What are some ways you’ve been able to stand out and differentiate your work from others who may seem like they do the same thing?
Regardless of [your field, I think it’s important to do] what [you] really love to do. And I think, as cliché as it sounds, it totally works.
I just loved it so much. I worked really hard and hard work pays off. A lot of people I worked for in the industry, their feedback to me was that I was always available, always there, always came in on time.
A lot of people in the creative world aren’t on time and I learned really quickly to be on time with everything. It’s really easy to procrastinate and be a day or a week late. A person who’s not on time, their photos might even be a little bit better, but when you’re somebody in an office dealing with 40, 50, 100 different creatives, the people who are on time, I think it really makes a difference.
So doing what I love and being on time, those seem to be the magic combo for me.
I think that’s my point of difference, in terms of what my business does, is that I think like a designer but I execute like an artist. So it’s this hybridity that enables me to kind of have this scale that ranges based off of who the client is and what they want.
One of my biggest differentiators, which could be a weakness, is that I won’t repeat things. A lot of artists find something and they repeat it over and over and over. I’m almost entirely against doing that. I think I would get bored if I was always painting the same type of thing.
So stylistically, you can see similarities in what I paint and the technique, but subject matter is always changing and I think it will probably always be that way.
I think probably the strongest thing I have going for me is my different styles. For example, the Adobe guys, they wanted graffiti, skateboarding things, and they’ve only seen my murals. They asked, Do you know how to use Illustrator? And I said, Yeah. And they were hesitant because they wanted to make sure I knew how to vectorize all the stuff and export all the files properly. I could tell they didn’t believe me right away. Stuff like that. Knowing how to use the computer helps a lot.