Today we’d like to introduce you to Robert Jimenez.
Hi Robert, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I first took an interest in art through comic book collecting as a young boy growing up in Brooklyn. Comic books and trading cards played a big part in my youth and that certainly influenced me to want to recreate all the great stuff I was looking at.
As I grew older, I studied graphic design. I ended up landing a job at Univision Network’s art department where I expanded my range by designing and animating broadcast graphics. Sometime later I more actively took an interest in illustrating and painting personal projects. I began to paint Tiki art which was well received and allowed me to grow a fan base for it.
I’m someone who always likes to jump around both the genre and the medium I work in, so at some point, I pursued and landed work with the trading card companies, primarily Topps but also Upper Deck and Cryptozoic. I continue to work in the trading card field, mainly for Topps, creating artwork for various properties of theirs, including Garbage Pail Kids, Wacky Packages, Mars Attacks, and Star Wars.
Lately, I’ve been creating a lot of illustrations for the Star Wars card trader app. All this work in trading cards led me to want to publish my own, which I’ve been doing for the last few years with my Fearsome Weirdos series. I am currently about to launch the 5th Fearsome Weirdos set. I’ve also created a trading card set of Edgar Allan Poe art.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
I would say my journey so far has been fairly smooth but not without its challenges. For me, getting my work out to an audience on a consistent basis and time management are very real issues. And that is wholly separate from the difficulty of creating the work itself. I wouldn’t say that there’s any one piece I’ve worked on that came very easily. While some ideas may flow out onto paper with little effort, the final creation always presents some difficulty.
So, the creation of the work itself is demanding, and then another level of the challenge after that which is to take it and present it to an audience and hope it connects with them. Ideally, you would want your audience to share the work with friends and followers and that some may be interested in it enough to purchase it, whether it’s an original or print or any other form that piece may take. That is probably the biggest challenge the path of my work faces.
And the funny thing is when you start to have a little success, for example, selling originals, prints, trading cards, pins, etc. Then the process of fulfilling orders begins to take up even more of your time. So every day is kind of a balancing act of brainstorming potential new ideas, executing those creations, filling orders, taking care of customers’ questions or concerns, and dealing with shipping companies among other issues.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
Like many artists, I had a great interest in drawing from an early age. I spent most of my time recreating scenes from my favorite comic books. As I got older thoughts of creating original work dominated my creative thoughts and works. Later, I began to become proficient in the Adobe products I use for my work, Illustrator, Photoshop, and After Effects, I also began to paint, mainly using acrylics. As my work began to grow, it seemed to divide along two fairly distinct lines.
My Tiki art is one and my trading card work is another. Those two don’t tend to overlap, although I am currently working on a trading card set of my Tiki Art. In my Tiki art, I’ve always tried to create a narrative with the visuals. I like to create something that seems to be a small part of a larger story. I feel that with the Tikis and Apes that I paint, I’m world-building in a sense. To me, they seem to inhabit the same world and are all part of a larger story. My Tiki work has gone back and forth between traditional work and digital.
My traditional pieces tend to be acrylic paint on wood. I think a wood surface compliments my somewhat impressionist brushwork. My digital work while cleaner still maintains some of that roughness. I particularly enjoy creating pieces that feel as if they were decades old and discovered in a dusty attic or basement. I often distress the originals, once completed, and often cover the whole piece with a sepia-like wash to dull the colors down. Visually this is a very satisfying sort of conceit to my pieces.
This love of a worn, vintage feel has led me to create many faux book or pulp magazine covers of my work. I’ve done it with the Tiki art and that has led directly to my trading cards work. Over the last couple of years, I have created many illustrations for Lucasfilm’s Star Wars Card Trader App and am currently working on the 3rd of my Pulp Covers set for them which incorporates the same ideas mentioned above with my Tiki Art. The series is made up of fictional book covers featuring various Star Wars characters.
Of my trading card work, aside from the work I’ve done for Topps and Star Wars, I’m probably most proud of my Fearsome Weirdos sets. I feel those cards have a unique personality. They’re a combination of monster parodies, product parodies, and pop culture references, all of which can be traced back to my younger self rushing down to the local newsstand in my Brooklyn neighborhood and buying comic books and cards.
Can you talk to us about how you think about risk?
I think the risks I take in my work, in particular financial risks, are fairly low and the main reason for that is that I am still a full-time employed broadcast designer. I’ve been designing and animating for Broadcast for about 30 years now. The job has afforded me the freedom to create my own IPs but more importantly, it has helped hone my skills.
Television is a very fast-paced and often stressful field. Working for so long, on live TV especially, has given me the ability to quickly brainstorm an idea, flesh it out and create it. This has been very valuable to my personal creations as I can personally work on every facet of it, from the design to the illustration and, when needed, the animation of my IPs.
Having a job you enjoy outside of your personal projects is a route that I suggest to a lot of artists I speak to, including my daughters who are budding artists. I think if you have a reliable job, one that you enjoy and that can support you and your family, provide you with health insurance, etc. It makes it easier to branch out and do the work that you love or pursue a passion project and take an occasional risk. So I feel I’m very fortunate in that regard and I think that allows me to work freely without the burden of some huge unknown overshadowing my work.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://zerostreet.shop/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zerostreet/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ArtOfRobertJimenez
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zerostreet/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/Zerostreet
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/zerostreet
