BMX Lookback Drawing

After doing the handful of drawings in the last few posts, it was obvious I needed to do a BMX drawing.  I searched for a good lookback pic that would work.  I'm really stoked on how this one came out, and it's the background my Facebook page right now.  Not sure who this is, but it's a really tweaked lookback, one of the classic BMX tricks, first called a Leary after legendary racer Harry Leary.

WIllow the Dog Drawing

When I told my sister I was doing pics for my niece and nephew, Katherine and Ethan, my she asked me if I could do one of their dog Willow.  I wasn't sure I could do a dog in this style, but Willow's spots and this particular photo worked really well.  So here's my four-legged niece,  Willow,  in one of the rare moments when you can actually see her face well.  I was really stoked on how this turned out.  I'm pretty sure Willow was, too.  For those wondering, she's an Aussie-Doodle, half Australian Shepherd and half Poodle. 

Cheerleading Drawing For My Niece

When I first came to North Carolina several years ago, I was broke and decided to draw some pics for my niece and nephew that I was just getting to know.  I drew their names and faded the colors in them from light to dark.  She was about nine then, and just starting in cheerleading.  Before I knew it, I was drawing these names for a whole bunch of her cheerleader friends.  I even did a few on canvas, but Sharpies don't work well on canvas, and I'm not a painter.

Well, many years have passed, and my niece Katherine is now a varsity cheerleader.  This is the first drawing I did for her in this new style.  But her school colors didn't come through enough, so I did another one for her.  Before I took these pics over to them, I made copies at the nearby office store, and accidentally left this original in the copy machine.  I went by the next day, and not only had the young women working there kept it, but they told me they thought it was awesome.  Pretty cool to hear from random people I don't know.  Again, the faces didn't come out as good as I wanted, but other than that, I was pretty happy with this one.

Drawing of My Nephew Playing Baseball

After doing the Bruce Lee and Taxi Driver drawings in the last two posts, I wanted to try a sports-related drawing in this new style.  I had a photo from the newspaper of my nephew Ethan playing baseball on the wall by my computer.  It was pretty small and black & white, but had great action and the ball was right at the bat.  It's really rare to see an action photo that good in a local paper, and it had enough shadows for me to do in my style.  He's a big Boston Red Sox fan, so the words in the back say things like his name and Boston Red Sox.  Doing full body drawings this size, the face never comes out quite as good as I want.  But all in all, it came out pretty cool.  He liked it.

Taxi Driver drawing

After doing the Bruce Lee drawing in the last post, I looked for other images that meant something to me.  Since I was a taxi driver for several years in both Orange County, California and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, I've seen a lot of crazy stuff.  I even published a zine all about taxi driving once.  Cab driving isn't a normal job, it's actually set up like a small business... a very competitive business that requires working 80 to 110 hours a week sometimes.  You have to be pretty crazy to do it in the first place.  Among other things, it has the highest number of murders per capita of any job in the U.S.  I could go on and on, but taxi drivers deal with a really wide selection of humans, and see a lot of the dark side of society.  This may be why so many big names have played taxi drivers on film.  Bruce Willis played a futuristic taxi driver in the movie The Fifth Element.  Super model Cindy Crawford played a taxi driver in an 80's music video.  Acclaimed director Robert Altman played a taxi driver in the into to George Carlin's What Am I Doing In New Jersey comedy special.  Jamie Foxx played a taxi driver in the movie thriller Collateral.  Even Queen Latifah played a taxi driver in the movie Taxi, working with a young Jimmy Fallon.

But there's one taxi film that stands above them all.  That's Robert Deniro playing the disturbed cabbie Travis Bickle in Martin Scorsese's classic 1976 film Taxi Driver.  I saw a painting in Winston-Salem of that character that was just amazing.  So I knew I had to do it my own way.  As I was blowing up the initial photo, I accidentally cut off half of Deniro's face.  I loved it, and used that for the drawing.

For the words on the side, I wrote "Taxi Driver," and "Are you talkin' to me?"  The classic quote from the movie.  But I also added the words "Drive, Die, Cash."  Those words are not from the movie.  In one of the cabs I was driving, I flipped down the visor one day and on the roof above it was graffiti left by another driver.  It was scrawled in pen on the fabric of the roof.  There was a skull and crossbones, and around it were the words, "drive, die, cash."  To me that completely summed up that crazy occupation.  So I added them to this drawing, along with the yellow and checker pattern widely associated with old school taxis.  I was pretty stoked on this one.  Sharpies on paper, 12" X 18."

Bruce Lee drawing

This is the drawing that really started me in a whole new direction.  I'd been doing my Sharpie "scribble style" drawing for about ten years, and I tried a whole bunch of different visual looks.  But none of them got me really stoked.  They were fun to do, but I knew something was missing all that time. 

Then, back about last November, I was still out of work, and couldn't find a job.  Between my weight, my age, and my last 12 years of work history which was made up of taxi driving and gaps in employment, I was not hearing back from any of the jobs I applied for.  Having spent most of my adult life in Southern California around people in the action sports world, my thought was, "OK, I'll create my own job."  On that day, I decided to quit thinking of myself as "unemployed," and start thinking of myself as a self-employed artist.  Basically, I reframed the situation.  A couple days later, I woke up in the morning and thought, "man, I really need to step up my artwork."  That night, I sat down at the computer and spent a couple hours looking at all kinds of art online.  I was trying to figure out what really got me stoked.  I'm a big fan of graffiti art, especially the really intricate murals.  But I noticed that I kept going back to stencils.  Stencils are a simple, high contrast form of street art made famous by UK urban artist Banksy.  As a zine publisher in the 80's, I'd worked a lot with Xerox art, which was also high contrast images.

As I looked through page after page of urban art, I asked myself, "What would I want to put up on my wall?"  It's a simple question, but it changed everything.  As a kid from the 70's, martial artist and movie star Bruce Lee was a big influence on me as a kid.  So I found this image of him, blew it up, and drew it in my own style.  I put his quote, "Be like water my friend." under it.  I finally made something that I actually wanted to put on my own wall.  This drawing started me in a whole new direction, which I've only begun to really explore.  Sharpies on paper, 12" X 18".

Alien on a skateboard

Since my laptop literally broke in late November, I've been ignoring this blog.  In addition, I was doing a bunch of drawings for Christmas which I didn't want to post, so I wouldn't spoil anyone's surprise.  So I'm going to play catch up now, posting a whole bunch of drawings in a couple of days. 

Back in 2012, I took the trash out and found three old skateboard decks sitting by the dumpster.  I'd never put art on a skateboard before, so I figured it was time to try.  The saying, "I'm not crazy, and if you say I am one more time, I'll send my invisible ninja leprechauns after you," is something I said to a friend one night who called me crazy.  It just popped into my head, and we both laughed.  I'd been drawing aliens, often smoking cigarettes, for a while, so I went with that.  I did a bunch of random scribble art and put it on, collage style, behind the drawing.  So it's Sharpies on paper, collage, and the whole mess stuck to an old skateboard deck with Mod Podge.  As an experiment, it came out pretty well.  I did a couple other boards as well, which are sitting in my bedroom to this day.  I definitely want to do some more skate decks in the future.