Gorker Private Tsp Edition Version 5.0
Alma Wass
Meet Timba Smits, an artist, designer, illustrator, publisher, curator and wannabe Olympic ping-pong player, who has the heart in him to share with us all some fantastic advice for all of you budding and upcoming world-class illustrators. Timba worked himself up from being turned away from design agencies, to becoming an extremely successful, world-known and award-winning creative, a founder of a superb magazine publication and a founder of a great brand known as Lyrics & Type. Read on to find out how he has gotten so far in life.
My name is Timba Smits. I'm an artist, designer, illustrator, independent publisher, curator and wannabe olympic ping-pong playa! I'm currently living and doing my thing in London (UK) for a chomp but I was born and bred in Melbourne, Australia (my home ground). I grew up with a really tight knit family about an hour down the coast in a quiet place which we called 'Mounty'. Without all the distractions of a big city or town, it was a great place to discover who you are, which for me came through at a very young age. However, after I finished high-school I just couldn't wait to move the hour into the city to chase my dreams of becoming an artist. There just wasn't the same opportunities back in 'Mounty'.
After a few years of painting, experimenting, and lots of procrastination (mainly about why I wasn't Andy Warhol already), I looked into a computer graphics course at a quaint little private college in Melbourne called Shillington College, thinking it could help speed things up a bit. Looking back, it was probably one of the best decisions I have ever made. At the time it was pretty expensive but it only lasted three months and before I knew it I had the right qualifications to get work as a designer. Although a post-graduate from college I found it hard to get a job which mainly came down to the fact that I didn't have the required 5 years experience, blah blah blah. What I did have though and still do have is a good amount of drive, passion and dedication towards what I do. So I quickly decided that if nobody was going to give me the chance I believed I deserved, I would go it on my own - so that's exactly what I did.
I don't think you really fall into anything. Yeah, there are stories of that happening, but I believe you either choose your path in life and your career, or it chooses you. For me it's the later. From such a young age I knew exactly what I was meant to do. I had a very supportive mother who nurtured my creative side, much to the dismay of my scientist father at first, and through the help of two incredible arts teachers at school I was helped into believing I could be really good at art and design. As far as illustration and design goes, I felt, and still feel more broader than just that. I like to keep things as varied as possible so I run a magazine to fuel my love of books and zines, I opened an art gallery to feed my hunger for art, all whilst drawing and designing for lots of different people as this feels natural.
I've always had a strong entrepreneurial spirit too and this has lead to being involved in a huge amount of projects including starting my own independent publishing company and opening a really successful gallery in Melbourne called Gorker Gallery with some mates in early 2008. I guess I was born with some natural talent in the beginning but I've had to work extremely hard to get here, and have struggled almost to breaking point to get to where I'm at now. It's funny because from time to time I bump into the same art directors who knocked me back for jobs out of college and I'm always thanking them for closing the door on me. Some have even confessed to kicking themselves, ha! Sometimes I imagine what life would have been like had they said yes. Would I be here? Deep!
You got me. I'm one of those people that has to do everything at least once and love everything in life. I'm not saying that I have a checklist or anything but there's simply not enough hours in the day, days in the week and months in the year for doing all the things I'd like to do. So I go with the flow a lot - I follow my heart most of the time and whatever feels right I chase it with a passion so hot it can sometimes burn me out. If I'm not good at something at first I'll beat myself up until I am. It's painful for my friends to watch sometimes and they wonder why I do this to myself but I just simply love challenging myself, it makes me feel so alive and being creative is a gift that keeps on giving. It never wears me out.
There are so many things I'm interested in apart from art and design swell of course. I'm pretty active so I love skating during the summer and snowboarding when winter comes around. I'm pretty excited as I have just landed my first snowboard graphics job which combines my top two things in life. And did you know my magazine is named after an old slang word for a skateboard...? Wooden Toy. I've been pretty much into skate and snowboarding culture my whole life, from it's fashion, the music, the trends and how parallel it seems to be with art & design. I'm also really into Film, I've always thought that if I got a whole new life I would start all over as a film director. Cue Wes Anderson as a favorite.
Then there's music. Sheesh! Don't get me started. I'd love to produce music, sing or be in a band but I cant. No, that's wrong, I probably could, but it takes so much time to be good at something. So instead what I tend to do a lot of the time is connect into these loves by creating initiatives like my Lyrics and Type project which brings type, music and designers together as one. This seems to give me a little bit of fulfillment and helps to feed my desire of wanting to make music. L&T has also been built somewhat as a lead up over the past six months for the release of Wooden Toy's music edition in August 2010.
Yeah, I kind of don't like new things, glossy things and quite a lot of technology to be honest. As much as a computer is a vital ingredient to what I do, I actually have a love / hate relationship with them. I love what I can do with them but hate sitting in front of one. You see, I'm more of a paper and pencil person. A traditionalist in many ways and this, I think, is where my style comes from. Because I prefer to work offline as much as possible most of my design work has a real illustrative feel and nostalgic sense about it. So when I am playing around on the computer I try to make my work as naturally illustrative as possible. Almost as if it was hand-made. I tend to do this by adding subtle texture to a heap of my work. Converting scanned elements into bitmap and vector texture files and placing these atop of my artwork.
As a whole I'm mostly inspired from a time well before the iPad, wireless keyboards and the mighty mouse. I use some of these products but don't seem to connect with them as a lot of people do. Vintage design approaches, advertising icons and products, notably stuff from the 40's, 50's and 60's gets much of my attention. Meccano and chemistry sets over Xbox any day of the week, ha! And as far as influences goes, sure, I have my favorites. Lets see; pin-up artists George Petty and Gil Elvgren are some of my all time favorite illustrators along with Gary Taxali and CandyKiller as some of my new found loves. Mike Giant is up there, as is Tyler Stout.
First step... go for a walk! I seem to come up with my best ideas outside of my working space. Just a simple stroll with a notepad and pen down the canal is all it takes. It's funny, when I'm at my desk and working I seem to just zone out. I don't think, I don't stop and I hardly blink at all. I almost go into this meditative state where everything is just quiet. So it's really important for me to get out, take a break and walk around for idea trawling. This part of starting a project is always the same regardless who I'm working for or what it is I'm working on. Everything else is quite dependent to the projects brief really so this changes each time.
My workspace at the moment is in my house as a result of moving to London where rents are equal to that of my Melbourne house and studio combined. So this has been a bit hard to fall back to after having a proper studio for so long. It's only temporary however and I'm lucky to have a big house and a huge bright sunny studio that overlooks some beautiful gardens with bumblebees that quite often drop in for a visit. It's also a very clean workspace. I have a separate desk where I draw and one as a computer station with a 15" MacBook Pro connected to a 24" Cinema Display, a trusty scanner, printer and my cactus plant (the only plant that doesn't die on me). Why mac? Well, before I started at college I could barely even use a computer. They had Macs, and so I became a Mac person. It could have easily been PC had they taught on those but I'm glad it was mac as there products are soooo puuuurdy!
Yeah, over the years I've been quite lucky to work with some great clients, and... some not so great clients. The surprising fact is, I've never proactively hunted for work before in terms of sending out pr/folio packages to people I wanted to work with or even asking people. Things have always just come my way when I needed them. The universe works in strange ways. Some would call this luck, however I don't as I've worked damn hard in order to make these people notice me at some possible point. I realize that Wooden Toy has helped more than I think when I'm discussing this topic. In a way, Wooden Toy has almost (secretly) been a massively expensive business card, kind of promoting all that I'm capable of.
On top of this I've always been very much a head-down-bum-up type of designer who constantly works more hours and produces more work that even I can't believe at times. I've also been clever in terms of filling my magazine with things that I'm really interested in so the work that comes my way as a result of Wooden Toy is always going to be stuff that I'm super excited about working on. A lot of design studios and advertising agencies subscribe to my magazine, as-well as a lot of brands looking for the latest artists and designers to work with. So a lot of the time I'm invited to work on projects this way but also a lot of the time I'm connecting clients with artists that I've featured in my publications for work. This is also a really nice side to what I do. I also have a number of websites. It's a real pain in the ass to maintain them all but they're quite a large backbone to getting more work. A lot of my offers come through from my websites, so some advice would be to have a kick-ass website with some great work up for show. Include a healthy blog too which you should keep updated all the time, just to keep people watching you constantly. I do this a lot and it works. If you can do this in print too like me then there's no way they won't notice you.
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