In doing justice to the saying variety is the spice of life, there’s a plethora of designs in our Marketplace. For those of you have ever wondered who those talented people are who come up with such fantastic ideas, you’ll now be rewarded with our monthly interview series introducing the people behind the designs. Let us get started with Adam Lawless who’s going to let us in on the way he comes up with great ideas for his cute and successful animal designs.

Hi Adam. Great to have you as our first artist of the month!
We noticed that you are located in Singapore. How did you find out about Spreadshirt over there?

I was looking for more stores to sell my artwork back in 2013, and that’s when I discovered Spreadshirt online. I signed up straight away and haven’t looked back since!

Your alias lets on that you’re a bit of an outlaw. Just kidding. But, does Adam Lawless display a certain disregard for the law, or did you just like the sound of it?

Basically, I was just looking for a nice nickname, and “Adam” seemed fitting because I’m a father of 3 and a husband. Then I was watching a movie with the incredible Lucy Lawless and voila the nickname was born. Anyways, I like to let my art do the talking, let’s keep the name aside.

How and why did you get into creating designs? What motivated you to sell these on T-shirts?

I’ve been creating designs as a freelancer since 1997. There’ve been ups and downs, been there, done that. In 2012, I started submitting designs to print-on-demand websites like Spreadshirt. I’ve come to know my strengths now and it’s been paying off as of late. The royalties will keep flowing – it all fits into a pattern. I feel very proud when I see people wearing my designs. So I would like to take this opportunity to thank my fans and people who buy my work, and also Spreadshirt – what would we artists do without you all?

What are you doing apart from creating awesome designs? Do you have a day job or are you a full-time artist?

I’m a fulltime artist, but that’s not all. I do my share of household chores, and I enjoy playing rock music. I simply love strumming my guitar and singing at the top of my voice, and I don’t think my neighbours mind. But I always imagine myself playing to a crowd of 80,000 people, so I tend to do it to the best of my abilities. I just love music so much!

We particularly like your Cat Rider design. How do you come up with ideas like that?

I usually have no idea about what I’m going to do when I start getting down to creating a new T-shirt design. My mind is blank, so I experiment with whatever comes to mind first. It’s easy to concentrate on popular themes, though, and maybe there was a little voice inside of me that whispered “generate more income” when I created Cat Rider. I love cats as well, and I have one named Cooper, so maybe he inspired me to a certain extent. To be perfectly honest, and I always have women as a peer group in the back of my head. And if the old stereotype rings true that woman can shop till they drop, then it must have been mainly the ladies out there who fell for my cute Cat Rider design.

A lot of your designs feature animals and crazy outer space encounters. Is there a special reason for that? And what else inspires you?

I don’t know why I keep doing animal themes. At the moment, I just can’t get away from it. It’s like an addiction. So I think the way is paved for many more animals to come to life in the very near future. I want people to associate the name Adam Lawless with cute and funny designs whenever they look for an animal theme.

Your designs look stunningly real while playing up a fantasy scale. Please do reveal your secret – do you have a special magic technique?

Oh, thank you! You see, I start off with images and then doctor them up with software. I work with my digital pen to emulate the fur of cats, bears and so on. Without that digital pen I’d be a cripple in front of my computer. A single design can contain many different images, and be the result of lots of hours spent in the process of creation, but in the end I’m happy whenever I come up with something that lives up to my expectations.

If you were one of your designs, which one would describe you or your character best?

I love pizza and this particular one might resemble me most. Except it’s much smaller as I’m only 137lb, hahaha!

More of this designer

• See designer's Marketplace
• See designer's Shop
• See designer's Facebook
• See designer's Tweets