By Eric Butler





Uh, sure?



Yeah. Through December it was pretty dry, I had maybe one thing going per week, usually for a smaller band that may or may not pay me, and I was just trying to kick stuff out to make sure I got rent paid. But in the past two weeks it's been insane.



It depends on what it is and who it is, and what situation they're in when they decide, "Oh wait, none of these pitches we did worked and we've got another pitch in a couple days, maybe we'll try this guy." Sometimes I'll get a frantic email at six in the evening saying, "I need three or four shirt designs tomorrow afternoon," or sometimes I'll have two extra days or something, but it's kind of often that there's a ridiculously tight turnaround.




Usually. If it's a band I just do not like I'll still try really hard to get it, but it's tough to really nail what really works for somebody if you're not into what they're doing.



No, I don’t have that much money. That'd be cool at some point, it's definitely possible, but I'm just not there yet.





No, it's very much all rock stuff. Every once in a while I'll get a cool project that's fun to work on because they'll ask for things that are totally out of character for me. I worked on some [Red Hot] Chili Peppers shirts about six months ago, and they wanted a bunch of surf-looking art, and stuff that looked like airport memorabilia that you would get saying, "Hey, I was in Hawaii," you know, sunshine t-shirts. For some reason I really wanted to work on something for Ashlee Simpson; one of the merchandising companies I work with actually has them as a client. And a few months back I actually got to. They were like, "You said you wanted to work on this…right?" And I was like, "Yeah! I hate her, she's awful! I would love to do that." I don't know why that works, but it does. And it ended up working pretty well for her as well.



Yeah!

I went to Manual, the magnet high school here [in Louisville], but because it was high school I kind of fucked off and didn't really care about it, and didn't take advantage of it like I should have. And I'd been in a few bands, and we always needed posters done but I was really bad at them then.





Yeah, a lot of Kinko's fun. And then some friends of mine, this band called Kodan Armada, started playing out a whole lot, and I really really liked them and I'd been looking at a lot of Derek Hess art, and I just wanted to start making flyers for them.





Yeah. And then I started getting into Juxtapoz and just really starting to get interested in art again, most of it being lowbrow art, and just started drawing again. I quit drawing after high school for quite a while and went into the design field because I figured that was where I was going to be able to make money. Because being an artist was just not feasible.



Yeah. And then I just decided I really needed to be doing that, so while I was working my day job doing web design I would come home, take a nap, and then until I went to sleep I'd work on my art, either for posters or just to draw again.



A company in town called Mission Data. They were really cool, they supported me, and when I'd randomly say, uh, I'm going to Seattle for a week because there's a Flatstock convention, they were tolerant.





That's my main reason for going to the Flatstock stuff. I went out for the first time a couple years ago with Bill Green, and we shared a booth together. We totally felt like little kids, like, "Me too, right?" Everybody had these big, magnificent booths with all these posters and I had one screenprint and a bunch of offset Kinko's prints; Bill had a few posters. I spent most of the day trying to get away from my booth because nobody knew who I was and nobody was buying any of my stuff, so I just went around and looked at all the stuff I'd seen on Gigposters, just in awe because I could actually see it up close and personal. And everybody was ridiculously friendly. Even though I guess technically we're in direct competition with each other and we're all fighting for the same 20-dollar bill, everybody was really nice and really welcoming. And when you start to become friends with everybody, then if they get a job and they can't do it, because they're running out of time or it doesn't feel like a good fit for them, they'll say, wait, I know a guy who can do this, or someone who's really good at that.

Never.





Right.



Nope, this is all I do now. As of April, I decided to take the incredibly terrifying leap to see if I could pull it off.





Yeah. Some months it's a little bit of a struggle, chasing down invoices and getting people who've "sent checks in the mail," and having bills be overdue. Some months are better than others. I think that's just how the freelance thing is, especially when you're just building it up.



I got hit up by a merchandising company a couple years ago to do a pitch for Metallica, which was pretty much out of the blue. I was at band practice and got a phone call and took it, like, "Are you…what? Are you kidding?" Because I hadn't done anything on that level. I was just doing small stuff for local bands. So I said, sure, fuck yeah, I would love to do something like that, awesome. And we talked about a budget, and because something I did for that went over, they sort of put me in the roster as a tool they could use over and over again. And then once I started amassing a bunch of successful projects, other people started noticing that they recognized my stuff at Hot Topic, or wherever.

Most of the stuff I get has been coming in for a while, and I've been really lucky that there's been interest in it. Every few months I'll send out emails to a list of people I want to work with and see if I can get a hold of their marketing people or whoever might be in charge. People like Jagermeister or Spin or whoever I could do just an article illustration or advertisement for (I've worked with neither to-date). Or I might like a record label's specific work and all the bands they put out, and I'll hit them up and usually they've already got someone doing most of their stuff but maybe something will come up and they'll think, Hey, that guy might be good for this. So every once in a while I'll send out a fleet of "Please Look at Me" stuff and it seems to work out.

No, it's all online, basically just a little spam email. Like, "Hey, I do stuff and it's cool, do you like things that are cool?"



I have never needed to show anybody anything other than it being on my site.





YI think it's because it's not fine art. Most of my stuff is, I'm cranking out a product. It's all factory work. It's all really iconic stuff, too. I don't make paintings, so I end up working with logos and imagery that works as a stand-alone thing.



I, well, yeah, kind of at this point. That’s something that Jeral [Tidwell] and I have been talking about recently, because he doesn't like it that I don't get the respect of some of the stuff that he does, because he is known for being a painter. He almost never puts any of his commercial stuff up and just shows his art prints. So he's trying to get me into painting, and I just bought a bunch of stuff and I'm going to steal a bunch of his knowledge to save me a lot of struggle. Maybe become more of a fine artist and not just a production artist.



Oh yeah. I don't do anything special, I actually mock myself a lot because I draw a lot of skulls, like, "I am a visionary. You know what I did today? I drew three skulls."



I have people that are doing small clothing lines who'll send me emails asking if I'll make a design, and I'll hit them back saying okay, what is your company about? What represents you as a company, what would you like to see? And they'll hit me back with, "I don’t know. Do that stuff you do. Draw some skulls on a cross or something." So I embrace it to an extent, but I'm trying not to be too repetitive with it.



Yeah.



You mean, what made me say, "You know what this little girl needs? She needs to be eyeless and holding a scarab"? Yeah, I don't know. Just watching horror movies, growing up with Gremlins and listening to too much metal. At one point way, way back somebody pointed out that my stuff reminded them of Pushead. This was before I was drawing any skulls really. I went back and really got into looking at Pushead's stuff, and I guess all of the ridiculous amount of merchandising he did for Metallica has just kind of stayed with me subconsciously.





Yeah. After I met Jeral a couple years ago, my process changed altogether. I was just using pencils and then inking with nibs and pens and things, but because I was using wet inks with the nibs I would get really anxious and wouldn't really wait for things to dry and just destroy the whole thing. He introduced me to marker paper, so that way I can ink on a separate piece altogether. Then I'll scan it in and then all my final work is in Photoshop. Or, I'll come up with a couple quick sketches, and I'll bring them into Illustrator and use the Wacon tablet and do all the line work in Illustrator and the final work in Photoshop, all the texturing and coloring.





Usually if I'm friends with them I'll go ahead and do it. Or if I'm not trying to scrape by with rent, then I'll say sure. But it's been a while, and I've kind of ousted myself to be able to focus on this full-time. I used to go out to shows a couple times a week but I kind of had to cut myself off from most social circles except for about five people that I really interact with in a week.



No, I just had to lock myself off to make sure I got things done. I get into work-mode and I'll work for 16 hours in a day, just straight through. I'll look up and go, weird, it's nighttime. I didn't go outside today. That's sad.





Get up at the crack of noon, and I'll work until 3 or 5 or 6 in the morning. That's about it. I might allow myself a break to eat. But that's at least like 5 days out of the week. And then I'll try to flip my schedule around and it'll ruin everything for a couple days, but.



I cannot go through a day without listening to Jay-Z lately. I listen to a lot of hip-hop, and weird arty music, like Beirut. But I have music ADD so in a day I'll download 5 or 6 different albums. I haven't found any metal bands in a long time that I've been really into, so it's all rhythmic stuff.



We were aggressively dark. It wasn't metal. We had a lot of stuff that was pretty, but it was still dark. I've only been in two bands. The other was a really shitty punk band called the Rainbow Girls, and the only really cool thing about that was we got to play with Kinghorse. And it was fun, but I was 15, so you know it wasn’t "good."



Because my week was set up with full-time job, full-time relationship, band practice a couple times a week, and art, I had to start nixing things, so when I realized that I really needed to be focusing on the art, I kind of had to halt the music altogether and just have the job and Angryblue. That way I could eventually cut out the job too. I'm hoping that in a month or two I can start writing again, because I still love writing music.





I haven't done that in a long time. When I started getting interested in art again, I found this guy Dubtastic on a graphic forum. I'd seen people doing similar things and he had a really weird, grotesque taste in art so we said, hey, let's do this. We passed files back and forth just trying to up the bar or totally destroy what the other person did and just leave some small element remaining. That friendly competition can help you grow really quickly, but no, I haven't done it in a long time.

I always thought those were so cool. Where can people go to look into some battles?

The first place I found them was at graphic-forums.com, but I don't know if there's a more popular place now that does them. I know they started a forum specifically for the battles, so people can pull up to the computer and actively watch every couple days as a new image is posted.




You can also check out Angryblue's old battles, and more of his artwork, on his website here.


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Date:	2007-04-25 - 22:17:00
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