#jirat

Lipsyncher

Who: James Jirat What: Exhibiting artist and freelance illustrator Backstory: This arty lad has channelled his boyhood thrills into creative genius for Nike, Microsoft and HBO.

How would you describe your style? It’s this kind of electro-gothic aesthetic world that I like exploring, throwing imagery from different influences like fashion, the supernatural, and sci-fi together and giving it a candy-hued rave twist. Some people think it’s scary, but it’s not scary if you’ve seen Saturday morning cartoons or an episode of Buffy.

Where do you turn for inspiration? I used to turn to the Internet a lot, using image aggregators like Tumblr or FFFFOUND!, but then I found I was getting inspired but no work was really coming out of it. Nowadays I look to music and try to create images that evoke the same feeling I get from certain songs, be it ’80s ballads or RNB songs or metal songs – you get different results that way.

Project keeping you up at night? I’m working on about three personal series right now so that keeps me up a lot – one’s a fictional editorial, one’s a typographic series and the other is still-life series. They’re all getting more and more complex as they go on, so that, and all the vintage leather jacket eBay auctions I’m stalking.

Tips for budding artists? It’s good to be inspired and have your heroes but at the end of the day, you need to do you. No-one respects another copy of an existing artist. We all have different backgrounds and tastes so take advantage of them – be as weird as possible. The weird things no-one has seen before are what sticks out, especially in an endless world of repetitive scroll feeds. If you’re really into yoga, but have a soft spot for the occult or aliens, then your work should reflect that.