Power
of the
Pens

Zach is the art director and cofounder of the t-shirt company, Tank Theory (www.tanktheory.com). He and partner Andrew Silverman started the company back in 2001, and Zach has been the general art man ever since.

"From creating the company logo, to website, to t-shirt designs, to hangtags, to catalogs, to hats, to embroideries and trims, I have had the opportunity to design for a whole slew of garment and print related stuff."

Essentially, Zach has been the creator and guardian of Tank Theory’s overall aesthetic and graphic direction from day one.

At the moment, Zach is underway with developing the Spring ‘08 line of Tank Theory threads, titled Spirit. He’s also working on a side project with his partner, starting a belt buckle company called Death Metal Buckles, which is set to launch early next year.

Zach’s Wacom experience goes like this:

"I am super experienced (or should I say adept) at using the Wacom, although I have no idea what the buttons on the sides are used for."

Well, we’ll just have to see if he figured out the side buttons for his 2008 calendar month.

In my design work recently, I have been spending a lot of time on the themes of religions throughout the world and ideas on energy, the earth, and spirituality and how it affects us. This piece is coming from that mindset. I really wanted to create a stained glass piece that somehow contradicted the norm. Instead of life being depicted, as in normal stained glass works that sit in churches around the world, I wanted to depict death… an equally important side of life and the other side of the coin. I wanted to almost commemorate or celebrate death, the way you would with life. Not to be morbid, but death is a fact of life and it will eventually claim us all. With that being said, for me, it’s time to come to grips with death and celebrate it just like you would living. And of course the month I designed for was October, so skulls fit right in with Halloween and the whole dying of one season and the beginning of another.

I created a rough of the artwork in photoshop using various references of stained glass. After the general compositional elements were set, I imported the image into Illustrustar and put the Wacom tablet to work. By hand, I traced all the shapes of the stained glass, essentially vectorizing it and composing the final work.