Interview with the 1st place winner of Derby 110
LKackman has been around Woot for more than a year and this is his first print. Here's more about him.
Shirt.Woot Stats? (first derby / shirts bought / shirts printed)
65 (Shirt as Costume) / 17 / 1. I believe I entered the shirt costume derby first. It was a horrible entry which eventually was rejected for incidental text -- or at least they didn't think it was incidental. I designed it in like ten minutes just so I could see how the whole entry process worked. I wish I would have planned for it better, I really think I could have came up with a better idea. To date I own 17 woot shirts, and my girlfriend has bought 7. I have only had one printed design -- sad day. I do however, have two I'm working on for daily shirts.
What are your tools of choice?
I use a combination of pencil freehand and my
tablet to do idea sketches, and then use
Adobe Illustrator with the pen tool to do the final. Sometimes I design in Illustrator completely on the fly with no preliminary design, just an idea in my head.
What is your typical process for going about a design?
Umm... well that's hard to say. A lot of the time my best ideas come when I'm not thinking about the design at all. If I like a thought, I will write it down and try and draw it out later that night.
What design or art experience do you have outside the derby?
I have a degree in graphic communications & advertising from St. Cloud, Minnesota. I work full-time at a local sign shop and have my own freelance company on the side. I am currently working on a webpage and hope to have it up in the fall. I wanted it up sooner, but it's hard to find more graphic motivation after doing it all day at work.
Which artists or designers inspire you?
Huge Van Gogh fan, but who isn't? I also really like Zak Smith's work too, his illustrations of the book "Gravity's Rainbow" are mind blowing, and I really dig his style. Actually I get allot of inspiration from music, the right music can put you on a good design track.
Would you like to do art/design full-time? If so, what is your dream job?
I already to it full-time, but I would love to only do freelance work. Designing logos is awesome -- especially after working with the output end of things for a few years.
Any plans to ever sell your designs using a print-to-order shop like SpreadShirt or CafePress?
I currently have my own
MySoti store, but desperately need to update my list of shirts.
What advice do you have for new derby artists?
Keep at it, and don't let the trolls get you down -- use their comments for future designing.
