Interview by Rachel Gottesman
Hi Mathijs! Congrats on another fine print.
Hi Rachel, thanks! I must say it looks really awesome in real life. Good job on printing it. Let's hope there's more for me in store.
What got you started at Threadless? What's your favorite part about being a designer on the site?
I can't really specifically recall how I came across Threadless, but one day I did. Digital art was something I had been doing for a while, started out with like forum-signatures, and it kinda grew from there. Started doing stuff in vector because I saw someone do awesome stuff with it. Of course my first stuff was really bad, but back then, it was all awesome to me, you know how that works.
Once I came across Threadless I figured I'd give it a shot, why the heck not? I remember thinking "Oh man this is easy money, I'm gonna win this so easily". Hehe, how wrong I was. So I stuck around, met some people who helped me with every critique I put up (shout out to Danielle and Hector), and eventually I got printed!
Watching others make awesome stuff would be the best part for me, along with the community collaborations and Threadless Loves competitions. I'm not a really productive designer, so most of my time on Threadless I just lurk around, check out awesome designs and comment on blogs here and there. Whenever there is a community collaboration that interests me, I'll try to contribute to it. Some great results so far. Good job on organising those, you guys. You know who you are.
The loves competitions are always great, even though most of the time I come up with a load of idea's, but end up not finishing the designs.
Your website says you enjoy other forms of art, but you mostly stick to digital work, especially for t shirts. What other kinds of artwork have you done in the past?
Drawing would be the biggest thing. Like a lot of people, when I was a kid I drew on everything, and everywhere. Pencil, charcoal, crayons, markers. From there, thanks to my art teacher at high school, I got into painting. Mainly acrylics, some watercolor stuff. My parents got me a big easel for my birthday once, and I got some big blank canvasses and panels to paint on. I still have some of those, ready to get painted on. Now that I mention it, I should finish that painting that's been standing around for a long while...
Thanks to my sister I also did some stuff in clay from time to time. I'm not a great sculptor, but it's fun to do anyway.
Why is digital art and design (vs. analog) so attractive to you as an artist?
The big plus for me is the fact that there are so many more options. If you mess up a painting, you have to repaint the whole area. If you make a mistake in Illustrator for example, you just hit undo, and on you go. Also the fact that you can mess around with everything. Colors, composition, size, everything. It's so much more versatile compared to traditional art.
I guess you could say analog art requires more skill, as you need to get it right in one go, or you have to redo a whole lot. Doesn't take away from the skill involved in digital art, but I guess digital art is easier to get into, and get decent at. Getting great at either one takes plenty of skill though.
Who are some of your biggest influences as an artist?
Hmm. I really can't name any big influences right off the top of my head. If I may be cliche, I'd say Dali.
But let's not be cliche. Digital art from all over the web inspires and probably also influences me. Again I can't really name any names, I just browse around and see what other people are coming up with. There's always something new, something insanely awesome to check out. I browse around on Threadless, Emptees, Conceptart, and some art blogs. Sometimes when I see something really awesome, it sparks off an idea based on what I saw idea-wise, but also technique-wise. I look at it and think how did this guy do this, whats behind this? And how could I fit this awesomeness into my style and my work.
I just make my stuff up as I go along, there's no real big important artist or movement 'telling' me how to do stuff.
Where did you get the name "Soul Burger" (your website) from? Do you suppose that when you eat a hamburger you are ingesting a cow's soul? I can't decide if that would make a hamburger more or less tasty... Probably more...
Soul Burger is actually not much more than a random word combo. It spawned from my mind when I started college. This friend of mine had a portfolio site with the completely random name of Sushi Vegas. We both still dabbled in the digital art world back then (he moved on to photography later), and I thought it was cool to get a random name as well. Just because it really doesn't make sense. That was part of the fun.
About the cow's soul, that sounds like a pretty damn special burger. It'd be more interesting to say the least. More tasty, I don't know, as it's still only a small piece of cow, so it should contain only a small piece of soul. If that's even possible. Then we'd be mixing all sorts of different souls into our own.
Maybe that's what makes a personality. Souls from food. Sounds logical right? Could lettuce have a soul? I think we're onto something here...
Actually, there is also a restaurant called SoulBurger. I wonder what they put in their hamburgers.
Speaking of meat, what is the best meat-inside-of-other-meat combo you can think of? There's already the Turducken, what else do you think there should be available for consumption?
Hmm. That's a tough one. Let's see.. I love schnitzels. So it should probably include schnitzels. Schnitzels covered in fried bacon? Does that count? Or schnitzels filled with kebab? Maybe I should try this stuff some time.
Anything you'd like to add before we call it a night?
Thanks for the interview! And remember, don't eat fish, fish are evil. Perhaps their souls are evil.
But yeah, I think that about wraps it up.
Cheers!
Interview by Rachel Gottesman
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