What’s your connection to the K2 brand and when did you start snowboarding?
“I started snowboarding the winter of ’93/’94 in the flatted-out hills of New Jersey. I think I only made it out once that season since the local hill was a mission to get to. A year later, my fam moved up to Vermont, and I was hyped to finally be closer to bigger mountains. I picked up my first snowboard at a local swap meet — a 154 K2 HC. I didn’t really know anything about snowboarding then. I was sold mostly on the graphic of the snake wrapped around the K2 on the base.”
Our homie told me to ask you this question, seems like you have a saying for it - have you ever tried skiing?
“I’ve never put on a pair of ski boots not once my whole life. Spending a day in those things seems like a prison sentence. How does anyone hike the arm in those?”
What’s your creative process like? Do you lean more towards the traditional or the digital world when making your graphics, or both?
“My process usually kicks off with a hairball idea, something I saw out in the wild or a moment that stuck with me. I’ve got a running collection of photos and messy sketches saved on my phone that I’ll dig up for inspiration. From there, I build out a mood or direction and just start jamming. It really depends on the medium, but everything eventually makes it onto the computer one way or another. Lately, I’ve been deep into collage work, pulling from photos I’ve taken on the road or out in the woods, there’s something raw and personal about working with your own imagery.”
That’s sick, sounds like there are a lot of steps in there. How did you learn to do all that?
“When I was a kid, skate and snowboard graphics were the coolest sh*t ever. I plastered my walls with that stuff. I always knew I wanted a piece of that. I was big into fine art in high school and was painting a lot. I went to some hippie art school for the first year of college but quickly realized that wasn’t going to cut it. It was around that time all my buddies back east were moving out west so I bailed out of school and moved to Mammoth Mountain, CA. Snowboarding was really all I cared about. Around this time I hacked a version of Photoshop and got really into making stuff on the computer. That curiosity with digital art eventually led me back to northern Vermont, where I landed a spot in design school. I was bummed to leave the crew out west but excited to start learning the tools of the trade and the wild world of graphic design.”
Catch Tim's artwork on both our ATV and Dopamine snowboard collections.
Follow along with Tim and his designs on Instagram.