Sharpie Scribble Style... my unique method of drawing with Sharpie markers that I invented in 2005

If you ask a serious artist, they'll tell you that you can't really shade with Sharpies. I didn't know that, and didn't bother to ask, so I figured out my own way to do it

I’ve drawn well over 100 drawings of people in my Sharpie Scribble Style, mostly musicians. This is my most popular drawing, The Notorious RBG, the late U.S. Supreme Court justice and women’s activist, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The preamble to the Constitution is written in her robe, above the “B” and the “G”. The words in the background are different quotes of hers. 18” X 24”, Sharpie markers on paper. #sharpiescribblestyle

It started with a rerun of an episode of MTV’s House of Style, that I watched while living in a tiny room I rented in 2002. I just had the TV playing one day, while doing something else, and this segment came on. The room was dark and dingy, but only $200 a month. The show had a segment about making a doodle wall, with some butcher paper and some markers. The idea was to get big white pieces of heavy butcher paper, tape it up on a wall, then use markers to draw any kind of doodles to decorate the wall. It was a plan for how to decorate a dorm room, or young person’s apartment with very little money.

While I’m about the least stylish person ever, I liked to draw. The idea sounded cool, and I bought a pack of 12 generic markers and some banner paper, the kind cheerleaders used to make those big signs in high school. I couldn’t find any place that sold butcher paper, but office supply stores have big rolls of banner paper. I put the paper up on the wall on one end of my room, two layers thick, so the ink wouldn’t bleed through into the drywall. I drew the outline of the entrance to a cave, looking out at a sunset over the ocean. It wasn’t meant to be a great work of art, just something fun to do, that would look cool when I was done. I used the 12 cheap markers, and began coloring it in. After a couple hours, I realized it looked like shit. The colors were blotchy and horrible. Why didn’t I just paint the sunset? I’ve never done much painting, other than glazing pottery, and the painting we did in school, and other groups where crafts were included. Markers just seemed much more fun to me.

That’s when I first began to experiment with markers, in 2002, now 21 years ago. I tore the big pieces of paper with the lame sunset down, and put up some big vertical pieces, I think the paper was 30 inches wide, and I cut off pieces 3 1/2 or 4 feet long, and taped them to the wall. At that point, I had a huge collection of action sports magazines, a combination of BMX, skateboard, rock climbing, and a few snowboarding magazines. I started cutting out photos out of the magazines, and making big collages. I didn’t cut any photos out of FREESTYLIN’ magazine, I’m not an animal, that mag was too cool to cut. I taped the photos to the paper, and the started coloring in the spots in between the photos with markers. But I didn’t just color it in solid, I tried all kinds of different ways to shade with the markers. I made dots, little lines, small circles, stars, and tried to find a way to combine or blend different colors together.

None of the blending worked very well, but I found that I really liked sitting there making collages, grouping different kinds of photos together around themes, with some music, blues in particular, playing in the background. I had never considered myself a visual artist, I was just a kid who liked to draw when I was in school, and still did it once in a while, as an adult. I had no intention of showing the collages to anyone, and no one ever visited my little room, except the family who owned the house. My room was actually built on the outside of the house, on the side, with a small bathroom that had no hot water. Again, it wasn’t great, but it was cheap, and served my basic needs at the time. For the Latino family, it was a little extra income for the family, usually the room was rented to a young immigrant or two, new to the U.S., who came to find work. But I worked with the grandpa of the family, and he offered to let me move in when I needed a cheap place.

One of the “Grey Trash” aliens I drew, back in 2012, mounted on an old skateboard deck I found in the garbage. If you’re a skateboarder, snowboarder, or BMXer, the caption makes sense. Something about Grey aliens smoking cigarettes just made me laugh, so I kept drawing them.

I got booted from that room so the family could rent it out to a couple of other Latino people for more money. No one was around to help me move, so I literally moved box by box, taking a city bus to my storage unit. I threw away a lot of my personal belongings, and about 100 books, nearly all of which I had read. My markers, collages, and a couple of big drawings I did of my favorite quotes, all went into my storage unit.

I wound up homeless for several months, then got some legal issues squared away, got my driver’s license reinstated, and went back to driving a taxi full time. From August 2003 to August 2005, I drove a taxi 7 days a week, taking only 5 or 6 full days off in that whole stretch. The taxi industry was dying, due to computer dispatching, and it got harder and harder to pay my weekly taxi lease, pay for gas, and make enough money to get by. I worked more and more hours, 14 to 18 hours almost every day, focused on nothing but making money, for that whole stretch. By August of 2005, I was over 100 pounds heavier, my health was horrible, and I was completely bitter and burned out. But I lived in my taxi, so if I quit driving the cab, I lost my “house,” my transportation, and my income, all at once.

Then, during peak burnout, another taxi driver I knew offered me a deal. He was a longtime taxi driver, but also an artist who had a little indie art gallery in Anaheim. He also owned his taxi within the taxi company, so he paid a lot less per week for lease. The deal was, I could live in the art gallery during the week, and drive his cab on the weekends. I’d pay $50 a week to live in that gallery, which was a small industrial unit, in a strip of several business units. It had a bathroom, a shower, a refrigerator, a microwave, and walls filled with all kinds of art from a couple of dozen local artists. I’d pay him to rent the taxi over the weekend, which is when I made most of my money, anyhow. He’d drive the cab during the days, Monday through Friday. It was the right deal at the right time, good for both of us, so I took it.

On the way to the gallery that first day, he asked, “Do you like cats?” I said, “Sure. Do you have a cat at the gallery?” He replied, “Yeah… well… technically, eight of them.” They had one cat, named Pita. Then a stray female cat showed up, and started hanging out, they called her “P.A.,” for Pita’s Assistant. P.A. had just had six kittens. By the time I moved in, PA. had run off Pita, so I had 7 cats as roommates.

The stencil of Bruce Lee I drew in November of 2015, which is when I started drawing people, and started really trying to sell my drawings. This was 12” X 18,” drawn on a sketchpad I got at the dollar store, using one regular black Sharpie to outline, and a 24 pack of ultra fine point Sharpies. There are some of his sayings in the background, around the edges. It was simple, but it led to well over 100 drawings of people that I’ve done since.

After two years of sitting in the cab around the clock, sleeping about 5 hours in a parking lot at night, and waiting for fares the rest of the time, the gallery was like a different world. I slept about 14 hours a day for the first two or three weeks. I made friends with P.A., and the kittens. I sat on the couches, and just looked around at the different styles of paintings, drawings, posters, and knick knacks. I had done absolutely nothing creative for over two years, I had focused entirely on making money in the taxi, and wound up in much worse shape than when I started.

On my second night in the gallery, surrounded by all this weird, and some pretty cool, local art, I drew a little pen sketch on a Post-it note. It felt good to draw again. Soon after, I took a bus to an office supply store, and bought another big roll of banner paper, and a 24 pack of regular size Sharpies, with all the colors, and a few black Sharpies. Instead of making collages, I tried just drawing different ideas. I had written hundreds of poems at that point, and I wrote some of them in real big hand lettering on the banner paper, then I tried to figure out cool stuff to draw around the words. I played with different ideas, and tried to figure out a way to blend Sharpies to be able to shade, and get more nuanced colors. I started up right where I left off, about two years earlier.

My poems were pretty good, I’d been writing poetry for 17 years at that point, and had written around 400 to 500 poems. The poems on the big pieces of paper weren’t too great, but they weren’t completely horrible either. It felt good just to have time to do something creative, at that point. I was having fun just playing around with ideas. I was a lot less stressed, and I actually had a little more money left over each week, just working the weekends. I started walking a bit, and slowly getting in a little bit better shape, as well.

David Bowie with a Bowie knife, 2018. According to a couple of the documentaries I watched about him while drawing this, he took his stage name, “Bowie,” from Jim Bowie, the American pioneer. He wanted to be a pioneer in music, like Jim Bowie had been on the American frontier. The Bowie knife was reportedly first created by Jim Bowie’s brother, after Jim got into a fight where the other guy pulled a gun. There are conflicting reports of the conflict, but Jim Bowie’s big knife became known as a Bowie knife in the years after, as the story of the fight became a legend. 18” X 24” #sharpiescribblestyle

After about a month and a half of living in the art gallery, as artist, janitor, and kitten wrangler, I was drawing a tree one day, with normal size (fine point) Sharpie markers. The idea popped in my head to scribble a few different colors over each other for the tree bark. The idea worked, and my Sharpie Scribble Style was born. Blending about six colors together, I got a nuanced brown with a cool texture. That was in September or October of 2005. I started doing big drawings of poems, again on sheets of banner paper, and decorated the top and bottom of these with scribble style coloring. I drew a whole bunch of big drawings that winter in the gallery, slowly learning which colors to blend to get certain shades of a particular final color.

I also learned, after 3 or 4 months, that the smaller Sharpies, the ultra fine markers, work much better, and last a lot longer when doing my scribbling. So I moved down to smaller drawings on smaller sheets of paper, using ultra fine Sharpies, and kept experimenting with mixing colors. Every part I color in usually starts with pretty much the opposite color. If an area is going to be orange, for example, the first color I lay down is lime green. Then I’ll layer yellow, light orange, regular orange, maybe some red, and usually a little bit of blue on top. Then, in most drawings, I do shading with black to do shadows and final shading. In my drawings, most every area is made up of 5 to 8 different colors of scribbles. They all come from a basic 24 pack of Sharpie makers. Occasionally I’ll add a little highlighter shading for brighter colors, or sometimes regular, fine point size silver, bronze, or gold Sharpies. I do, sometimes use other makes of markers, but not very often. Generally I use Sharpies almost exclusively.

I’ve been homeless for most of the time I’ve been doing my higher quality drawings. My “studios” have been a series of tables in fast food joints and libraries, or maybe the desk of a motel room, when I get a room for the night. Here’s a Volkswagon bug I drew in 2019, where my studio for the afternoon was a Carl’s Jr. in Orange County. 11” X 14”, #sharpiescribblestyle

The oldest surviving Sharpie Scribble drawing of mine is a picture of colored glass jars that I did for my mom, for Mother’s Day in 2006. One of my cousins back east has this drawing now. My mom had it professionally framed, and someone once offered her $400 for it, even though it’s only 11” X 14, as I recall. My sister has a drawing in her kitchen that I did in late 2008, of a Frappucino bottle, or “yuppie crack,” as she referred to it then.

For several years, I didn’t know what to draw with this style, after I got the basic shading technique down. I drew drawings of characters in high contrast backgrounds in my taxi, when I moved out of the gallery, and went back to taxi driving full time. I wound up living in North Carolina after taxi driving died out, in 2007, and I then spent a year homeless in Southern California, trying to find another way to make a living. For the first Christmas NC in 2008, I drew my niece and nephew’s names, in block letters, and colored them, as a Christmas present. My niece was active in cheerleading then, and suddenly all of her cheer friends wanted their names drawn in their favorite colors.

This is one of the names I drew, for a kid my mom was babysitting for, in 2012.

That turned into a little side gig, though I didn’t have a main gig, while living with my parents in 2009-2010. Drawing the kids’ names, in block letters, fading the colors, took me about 4 hours to do. I sold 40 or 50 of those, for $20 each, over a couple of years, and I even tried doing a few on canvases. But on canvas, I had to use regular size Sharpies, and the colors didn’t blend as well, and I’d wear out several markers on each drawing. So I stuck with using the ultra fine point Sharpies on paper.

A somewhat cubist design, based on the drafting skills and isometric drawings my dad taught me to draw, when I was about 12. This is from 2012. I drew a few of these freehand, just to see how what they would look like. 12” X 18”, #sharpiescribblestyle

In ten years living in North Carolina, I could not find any job, except driving a taxi. I quit after about 10 months, when my dad had a major stroke, and was slowly dying of complications. I moved back in with my mom after his death, and tried a whole bunch of different drawing ideas, trying to figure out what to draw with my scribble style technique.

Calla lily. This one is also from 2012 or early 2013, during my Georgia O’Keefe phase. I really liked her paintings, and of all the things I tried drawing, the flowers worked best with my shading technique. I did a few of them, and sold a couple for $20 or so each. But I didn’t want to become “The flower drawing guy,” so I stopped drawing them. #sharpiescribblestyle

From late 2012 through 2015, I still couldn’t find any job in NC, which meant I had no money of my own. I spent three years dealing with serious depression, between being stuck in NC, living with my mom, not being able to find any job, and yearning to get back to Southern California. I decided to try to really sell a couple of drawings. I knew I needed to step up my drawing game. So I sat down at the computer one night, and looked through all kinds of art, from graffiti and street art, to paintings by masters, from Monet to Picasso. I asked myself a simple question, “What drawing would I want to put on my own wall?” I found a street art stencil of Bruce Lee, my first hero as a kid. Yeah. A stencil. I liked it, printed it out, and drew it in my style. With that simple drawing, I decided I needed to start drawing people. I put the Bruce Lee up on my wall in my bedroom, next to my art table. I also put it on Facebook. Armed with a pack of 24 Sharpies, a sketch pad from the dollar store, and a $65 refurbished laptop still running Windows XP in 2015, I started selling drawings.

Kurt Cobain drawing I did for an art show at Earshot Music in Winston-Salem, NC, in late 2017. This show really jumpstarted my drawing work. Huge thanks to Phred, the owner, and art coordinator, Jane Buck at Earshot for that. I’ve been drawing mostly musicians ever since. #sharpiescribblestyle

I sold a drawing on Facebook for $20. Then another one. Then another. Those first drawings took me 15 to 18 hours to draw. Now my drawings take 35 to 45 hours, sometimes 50 to 55 hours each. My recent ones have sold for $200 to $250 each. Not much money per hour, but I’ve survived, as a working artist, though usually homeless, for the last eight years. I made it back to the L.A. area. You can see about 200 of my drawings on my Sharpie Scribble Style Pinterest board. That’s the basic story of my Sharpie Scribble Style drawings. Hit my up on my Facebook if you’re seriously interested in one.