Featured Artist | Taylor Rushing

In our latest featured artist video, we caught up with Taylor Rushing, owner of Not Bad Illustration. Learn more about his passion for illustration, posters, and his work with Willie Nelson.

Taylor's Instagram: @twrushing
Taylor's website: taylorwrushing.com

My name is Taylor Rushing. I own Not Bad illustration. I'm originally from Puget Sound in Washington State. I live here in Atlanta now. My company is sort of an all encompassing visual, graphic branding company. The thing that sort of holds it all together is the fact that I draw everything with my hands. Whatever I do, whether it's a mural or a poster or anything, it it'll have the mark of my hand and a little wobble in the line.

Not Bad was totally born out of this idea of perfection never existing. I always wanted my business to feel like a local hardware store somewhere where you could go and you could get decent service at the reasonable price and be served with respect. And I've been lucky enough that sort of built my company as a place where people can return to and feel like they know me. So, yeah, I want things to be pretty good. Not bad. Halfway decent.

My influences sort of come from two realms. One is very much the folk art, self-taught, outsider art world. And then the other side is sort of the American counterculture world. I'm very much in love with the psychedelic posters of the sixties and seventies and I draw a lot of inspiration from those.

I'm very much enchanted with sort of the idea of the self-made person especially throughout history. So more often than not, you'll see cowboys and cowgirls in my work, sort of anything that draws back to an older era, but still feels very relevant to sort of the human soul or the American condition.

I'm very lucky to be working with the country music community, and my dream client was to work with Willie Nelson. I've been very lucky to have done several posters for Willie Nelson, including his 90th birthday poster, most recently. But more often than not, I want to work with people that stimulate me and interest me so that the project feels collaborative.

Yeah, I've been really lucky to work with tons of musicians in the country, music world, tons of music musicians in the psychedelic rock world. And those are my favorite kinds of people. I love artists working with artists, so that's it's a dream come true for me. When two artists can meet and collaborate Poster work is, to me, the pinnacle of an illustrator or a designer's world. It's the ultimate relationship between typography and the image. And there is nothing I enjoy more than laying out a poster and laying out the color separations and thinking about how the ink will fall, what paper will land on it. And I just love the idea that a poster is now something that is very much an artisanal souvenir that someone can take home if they go to a show, I think posters, because they have such a long and fascinating history. I definitely feel like it's a world that will continue to be pushed limit wise. In the end, it's just ink on paper, and that's what makes it the most magical.

If you want to be a freelancer, there's a few things. I think that you need to keep your overhead low and you need to think about what kind of tools, what kind of tools will cost you money and ways to keep yourself safe. Do you need to do you need to rent space? Or can you work out of your basement in your house? And I also think that your reputation is everything in this business. And it is amazing to me how much treating someone with respect can influence your next job.

What's ahead for me is slowly growing my organization. I always want to keep it small and keep it a homestead, but I'm well on the way to sort of taking on much larger projects that will require more help. I find myself super lucky to be in a position where I'm just sitting here in this room drawing pictures and making a living, doing it.

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