here's the article as it appeared in the paper:
This blog is about 7-8 years old ( in 2023), and I have a new blog now, check it out! I had no idea this blog was still getting quite a few views, please go to
Creative Scenes Artist Steven Emig using artwork to help fund publishing a book
By Jennifer Owensby Eminger/Lifestyles Editor
Despite having struggled as an artist and writer and having lived in homelessness for several years, local artist and writer Steven Emig has seen the world of action sports through working for magazines and TV production. He is using his artwork to help fund publishing a book about how creative scenes turn into an industry.
Emig grew up in Ohio, living in Boise, Idaho and California for many years, before settling in Kernersville in 2008. With aspirations to be a professional BMX rider and writer for a magazine, Emig learned how creative scenes can help build local economy. Along the way, he has struggled to make ends meet, but he continues to do what he enjoys - art and writing.
Emig explained that his father was a design engineer, having started out as a draftsman, so naturally Emig has always been interested in drawing.
"My father taught me how to draw," he said.
Having grown up in the 70s and 80s, Emig got into BMX bikes and enjoyed riding with kids in his neighborhood.
"We always tried to outdo each other." he said. "One day, we found a BMX race track. They were having the last race of the year. We raced and came home with trophies."
The next year, he started getting more into freestyle BMX riding and said it became his life. In 1985, his family moved to San Jose, California where there was a big BMX freestyle scene.
Along with riding BMX bikes and drawing, Emig took an interest in writing and began writing zines (self-published miniature magazines), which he learned about in a freestyle magazine.
"It's pretty much what bloggers did before blogs," he said.
After his zines got noticed, Emig became more popular and eventually landed a position at Wizard Publications. Over the years, Emig moved around to different jobs in the writing and production industry, having written articles and helping produce low budget films in the world of action sports, but never catching a break.
He shared that he has worked behind the scenes on shows such as American Gladiators and Cirque du Soleil.
Emig got out of the TV production world in 1995 to find a more stable job, moving furniture.
"You are always working on other people's ideas and I was getting sick of it," he said.
Eventually, Emig decided to get back into the industry and joined a lighting company, but when he began struggling to make ends meet again, he became a professional taxi driver for about five years. Eventually, Emig said he became homeless and ill.
"I ended up living out of my taxi because I was struggling to make ends meet, working 16-18 hours a day," he said.
Having lost his way in art, Emig said his passion for art began to come back when a friend offered him a place to sleep in an art gallery, where he lived for several months.
"It was an underground indie art gallery called, AAA Electra 99," he said. "I hadn't done anything creative in a while, but it was while I was living there for a month or so that I came up with my scribble style."
Emig explained that he drew some pictures for his niece and nephew in Greensboro and for his mom, who had moved to Kernersville.
Emig said during his downtime working as a taxi driver, he got really into drawing, reflecting on musicians and BMX riding. Having gotten his passion back, Emig said he once again fell into despair when his long days of sitting caught up with him and he got a bacterial infection and was hospitalized.
"Driving a taxi, you sit too much and end up eating a lot of fast food," he said.
After walking out of the hospital with $15 to his name and unable to find a job, Emig said he ended up panhandling for about a year, until his family encouraged him to move to NC.
"I had all this experience writing and working in TV production, but on my resume there was a gap (where I had worked as a taxi driver)," he said.
In 2008, Emig finally moved to NC and has since been engaged in his artwork and blogging about his experiences. He explained that initially he began drawing in black and white with pencil and then pen and ink, but has since moved to the use of Sharpies, which he turned to in 2005, using a scribble design.
Having experienced working in TV production and magazines, Emig is also working on writing a book and has started a GoFundMe page in hopes to getting help with funding.
"I have started a GoFundMe page, and right now, I am trying to write a book about how creative scenes eventually attract big industry. I've been in a lot of these scenes throughout my life and have seen how they attract business," he said.
Emig is selling his art for $100/drawing and is giving his artwork away to people who contribute to helping fund his book. He is also selling zines about his book for $5 to give people an idea about what to expect from the book.
Emig noted that he can also create a drawing for anyone interested in having one made.
"I work from photos. I look at a photo and get a basic outline and then start scribbling ans shading," he said.
While Emig does work from photos, he said he is not great at re-creating faces unless it has heavy shadows," he said.
"I really like making drawings with heavy shadows," he said.
In each color on his drawings, Emig said there are actually four or five colors with different thickness of the Sharpie point.
"I almost always start with out with orange, lime green, or yellow and usually end up with the opposite color," he said. "That's how I am able to do the shading."
Having been homeless and fearing he might die, Emig said the biggest lesson he has learned is, "Figure out what's most important to you and do it as much as you possibly can, because you never know how much time you have left on Earth."
I've put myself on a blog diet, and I'm down to one blog... really. Steve Emig: The White Bear
You can find my newer stuff there.
I've never been a huge football fan, mostly because I grew up in Ohio in the 70's where all the teams sucked. But it was easy to start rooting for the Carolina Panthers when I moved to North Carolina several years ago. Back then, it wasn't unusual for them to run the ball on 3rd and 17 and actually convert. They were perennial underdogs.
Last year, quarterback Cam Newton and the crew really surprised everyone with a long undefeated streak and then a trip to the Super Bowl. I drew this picture of Cam, and the Panther picture below in anticipation of another great season. Last year was crazy, so I figured the Panthers would maybe end up 10-6 or something this year. As of yesterday, they're 1-5, losing three of those games very closely. So maybe they're just trying to get the six losses out of the way before going on a streak. Yeah... that's the ticket. Anyhow, Cam's a freakin' amazing player, as are many on the Panthers. Hope they start pulling off the W's the rest of the season. Sharpies on paper, 18" X 24".
In about 1987, my friend Mike started introducing me to a lot of music I wasn't familiar with. He was a walking encyclopedia of punk rock, and The Ramones was one of the first bands he told me about. Some say they coined the term "punk rock" in an interview. In any case, the stripped rock and roll down to its rawest form, and by doing that influenced musicians for decades to come. Once I started looking for things that I wanted to draw, The Ramones was an easy choice. Sharpies on paper, 18" X 24". Hey Ho, Let's Go!
Legendary singer of The Ramones, one of the earliest punk rock bands, dating back to about 1974. The "quarter" word bubble is an inside joke. Ask me sometime and I'll tell you the story. Sharpies on paper, 18" X 24".
As a kid in the 70's, I grew up listening to what was then called Country and Western music. I didn't want to, that's just what was on the radio my mom always had playing in the kitchen or in the car. It was the era of "D-I-V-O-R-C-E," "Stand by Your Man," "The Happiest Girl in the Whole U.S.A.," and "The Harper Valley PTA." My dad and I used to joke that every country radio station should have the call letters, KRAP. "This is Twangy Bob, your D.J. on K-R-A-P, country crap radio..." My mom never thought that was funny.
Like it or not, that was the soundtrack of my childhood. But there were some country songs I liked. And then there was Johnny Cash. He wasn't country, he was The Man in Black, a genre' all to himself in my mind. I remember laughing to his song "One Piece at a Time," which was about a guy working in a car factory (back when those existed), and the guy stole a whole car from his job... one piece at a time. I thought that was awesome when I was about 12. Song after song, Johnny Cash created a huge collection of epic, working class music.
Years later, in Southern California, my friend Mike started introducing me to punk rock and alternative music, bit by bit. The first couple of live shows he took me to gave me headaches. Although the house band, a little group called Jane's Addiction, was pretty cool. But at the third gig Mike introduced me to one of his favorite bands, Social Distortion. It was pretty cool. And then they broke into their cover of Johnny Cash's (actually it's June's song) "Ring of Fire." I was hooked. Social Distortion is still my favorite band, even though no one in the crowd that night seemed to know who Johnny Cash was. I was really stoked that Johnny broke into a whole new generation with his cover of "Hurt" near the end of his life.
When I decided to start doing drawings that really got me stoked, drawing Johnny Cash drawing was inevitable. Sharpies on paper, 18" X 24". Drawing the feelings that came through "the mud, the blood, and the beer."
Johnny Cash just found a home, he'll be on that wall in Deli on Main in downtown Kernersville.
My nephew Ethan is a cool kid. He's been totally into baseball since he's been about four, and he's also been a Red Sox fan since then, and now he's thirteen. Not too many kids stick with the same team all the way through grade school. Since I'm pretty much always broke, I've been drawing my nephew and niece pictures for Christmas and birthdays since I've been in NC. They're probably sick of uncle Steve's drawings, but they always act stoked. I wasn't sure what was left to draw for Ethan's birthday over the summer. So I went old school and drew him a pic of Babe Ruth, baseball legend, and lefty like Ethan. I added my poem "Become," to it, figuring he was old enough to maybe appreciate it. He seemed pretty stoked, although he did mention "The Curse of the Bambino." Sharpies on paper, 18" X 24".
Over the years, people have asked me why I wasn't really into traditional pro sports. My answer has always been, "I grew up in Ohio, where all the teams sucked." That's mostly true. The Cincinnati Reds were really good in the Pete Rose and Johnny Bench era, when I was about four and lived there. But then we moved to northern Ohio. The Cleveland Browns flat out sucked. The Cleveland Indians sucked then, too. The Cleveland Cavaliers basketball team was mediocre as I remember. So I wound up getting interested in BMX and skateboarding when I moved West.
But it was really cool to see Lebron James, born in Akron, near where I was born, go back to the Cavs and take them to the finals. I was stoked when they won and Cleveland had a championship for the first time since I've been alive. So I drew a couple of pictures in celebration of that title win. The top drawing is Lebron, surrounded by a bunch of facts and stats from the series.
In the drawing below, I took the photo of Kyrie Irving shooting "The Three" over Steph Curry, the shot that clinched the NBA Title. I know some people in Ohio, even a couple in Akron, so I thought I'd be able to sell these drawings. I wasn't. I'll find some Cavs fan one of these days that wants them. Sharpies on paper, both 18" X 24".
I had been wanting to try a surfing drawing, and I wanted to draw a good looking woman. With those two things in mind, I immediately thought of Karina Petroni, a pro surfer that I gave a couple of rides to in my taxi in Huntington Beach years ago. I couldn't find a surfing photo of her that would really work with my scribble style, but I loved this duck dive shot. For all you non-surfers out there, a duck dive is when a surfer dives under an incoming wave (like a duck does) while paddling out. I drew this one on one of my "backing sheets," as I call them. Since I work with Sharpie markers, I always put a sheet of paper under the one I'm drawing so the markers don't bleed through to the fresh sheets underneath. I also test markers to see how fresh they are and if that's the color I need at the time on the edge of my backing sheets, So the pages end up framed in black and little blobs of different colors. I think they look pretty cool, so I keep these backing sheets to draw on later.
Here's a drawing I did of Barspinner Ryan Brennan free diving a place called The Blue Hole. A mid school BMX jumping legend, Ryan now runs a very successful trick team, but has been getting into free diving over the past year or two, which makes for some great pics on Facebook. The top says, "There's another world... one breath away."
This is footage I shot of a 2-Hip King of Dirt comp at Mission Trails near San Diego, in the spring of 1991, that wound up in the first S&M Bikes video, Feel My Leg Muscles, I'm a Racer.
At the moment (spring 2016), I'm a middle aged guy who somehow wound up in Kernersville, North Carolina. My "eclectic" work history makes me a bad match for the job market here, so I'm creating my own job (aka small business) doing artwork, writing projects, and whatever else that leads to. I'm putting a lot of links in this post. If you see parentheses with a number inside, like this (13:43), that's a point in the video either I'm in, or I'm the cameraman, producer, or editor. I've lived a weird life, and been involved in a lot of creative endeavors over the last few decades. Here's a look at how I got here. I was born in a small town in Ohio, and we moved around Ohio during my childhood. My dad was a draftsman/design engineer. I grew up looking at his huge sheets of drafting paper and designs for things my dad drew. He taught me how to draw Army Jeeps, the old Willys kind, when I was eight. That turned me into one of the best artists in my class that year. I've been drawing ever since, though not always on a regular basis.
In 1976, as a nine-year-old in Willard, Ohio, a friend showed me a skateboard. It was just over a foot long, made out of pressed aluminum, had steel wheels, and no grip tape. I rolled about a foot on it, hit a pebble, fell, scraped my knee, and said, "Skateboards are dumb!" In the following months, another friend got a plastic skateboard with urethane wheels, and I started learning to ride it. I saved up my allowance (minus candy money) for nine months to buy my own board, a lime green plastic Scamp. I've goofed around on skateboards ever since.
My family moved to Carlsbad, New Mexico for my ninth grade year, and that year sucked, though I did fall in love with the desert. I bought an old BMX bike off my friend Mike for $5, a few days before we moved again, that time to Boise, Idaho. I lived there through high school. In a trailer park outside of Boise, I got into BMX bike riding in 1982. There wasn't much else to do out there. I built my $5 Sentinal Exploder GX into a better bike, part by part, and started racing BMX in October of that year. I raced locally at the Fort Boise track, all through 1983, and won a contest to help re-design the track, and help design and build a new track in Boise. Then, I started getting into trick riding, which was just turning into a sport in 1984. Much to everyone's dismay, I spent my high school graduation money on a brand new Skyway T/A bike. I joined the only trick team in Idaho, with rider Jay Bickel. We did shows and rode in parades all that year. I also traveled with Jay's family to my first big BMX freestyle contests, one in Whistler, British Columbia, and one in Venice Beach, California in 1985.
I didn't have enough money to go to college, so I followed my family to a new city, San Jose, California, in August of 1985. Like all freestylers then, I lived for the moment that FREESTYLIN' magazine would show up in the mail every month. I literally read every word of that mag, even the ads, trying to soak up every drop of knowledge about the obscure world of BMX freestyle. As luck would have it, one of the best freestyle scenes in the world then was in the San Francisco Bay Area. I'd met Robert Peterson, Eddie Fiola, and a few others at my first AFA contest in SoCal. But I didn't know them well.
I'd read about zines, (pronounced zeens) in FREESTYLIN'. Those were small, self-published booklets about some topic. In those pre-internet days, that's what self-publishers did. I bought an old manual (as in NON-ELECTRIC) typewriter at the swap meet for $15, and used my Kodak 110 camera (remember those?) to take photos, and I started my zine. I had never seen an actual zine in my life, just a magazine article about them. So I had no idea what I was doing. My goal was just to meet the riders of the Bay Area. Much to my surprise, it worked. Before long, I was going to the monthly Beach Park Ramp Jams, put on by Skyway pro Robert Peterson. Soon after I went to Golden Gate Park (5:07) on the weekends for the sessions there. I met all the local pros and interviewed them, Bert, Dave Vanderspek, Maurice Meyer, Hugo Gonzales, Oleg Konings, and Rick Allsion. I also met a big crew of amazing amateurs. Future BMX Plus! editor Karl Rothe was in that crew, as was future skateboard deck design legend Mark McKee. The Golden Gate Park scene was the most cohesive freestyle scene anywhere, and I became a part of it, though my riding lagged behind the other ams.
The something amazing happened. I got a call out of the blue from Andy Jenkins, editor of FREESTYLIN'. He said the guys liked my zines I sent them, and asked if I wanted to write a story about the next AFA contest. I flew myself to Tulsa, Oklahoma, hung out with the Haro team all weekend, and had the time of my life. I met some up-and-coming ramp riders like Joe Johnson, Josh White, and a local Oklahoma kid named Mat Hoffman, who was 14 then. My first article, and a review of my zine, which they thought was the best in the country then, appeared in the July 1986 issue of FREESTYLIN'. I was beyond stoked. Then I got another call from Andy J., one of the writers was leaving the magazine, and they wanted me to fly down and interview for the job. That weekend was amazing. Even better, I got the job as editorial assistant at two national magazines,BMX Action and FREESTYLIN', at age 20. I had no college degree. I'd never even taken a single college course. I had no background in creative writing, other than high school work and my zine. They just liked my zine and knew I was a hardcore (if not overly talented) BMX freestyler. I left San Jose with a bike, a suitcase, and $80, and moved to Southern California.
Suddenly, I was a part of the BMX and freestyle industry. I met all the riders, company heads, and behind the scenes industry guys. I was living the BMX freestyle life. But, I didn't totally click with Andy, Lew, and Gork at the magazines. I just wasn't punk rock enough for them. I didn't like the band Skinny Puppy. And I was really uptight back then. I got laid off after only five months there. One cool thing was that Lew introduced me to a freestyle skater who practiced right by The Spot in Redondo Beach, where we rode flatland every night. That skater was a 19-year-old Rodney Mullen. He was the first pro skater I really got to know, and the first person who was super serious about practicing with an intensity few others had. I learned a lot from Rodney, and did a mini-interview with him that wound up in the December 1986 issue of FREESTYLIN'. My time at Wizard Pubs was over on New Year's Eve 1986. They permanently replaced me with some BMXer/skater kid from the East Coast. A kid named Spike Jonze.
I quickly found a job at the American Freestyle Association, editing their newsletter. There I worked for early freestyler and serial entrepreneur Bob Morales. He's the guy that turned BMX freestyle into a sport. He promoted the first skatepark contests, then later the flatland and ramp contests. I did a little bit of everything there, from writing, shooting photos, and laying out the newsletter, to running errands, putting logos on T-shirts, and driving the AFA van and 30 foot long trailer. There was something new nearly every day at the AFA. The pay sucked, but it was interesting. One day, before a big contest in Austin, Texas, Bob walked in and asked me if I wanted to make a TV commercial. He found out that he could get ads on MTV in the Austin area for $25 each. So I headed off to Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear video company that shot footage of all our contests. They guided me through the process of producing a TV commercial. It wasn't great, but it did bring some spectators to the contest. After that contest, Bob talked to me. "You know," he said, "I advertised some contest videos in the newsletter a while back and never actually got around to making those videos. Do you want to produce them?" Again, I said, "Sure." I went back to Unreel, and my video career started by producing six AFA videos (2:18) in 1987. Very few people saw those early videos, but two or three clips from those videos wound up in Mark Eaton's BMX documentary,Joe Kid on a Stingray. I spent so much time at Unreel that year, that they offered me a job in December of 1987.
Outside of work hours, I rode my bike every night, and spent my weekends at the Huntington Beach Pier, freestyling in front of crowds with Mike Sarrail and other BMX guys, along with freestyle skaters Pierre Andre, Don Brown, and Hans Lingren. The H.B. Pier was a known spot, and anyone could show up on a weekend. Mark Gonzales rolled by often, Ed Templeton was a young local, Bob Schmelzer was there a lot. On the bike front, Woody Itson and Martin Aparijo showed up on a regular basis, along with many others. I figured out once that I probably rode in front of over 140,000 people at the Pier. But they were in crowds of 50 to 500 people at a time, over several years.
When I started at the video company, Unreel Productions was then housed in a really nice office in Costa Mesa, CA, and we could see the Pacific from the upstairs windows. That's not a good thing when we had an office full of surfers. They would disappear when the waves were good. But it was another job I was completely unqualified for, but ended up excelling at. My main job was making dubs, copies of tapes needed by someone in the Vision family of companies. At that time, Vision owned Vision, Schmitt Stix, and Sims skateboards. It also owned Sims Snowboards, and Vision Street Wear clothing. So I suddenly left the BMX world, and became a part of the skateboard industry. On one hand, it was a really cool job. I made VHS copies of all the raw footage our cameramen shot. So I saw all the footage of the BMXers, skaters, snowboarders, and fashion photo shoots. On the other hand, one of my jobs was to label and organize all the video tapes in the tape library. The boxes were labeled with tags like, "savannah skate." No date. No year. No idea who was on which tape. I literally went through every single tape, found out when and where it was shot, and labeled each one of the 3,000 or so tapes and organized them. When I was bored, I'd put on a tape I liked and just watch it, until more work came my way.
During the course of my 2 1/2+ years at Unreel, I worked on Psycho Skate, Vision Skate Escape, Red Hot Skate Rock, Mondo Vision, Freestylin' Fanatics, Snow Shredders, Snow Daze, Barge at Will (14:53, 19:02, 45:18) many fashion videos, and other random stuff. I was basically a production assistant, so I didn't have much say in the videos. The one exception was for the BMX videos, they'd always ask for my input on those. In addition to those home videos, Unreel produced the first ever action sports syndicated TV series, called Sports on the Edge. That was six years before the X-Games came along. When Unreel tried to sell the series to ESPN, the suits there replied, "No one wants to watch skateboarding on TV... and what the hell is snowboarding?" It took a few years, but ESPN finally saw the light when it came to action sports. During that time, I also edited the 1988 contest season video (3:07) for Ron Wilkerson at 2-Hip.
By 1989, I became the staff cameraman at Unreel, so I shot a bunch of footage which was nearly always fun. I was on the deck of the halfpipe shooting video when this happened. I went to the '89 2-Hip Meet the Street at the Brooklyn Banks in New York City. Racer/street rider Rich Bartlett and I shared a hotel room, and Dennis McCoy, Mat Hoffman, Steve Swope, Rick Thorne, and a couple other guys slept on the floor of our room to save money. That was the best weekend of my BMX life. I also met a ton of talented people working at Unreel/Vision. Don Hoffman, Dave Alvarez, Paul Schmitt, Marty Jiminez, Mike Miranda, John B. (the B is for Badass) Hogan, Miki Keller, Scott Clum, and many, many more. In 1989, though, the wave of skateboard and clothing business began to fade, and Vision was to big for its own good. Unreel was dissolved, and I was moved to an office in the main Vision building. The last project I worked on there was a promo for Tuff Skates, a short lived skate company that combined Christian Hosoi and Vision. I got to hang with Christian and his guys for three days shooting video, which was a crazy experience. There's nothing like hauling a $50,000 video camera to a sketchy area of Van Nuys, to shoot footage of Christian Hosoi skating a pool behind a crack house.
I finally bailed from Vision in the summer of 1990. On my last day there, one of the women in the promotions department asked me what I had planned after I quit. I told her I didn't have any plans. So they asked me if I wanted to go on a short tour with some skaters. I spent the next three weeks on the road with Mark Oblow, Buck Smith, and two 15-year-old vert skaters named MikeCrum and Chris Gentry. As tours go, it wasn't that crazy. But I did see the most disgusting thing ever on that tour. Ask me about it some time.
I had already started shooting footage on the weekends for my own, self-produced video. I got a part time job at NSI Video, a small distributor of surf and skate videos. In October of 1990, I released The Ultimate Weekend, (27:33, 28:30) my first completely self-produced bike video. I tried to show what riding was really like, and to not be as hokey as the Vision BMX videos I'd worked on. Jess Dyrenforth was supposed to be the star of the video, but he kept flaking out on me. A recent New Jersey transplant to H.B., Keith Treanor, was always raring to go ride. The video had about 35 great riders in it, but Keith became the star. Unfortunately, that year the BMX freestyle industry was collapsing as the bike world switched their focus to the growing new genre of mountain bikes.
A woman I had worked with at Unreel called me one day and asked if I'd like to work a day or two on "real" TV shows. I showed up at the office, just over the hill from Hollywood, and logged footage all day for monster truck shows. The asked me back the next day... and the next. I wound up working a few months on those shows, that year's monster truck and supercross series. One of the highlights of working there was meeting Johnny Airtime, the super technical motorcycle jumper whose career spanned the years between Evel Knievel and Seth Enslow. One day, I sent him a copy of the footage in the clip at the top of this post. He called me up and said he was blown away by how crazy BMXers were. We brainstormed some ideas for the Stuntmaster's TV series, which was produced by the same company. That led to this stunt. I was gone by the time they taped the show, but that Stuntmasters episode had far reaching effects. It was Johnny Airtime who told Mat Hoffman that to do bigger airs, he needed a bigger ramp. So without the BMX world knowing, it led to Mat and Steve Swope doing this. It's funny how things happen sometimes. I went back to doing odd jobs in Orange County, but the next year I finagled a job on the stage crew of the hit TV show American Gladiators. That's where I met the best athlete I've ever seen, Wesley "2 Scoops" Barry. I worked four seasons on that crew, along with working on similar shows Knights and Warriors and Blade Warriors. If Lady Battleaxe on Knights and Warriors looks familiar, that's because Dot Jones went on to play Coach Bieste in Glee a few years ago. When I met Dot on the show, she was taking time off her job as a prison guard, and was the nine time women's world arm wrestling champ. It may seem hard to believe, but she is the funniest woman I've ever met.
During that same period of time, the early 90's, I got a call from Chris Moeller, owner of the fledgling BMX company, S&M Bikes. He asked me to produce a video for them. I was stoked, hoping to pocket $2,000 or $3,000 for making the video. As it turned out, Chris was a serious tightwad in those days, and we made the entire video for less than $750, including beer money. That video, Feel My Leg Muscles, I'm a Racer, became a cult classic in the BMX world. It a crazy turn of events, I also wound up sleeping on the floor of Chris' tiny apartment, and helping sell bikes and ship orders for S&M in those early days. Chris and I were roommates nearly constantly until 1995, and we spent many hilarious nights drinking cheap beer and brainstorming ideas for the company. In the skateboard world, maverick entrepreneur Steve Rocco had the super intelligent Rodney Mullen as a sidekick. Chris Moeller, the maverick entrepreneur of the BMX world, had me. It was a crazy time. In 1993, with a slightly bigger budget, I produced and edited the second S&M Bikes video,44 Something. That low budget video sold somewhere around 8,000 copies and was later called one of the ten best videos of the 90's by BMX Plus! magazine.
In 1992, I became the first freestyler to become an official resident of the P.O.W. BMX House. Roommates in that era included Moeller, Dave Clymer, John Paul Rogers, Todd Lyons, Alan Foster, Chris Sales, Jai Lonegran, Lawan Cunningham, Mike Griffin, Brian Foster, Brooks and Suzy, a couple of dogs, and many others. If you've ever jumped your bike, raise a Mickey's Big Mouth (or an O'Douls if you're on the wagon now) to the P.O.W.'s and to Hippy Jay and Hippy Sean, who built Sheep Hills during that era. Remember kids, never drink St.Ides (it's EVIL!), ramen is your friend in times of need, and "You are rotten." Subliminal old school message, if you're too big for an S&M these days, get an SE Fat Ripper.
Another thing that happened in the early 90's was that I got a part time job in 1993 for the first Cirque du Soleil tour to come to Orange County, CA. The show was Saltimbanco, and I was blown away by that weird new Circus. At the time, no one knew what Cirque was, so I had to explain it to people on the phone as I sold tickets. "Andrew Lloyd Webber meets The Fall Guy," was the line I used. In later years, I also worked in the Orange County box office at the Cirque tours of Alegria, Quidam, Dralion, and Varekai. Cirque du Soleil is the best run company I've ever seen, which surprises people. There's a reason it started as a group of French Canadian street performers and now has about a dozen shows worldwide. If you've never seen Cirque du Soleil, go see it when it comes to your area, or when you're in Las Vegas. I learned a ton of stuff working with circus people, one of the hardest working groups there is.
Yet another thing that happened in the early 90's was that I decided to work through my personal issues, like being super shy and not making a lot of money. I started reading books about real estate and business. That led to reading self-help books, and later books on religion and philosphy. In 1993, I bought a speed reading course and started plowing through books of all kinds. I read several hundred books, mostly non-fiction, in the 90's, and listened to hundreds more on tape.
By 1995, I was burning out. I was tired of working on dumb TV shows, and the BMX world was still pretty dead. I became a full time furniture mover. That sucked. In two years, I moved about 900 households. I still rode my bike nearly every day, but just did it for fun. After a couple years of pushing cat-piss-stained couches up stairs, I decided that the TV industry really wasn't so bad. I started calling my contacts, and got a job at a lighting company. In Hollywood terms, that means I was in a warehouse, testing, prepping, and packing up studio lights that then went to TV shows, movie premieres, and corporate parties. It was a long commute, but the work was pretty fun and it paid well. I even got to got out and worked on location once in a while. I worked at the 50th Emmy Awards after party, at a premiere for the second Harry Potter movie, and spent one day on the set ofViva Rock Vegas, the second Fred Flintstone movie. I was finally making good money, and was generally pretty stoked on life.
Then I injured myself. It seemed to be a hernia. When you lift things that weigh 100 pounds or more several times a day, that's a real bummer. I saved up money, took the summer of '99 off, and planned on getting the necessary surgery so I could get back in action. But there was a problem with my insurance. I got the run-around for three months, never did get to see a doctor, and burned through my saved up money. I needed a job that didn't require heavy lifting. Somehow, I decided to try taxi driving. Within two months, I could no longer afford my apartment (three blocks from the beach), andI put my stuff in storage and lived in my cab for six months.Taxi driving is a crazy job, and back then it was a really hard way to make a living. But I figured it out, and was able to have three exceptional weeks that got me a place to stay, and allowed me to only work weekends. That was in the spring of 2000.
That was my good year in taxi driving. I worked three long days a week, made $300 to $350 a week usually, and had four days off. Having four days off is a really cool thing since I lived in a beach city. Then, right before Christmas, there was a mix up at the DMV, and my driver's license got revoked for failure to pay a fine that I had actually paid. Things went downhill fast. I worked a telemarketing job for a while, but eventually wound up homeless. I worked at a restaurant and lived in the bushes for nine months.
That turned into a decade of struggling in and out of homelessness. I eventually got my license restored and got a taxi permit. But the taxi industry was changing due to computer dispatching, and I wound up living in my taxi again, working 7 long days a week. Every day was a struggle to earn enough money to pay for the cab, pay for gas, and buy food. From 2003 to 2005, I struggled in the cab, often working 90 to 100 hours a week, and just scraped by.
The thing about taxi driving, is that you never know who is going to get in the
back of your cab. I gave rides to homeless people. I gave a ride to billionaire Larry Ellison once. Other people in my taxi included BMXers Barspinner Ryan Brennan, Cory Nastazio, Shaun Butler, Ryan "Biz" Jordan, and Chase Hawk. One night in HB, I picked up skaters Arto Saari and Stefan Janoski, and drove them to Geoff Rowley's house. I gave rides to surfers Christian Fletcher, Samba Mann, and Karina Petroni. I picked up early UFC fighters Tank Abbot and Ken Shamrock. I used to work Dennis Rodman and Carmen Electra's beach house late at night after the clubs closed. I got a lot of great rides out of their place. Taxi driving was really fun at times. I even gave a ride to the Black Eyed Peas' tour bus driver one night, that guy was hilarious. I gained a lot of weight working those crazy hours in the taxi, going from 200 pounds to 374. I started having serious health problems. It got harder and harder to make money, because all the taxi companies were putting more and more cabs on the road.
Then, in 2005, I got an unusual offer. A taxi driver named Richard that I knew also ran an indy art gallery called AAA Electra 99. He offered to let me live in the art gallery, and drive his cab on the weekends. It was awesome to have some time off, though at first I just slept all the time. I'd completely given up on doing anything creative while driving a taxi. Living in a small industrial unit full of art by young, unknown artists, I got the bug again. I drew a little picture the second night. My creativity started bubbling up again. A couple years before, I tried to do a mural with markers. One day at the gallery, I layered a bunch of marker scribbles over each other while drawing a tree. It looked pretty cool. My scribble style was born. I did that for seven months, working the weekends with hardly any sleep, then drawing in the gallery where I had a mama cat and six kittens for roommates. But I didn't make enough to save any money.
So I went back to full time driving and living in a cab in mid-2006. Again, I struggled to make enough to pay for my taxi lease, gas, and food. In November of 2007, I could no longer make enough money to pay for the cab. With $15 in my pocket, I walked out onto the streets of Orange County, California. I weighed about 365 pounds, and my feet were cracked and bleeding from severe athlete's foot. I could just barely walk, I hobbled really slow like an old man. I expected to die within a few weeks. My mantra was "Moment to moment, day by day." I lost all hope for any kind of future.
But I didn't die. I lived on the streets, panhandling to survive, for nearly a full year. The streets are no joke. A lot of bad stuff happens out there that normal people never see or hear about. Surviving that year was the biggest accomplishment of my life, but I'm the only one who knows that. Everyone else just thinks I'm a complete loser for getting into that situation. Just for the record, I don't drink or do drugs. I just couldn't make enough money to get my life back on track. I finally called my family, who had moved to the Triad area of North Carolina. They gathered money and flew me to NC. I arrived in my parents' small apartment in Kernersville in November of 2008. Remember that time? The start of the Great Recession? It was a bad time to try and find a job. As I began to decompress from my year on the streets, I just wanted to get a job, lose weight, and forget all about homelessness. But I couldn't even get a restaurant job. All my old friends and contacts in California meant nothing. I started blogging about my early days in BMX. I had no idea that anyone would actually read it. After about a month, my blog went viral in the old school BMX freestyle community online. I didn't even know there was an old school BMX community online. I've been blogging ever since.
I drove a taxi in nearby Winston-Salem for a while. Again, I had to live in the cab and gained by most of the 130 pounds I'd lost. In 2012, my dad had a massive stroke, and eventually wound up in a nursing home. It was obvious he wasn't going to be around very long. I quit taxi driving, and literally built a hut in the woods to live in for a couple months. I would panhandle money for a couple of days, then take the regional bus to Highpoint, where my dad was, and stay for a couple of days. My mom and I weren't getting along well at the time. On the day my dad died in August 2012, my mom asked me to stay at her apartment. I've been living with her ever since, working odd jobs when I could find them, and selling artwork now and then.
After dealing with some serious health issues over the last four years, and finally starting to get that worked out last year, I realized that I was never going to find a high paying job here in the Piedmont Triad area of North Carolina. But I think like a Californian from the action sports and TV world. I decided to step up my game with my "scribble style" artwork I do with Sharpie markers. I decided to create my own job. That's where we're at now. My Sharpie art looks nothing like that of Jessie Armand, his stuff is amazing. But, I'm hitting up my social web as well as local people to draw whatever I can. My forte' is sports pictures with lots of shadows. I have drawn quite a bit of other stuff as well. As I write this, I'm all caught up on the drawings I'm doing for other people, and I'm drawing my first surfing picture in my new style.
So that's my story in a nutshell. Most people around here see me as a complete loser. Maybe they're right. Or maybe I'm just regrouping for another go at it. I know this is a really long blog post, but I only scratched the surface. If you meet me in person and want to be moderately entertained for a while, ask me about some of my taxi or homeless stories. I have lots of them. Or you can get me to draw a picture for you. That sounds good, too.
If you're only going to watch one clip linked in this post, make it the Brian Foster clip. Stay Strong like Stephen Murray and chill like Boozer Mike. Ridaz Gotta Ride. Now go do something cool.
Mike Haupt was one of my roommates in one of the many BMX houses in the Huntington Beach area in the early 90's. He was a serious BMX racer and jumper, and local at Sheep Hills. I did this drawing of him doing one stylish X-up over one of Sheep Hills' many sets of doubles. When I was drawing this, I toyed with the idea of listing all the top riders from Sheep Hills in the dark back of the take-off jump. I decided against it, partly because so many great jumpers were locals at Sheep, that I figured a forget a couple of them. So I just wrote Sheep Hills on the jump instead. Sharpies on paper, 12" X 18". #shadowsandsharpies
If you were a BMX freestyler in the 1980's, you know there weren't many women in the sport. One of the few busting moves then was Alma Jo Barrera out of Texas. Above we see her doing a stomach stand at the Velodrome at Cal State Dominguez Hills in Carson, California in 1987. In the lower picture we see her doing a classic surfer, also at the Velodrome. She competed against the guys on a bike at a time when there were very few women in action sports at all. Surfing and inline had some women ripping it up in those days, but BMX freestyle and most other sports were nearly all men. Along with Krys Dauchy and a couple others, Alma Jo was breaking new ground for women in sports.
Both drawings are Sharpies on paper, the top one is 18" X 24", and the lower one is 12" X 18". #shadowsandsharpies.
In addition to doing a lot of drawing lately, I've been working on a writing project. I started listening to several interviews with different writers while I was drawing. I kept coming back to shows and interviews with J.K. Rowling, mostly because her story is so amazing. There's one clip on You Tube where she talks about her depression while writing the first book, and how the Dementors in a later book were pretty much "depression personified." Since that is an issue I've dealt with throughout my life, I thought doing a drawing of a dementor would be cathartic. It was. When I thought about the drawing, I asked myself what does depression really do? One of the big things is that it robs us of our dreams. So I drew my take on a dementor trying to suck the life out of dreams. It's not the best drawing I've done, but I did it for myself, and it's a constant reminder of what can happen when I get down. Sharpies on paper, 18" X 24".
This is Alama Jo's (from the last post) grandson Brayden chillin' at a baseball game. This top photo had some good shadows for me to work with, and I'm pretty stoked on how it came out. The lower photo is Brayden, waiting for the game to start. I hope Brayden is stoked on these, too. Top, sharpies on paper, 18" X 24", bottom, sharpies on paper, 12" X 18".
Alma Jo Barrera of Texas was one of the few women to get seriously into BMX freestyle in the 80's. I got to know her then, and we reconnected on Facebook a year or so ago. She asked me to do a series of drawings for her. This one, of her and her dog Ali near a river, was a new challenge for me. With my style, faces don't always come out well, and I'd never drawn rushing water, which is a lot trickier to do than it sounds. But I gave it my best shot, and added the color bars top and bottom to play off the color in Ali's collar. Sharpies on paper, 18" X 24".
A long time ago (the 1950's), in a galaxy far, far away (Mansfield, Ohio), my mom was a telephone operator. At that job she met her life long best friend Linda. Although they're both on Facebook these days, they often catch up with each other with four hour long phone calls. When I started my Go Fund Me campaign to get my business started, Linda was the first person to donate. At that time, I wasn't even offering a drawing to everyone. But I wanted to do one for her. I contacted her son, and got a few pics of her granddaughters to draw. With my weird style, what works best is sharp photos with hard lighting. In this case, I had a couple of fuzzy photos with pretty flat lighting. But I did my best to give Linda a then-and-now drawing of her granddaughters. Sharpies on paper, 12" X 18".
This drawing of Carolina Panthers quarterback Cam Newton is one I did several weeks ago as the Panthers were working towards their Super Bowl bid. I drew this one as a demo to give people an idea of what my work looks like. The entire thing (18" X 24" in this case) is drawing with scribbles of Sharpie markers.
If you're reading this post, you probably just had me hand you a flier about doing artwork of your kids in sports. My unique style of shading with Sharpie markers is something I stumbled upon a decade ago. In the last few months, I've started working towards turning my hobby into a small business. I'm now drawing seven days a week, but I'm still selling my drawings fairly inexpensively to get my art out into the world and promote it. I work from photos, in particular, I use photos with lots of shadows. The drawing of skateboarder Diego Najera in the last post is a great example of this. Right now, I have a crowdfunding campaign going on Go Fund Me to jump start my business. I'm doing 12" X 18" drawings for $25, and 18" X 24" drawings for $50, which is less than I normally charge. The smaller drawings take me anywhere from 7 to 12 hours to draw, and the larger ones take 20 to 25 hours. So I'm not making a whole lot for the time involved. But as an artist new to the marketplace, it's a good way to promote my work. If you're interested in me doing a drawing of your kids (or dog, or custom car or whatever) you can call me here in Kernersville at (336) 937-3436, or email me at stevenemig13@gmail.com .
As I write this, I'm finishing up a series of drawings for an old friend in Texas, and I won't post those pictures until she actually receives them. I do have a few other recent drawings I'll be posting in the next few days, though. There are some artists out there who do amazing things with Sharpies, but no one uses a technique quite like mine. Here's you chance to get a unique, original drawing unlike anything else out there. I work on a first come, first served basis, so contact me soon to get on the list to get an original drawing of your kids playing their favorite sports.
A lot of things I draw for other people, but there's also some photos I see that I just need to draw for myself. When Sole Technology VP and old skate friend Don Brown posted this pic on Facebook two or three weeks ago, I knew I just had to draw it. The photos that work best with my style are ones with good action and lots of shadows. This original photo had both. The skater is Diego Najera, who I know nothing about, and the trick is either a straight nollie or nollie kickflip, I'm not sure. I added the e'S logos just to see how they would look, since that's his shoe sponsor, and since I've been hooked up with several free pairs of Etnies ( e'S shoes sister company) BITD. Why did I put six logos in? I think I had a flashback to the Vision Street Wear days where we were told to put logos EVERYWHERE. In any case, this is my favorite drawing of the past few months, I'm really stoked on how it came out. Sharpies on paper, 18" X 24", #shadowsandsharpies .
In the last year, as I worked through a whole slew of issues, Ann Tester from our church has become a good friend. She donated some money to me after hearing of my Go Fund Me campaign, but didn't even want a drawing. When I pressed her, she said she'd like a drawing of our church. This is the first building I've done in this style, and it worked out pretty well. Thanks Ann for all your help. Sharpies on paper, 8 1/2" X 11."
Since I started a Go Fund Me campaign a few weeks ago to crowdfund my new business, I've been shamelessly hitting up my Facebook friends to do drawings. BMX racer and former roommate Mike Haupt hit me up to do this drawing of his daughter playing soccer. "Tuti" isn't her real name, it's her nickname. This is the first soccer player I've drawn, and it came out pretty well. Sharpies on paper, 12" X 18."
