We have talked about doing things together for years, but didn’t actually follow through with it until recently. He works a full-time job as a creative director and has a family, etc… and I live half-way across the country from him and am always busy as well, so it continually got put on the back burner.

But last year I got asked to shoot a fashion editorial for a publication’s “Art Issue” and I figured it was the perfect opportunity to pull in my brother. They gave us the freedom to run with our own concept, so we had a lot of fun figuring it all out together. I added some of the work from that series to my printed portfolio, did a little marketing push of the series online with social media and email blasts, etc… and people seemed to really dig the combination of our styles. Since then, he and I have been fortunate enough to get asked to collaborate on quite a few things as a team.

Paul from SLAM reached out to me directly with tears from the first fashion spreads Ty and I did. And simply asked if we would be interested in doing something similar for their upcoming cover/feature with Russell Westbrook. I have worked with SLAM for many years on many past assignments, so for me, it was rather standard in terms of my role behind the camera. And again, Ty and I were given pretty amazing creative freedom to simply work together as a team like we had on previous projects. I was asked to capture a few specific static portraits as well as some specific poses to help the flow of the illustrations and Ty was given some loose direction of them wanting things to feel a certain way, but besides that, Paul pretty much just let us do our thing.

SLAM was my my long-time client. It was really great to get to mix it up and do something different this time around.  I’m a huge basketball fan and the people at SLAM are all top-notch folks; have consistently been one of those clients that I feel really fortunate to have a long-standing connection with.

Yeah. Absolutely. We used to draw together all the time, but Ty was always more into it than I was, and way better at it. My father is a graphic designer and used to take us to his studio after school. We would sit there for hours playing with his markers and pens while he worked. Ty and I both eventually went to college for illustration, but I ended up changing my major, I just didn’t have the passion for drawing. Eventually, I found photography after years of searching for a medium I connected with.

Our first collaboration was a series titled SCHIZOPHRENIC for a fashion editorial (mentioned above). Still one of my favorite things we have done together.

Getting a chance to work with Trevor has been really great, we’ve talked about collaborating on a project like this for a long time. We already knew that we’ve got similar tastes as far as art & design goes, so I felt pretty comfortable going into the project. Being more open to feedback & change was definitely one of the skills I developed more while working on this project. Typically, I think about how an illustration works by itself, but in this case, the drawings needed to work as one with the photography, so finding that balance needed some back & forth which wasn’t always as easy as we wanted because we both have strong opinions on how we think it should be. Having those conversations with Trevor was alot of fun though, I value his opinion.

My process for this project was a bit different than normal for me. Because I have a really loose, organic style that makes use of mistakes, ink bleed, drips, splatters, etc, I kept my sketches to thumbnails to get a sense of placement and a general outline of the page. Once I had an idea of how the photos & drawings were going to work together, it was a lot of iteration to get the lettering and drawings just right. I would use a lightbox to paint over the photos, building up textures & drawings, then I’d take all of the drawings and scan them in, putting it all together in Photoshop. By the end of the project, I had a huge pile of sketches & drawings for each illustration (around 20 each. I must have drawn each of the words 50x each until I thought it was just right.

No, I’m an Art Director at a company in RI that does web & app design. Outside of design, most of my art has been paintings and personal side projects that rarely saw the light of day. I went to school for illustration (Massachusetts College of Art), and after college I focused more on graphic & web design, only pursuing illustration work when fun projects like this one come up, but lately I have made more of an effort to get more regular illustration work.

I’ve always known I wanted to be an artist, even when I was much younger, making artwork was the only thing I ever wanted to do. Trevor & I have a lot of artists in our family (our dad & grandfather are both graphic designers & artists), so it seemed natural. We were always encouraged in whatever we were doing. I grew up with a nonstop barrage of comics, video games, skateboarding, graffiti and music. The unconventional creativity that permeates skateboarding & graffiti is massively inspiring to me, and really helped to shape the way I look at art, and life in general. I’d be destined for failure if I were to try to do anything else.