Stom 500 ist ausgebildeter Grafikdesigner, Illustrator und renommierter Graffiti-Künstler aus Basel. In den letzten fünf Jahren war Stom500, wie er sich mit Humor definiert, ein echtes "Schweizer Taschenmesser". Mit Spray, Pinsel oder Acryl bringt er seine humorvoll interpretiertenTierthemen auf große Wandbilder oder kleine Leinwände.
Unter dem #myhomecourt teilt FILA die Home-Court-Stories diverser Creators. Wir haben uns zu diesem Anlass mit Stom500 zusammengetan und sind kreativ geworden. Passend zum customized Editorial by Stom gibt es limitiert und nur bei uns im Shop: Kunstdruck (geprägt und mit Farbschnitt), Vinyl-Stickersheet und die illustrierte Trinkflasche aus Glas mit schützender Neopren-Hülle. Das gute Stück gibt es übrigens, nur so lange der Vorrat reicht, zu allen Pieces der FILA-Kollektionen Court-Casual & Filadelphia.
Your animal interpretations always have a certain sense of humor and ideas in the interpretation. What inspires you?
My first inspiration comes from the cartoons that I watched when I was kid and of course humor has a big part in this kind of movies.
I try to never be so serious in my work but I'm the same in real life. So for me drawing or painting is always giving a part of your daily life. When I feel good it feel the same in my work.
My latest paintings are about travel, it's an answer of the situation and the opposition to real life. We were all more time inside the studio and for me painting was a part of evasion. It was good to do research on books or differents medias to travel in my head.
On your table are some tracing papers and many different pens. What do your typical work steps look like to come to a character design?
Haha! Yes my table is a temple of pens! Sometimes I feel a little bit old because I see a lot of artists who work in digital. I've a lot of respect for this technic, but I feel super bad to draw directly on the screen ... I don't like the sensation for the moment. Maybe one day I will find a motivation to work on it. But now my first love is the paper and the pens.
For this project the idea was to work on a photocopy of the picture for Fila. So first I did some sketch on my sketchbook and tried to find an universe. I draw my first line really energic to find a movement or a dynamic in really rough sketching. So colors markers are good tools to work like different layers from the lighter to the darker color. I finalise my sketch on a good quality paper with my light table and start to find the good lines and a good contrast to finish my illustration.
The last part is on my computer: After a dynamic vectorisation on illustrator I start to work the coloring part. So it's a long process and a lot of people don't understand why I don't work directly on digital. But like that’s for the moment. Maybe one day!
With FILAs hashtag #myhomecourt you show your personal worspace. What does your home court matter to you? What makes a home court for you?
With @myhomecourt you can see how I work in my studio. I share it with my superfriend Missy, and it's mix of a studio and a little jungle because she's a big fan a plants. So for us it's important to have a space and good atmosphere where we feel good. I try to be mostly clean in my space to be relaxed, and it's curently a good subject of discussion because all people imagine a piece with a lot of paintings everywhere and a lot of mess in my desk. I need to be as clean as possible in my space and of course in my mind to feel good. It's like a extension of my house.
Keyword “Home”: What impact does the pandemic have on your (professional) life?
It was a strange time, but not so bad for me. I wasn't sick and all my family was safe so not the badest time. But without culture, museums, traveling , friends, and beers with friends, the movivation was here – but not the inspiration ... It was really hard to escape myself and to find some other process to work. Some things were better while other really weren’t. I love to start working early in the morning, so I'm in my studio at 7.30 am and finish around 06.00 pm. But in my home it's different because you can work everyday, everytime, so during lockdown I somehow never stopped to work. Fortunately my wife rang the alarm and stopped me!
When I don't work I love to cook too, so I started – like a lot of people did – to make my bread by myself and also tried some new cooking recipes! My second vice!
“Creators gonna create“ means for me …
I loved this feature with FILa and Stylefile, because for one of the first time since I started to work on commission I was completly free to do what I want. From the beginning to the end I was completly free to create and that's the best way to create an artistic work for a brand. Creators gonna create is a good thing to say. Because sometimes brands can just trust the artists who they ask to do something and simply not create borders.
So thank you for your invitation and this good time!
