My Recent Stuff

In an upcoming post, I'm going to link a bunch of the stuff I did back in my BMX/skateboard industry guy days.  But for those of you who've never heard of me, here's what I've been doing the past couple of years, along with not really making a living.

Freestyle BMX Tales blog- This is the reborn version of a blog I started in about 2009.  After living a year on the streets of Southern California (which followed years of taxi driving as the industry tanked), my family flew me to North Carolina.  I'd never lived there, and I lost all my video footage, video masters, poems I'd written, and everything else.  I was deeply depressed, unable to find a job in NC, and started blogging just to vent.  My first blog was called FREESTYLIN' Mag Tales, and I wrote over 200 posts about my short stint at FREESTYLIN' magazine, the bible 80's BMX freestyle, in 1986.  I was laid off there, mostly because I didn't like the band Skinny Puppy.  Then they replaced me with some East Coast biker/skater kid named Spike Jonze.  He fared much better there.

Writing the FREESTYLIN' blog, I reconnected with many of my old friends from BMX freestyle in the 80's, and I started another blog, Freestyle BMX Tales, to continue telling my stories from those early days in the BMX freestyle world.  I wrote over 700 posts on that blog.

Shortly after my dad died in 2012, I went into a real dark period in my life, and I took down all my blogs, the two freestyle memoir blogs, Make Money Panhandling, my blog about homeless and panhandling that got over 60,000 page views, and several other blogs where I tried out different ideas.

Later I started Freestyle BMX Tales again in a somewhat nicer version on blogpress, but I faded on that one.  I finally re-started Freestyle BMX Tales on blogger again, and that's the version I'm still adding to today.  This is the blog I'm best know for.  I still have several years worth of stories that I haven't shared.

Steve Emig Art blog- It's a long story, but in 2005 I came up with a unique way to draw using markers, Sharpie markers in particular.  I draw an outline of the picture in black marker, and then color and shade using scribbles of several colors of ultra-fine Sharpies over each other.  So every color in my drawings is actually 3 to 8 colors scribbles over each other.  Now, 12 years after coming up with the technique, I'm still the only one I know using this style, and I've found drawing athletes and musicians from photographs is a great way to use my technique.  I've been selling my drawings (cheap!) for over a year now, but it's nowhere near a full time living.  I started this blog as a place to house my work online.  But not I've decided to being my drawing, blogging, writing, and everything (except the old BMX stories) into a single blog.  So I'll be putting my newer drawings in this blog from now on, as well as on Facebook.