Tilteed

Welcome back, Ray! What have you been busy doing since we released your contest winning design, "Get A Job"?

Hey! I've been mostly focusing on school, and drawing a lot.

Can you tell us about this design and what inspired you to create it? How do you keep your own creativity flowing?

I've really been learning a lot about art lately, and considering the theory behind art rather than just making pretty things. I guess "Creativity Flows" is an homage to that, because I've been pretty fortunate and haven't really hit any artist blocks lately.

What's your typical day like?

I wake up early and sleep late. I'm a college student attending Parsons School of Design, so I go there during the day, and I work on art stuff (freelance, school work, personal work) after class.

Along with freelance work, you also have experience in running your own clothing company, Lowdtown. What's the difference between designing for clients and designing for your own line?

The stuff I design for clients are usually pretty different from my Lowdtown stuff, unless they ask me for a particular style. Lowdtown is really clean and sharp, but sometimes I really like drawing intensely detailed, crazy linework stuff for clients. It depends on the client obviously, but I try to keep the clean characters for Lowdtown.

If you were to write and illustrate a children's book, what would the story be about? What would the artwork look like?

Haha, I'm not sure if I'm a children's book kind of guy. When I'm not doing my vector-y stuff on the computer, my drawings are a lot weirder, so I'm not sure how youngster-appropriate it is. But if I were going to make a children's book, it would probably have to do something with monsters.

Tell us your favorite…

Sound -  I like the sound of two rocks hitting each other
  
Toy designer - Ooh, that's a good one. I'm a huge huge fan of 123Klan, but I've always been a fan of Tesselate, Course Toys, Superdeux, Thunderdog, and Shin Tanaka. Lately I've been getting into the wooden works of Pepe from SmallStuffStudio.
  
Pokemon - Haha! Bo, you know me so well! Snorlax is probably my all time favorite, but I also like Blissey and Gengar.
  
Color combination -  I like most complementary colors schemes. Purple's probably my favorite color but I don't really like purple and yellow together. I also don't really like the red and green complements, because it reminds me of Christmas. I don't have anything against Christmas, I just don't like when you look at art and make relationships to other things that are unrelated because of the colors.
  
Letter of the alphabet - I like the letter Q a lot, but it depends on the font.

Any parting thoughts?

Just wanted to thank you guys for interest in my design. And to all those people who have been patiently waiting on the next Lowdtown release, it's definitely in the works, so don't worry! I don't know an exact date yet, but it's definitely coming!

Check out my Youtube and Twitter for updates!