Some people are born to be artists. Illustrator and designer Dan Christofferson is one of them. Originally from Salt Lake City, Utah and currently based in Brooklyn, his art is unapologetically cool. Par of a two-dan team named Young Jerks, he also runs an online shop filled with oddly vibe-y pennants, patches, pins, and flags.
“I feel like I was one of those lucky kids who knew that I should be in some sort of art,” he told The Great Discontent. “My friends would get all dressed up as Ninja Turtles and jump around, and my inclination was to get out a piece of paper and a pencil and draw them,” he recalls.
“My parents were also super supportive, and got me into art classes where we’d go to the zoo and draw animals,” he adds. “And in high school, I went into an art program at the local college. It was just so natural; I never questioned it or tried anything else.”
It all culminated in his adult years when he fine-tuned his craft. But asked about his advice to young creatives his answer is relatively straight forward: “You ask someone about inspiration, and they’ll usually say ‘I look at everything around me and let it roll around, and then I use it.’ But it’s another thing to find a tangible system to be able to do that. It started really simply for me—when I was in high school, I had an art teacher who I really connected with. She encouraged me to build a system in my head, where I was cataloging the world around me and everything that would benefit my art. So I started thinking about how I could take everything around me and organize it in my head in a way that I could use it.”
“As an illustrator that’s helped me to be able to exaggerate face shapes really well, and to form this system of cataloging that I could regurgitate into something authentic and useful,” says Christofferson. “So the advice I would give is to be inspired and influenced by everything that’s around you, but then to build a cool system to be able to use all of that.”
