Get to know more about Draco, a fantastic illustrator and one of the best t-shirt design artists out there with designs being printed by the most famous online t-shirt websites Draco brings a Brazilian flavor into people's closet. Besides all that he has a great project that releases free t-shirt templates for you to put your designs on.

For more work from Draco visit www.dracoimagem.com

Who hides behind the name Draco?

Well, My name is Edno Pereira Jr, I'm from Nova Iguaçu - RJ - Brazil, I'm self taught, and I always Ilustrated since a little kid, but being an illustrator or designer weren't exactly my dream as a child, but, I couldn't run from my destiny and today I work on Hiperativa www.hiperativa.com.br , a web agency that has big clients Brazil such as americanas, shoptime, ig and more.

When and how did you first start getting into design and illustrations?

Drawing was always a good way to pass the time, and the transition between fun and work happened naturally. I don't know exactly when I started my interest, but since a little kid I liked to see drawing cartoons and paintings. I think it was one of the first things that messed with my curiosity.

How was this transition from drawing cartoons to start illustrating on a computer?

It was when I first bought a PC, about 10 years ago, since I was already drawing, I started to produce some digital material, started with photoshop, not knowing anything. By then I didn't have internet so no tutorials at all. It took a while but I learned my way around the program, and after some time I started doing vectors, which is what I like the most, today 80% of the work I do are vectors illustrations.

How was the transition of being an illustrator to becoming a t-shirt designer?

It kinda started for no reason, one day I was surfing the web when I found www.camiseteria.com.br (It's kinda like threadless from Brazil) I was very interested and started to post my illustrations in form of t-shirt designs, I started to like doing that when my designs began to get approved and was getting a good money out of it so I looked for other sites that had the same system of work and never stopped.

How long did it take to start getting noticed and actually selling your artwork to big companies?

If I'm not wrong, it took about 6 month. At first the biggest challenge was to try to understand what kind of designs they liked the most, but after some time I realized that I had to do what I liked and not work on what other people would like, from tha point my work started getting bigger and better and my designs started getting acepted in a lot of places.

Tell us about other projects you have.

For more free templates visit www.imaginatee.com

As a right now I work in a design agency and that's taking most of my time, and we all know that whoever works on an agency never has time for any personal projects, but slowly I'm getting back to an old project I always had that is to create a studio to work on drawing cartoons like the ones we see on the newspaper. It's a complicated project but very soon you guys will hear about it. Besides that another project that I have going right now is www.imaginatee.com which is a site where I put up free t-shirt templates to help the people who send works to any t-shirt contest website. This project was born by the difficulty I had on finding photos of people wearing t-shirts where I could place my work in before it actually got printed, I believe everybody on this area needs those templates and I decided to create a place where we all can find what we need and help everyone.

What would you like to say to the young artists who are just starting to work on this area?

For everyone that is just beginning their journey I have to say: The first step is to keep an eye on good designers on the area, look up for designs to learn what is good and what is not, and bet on your on design feelings. It's important to understand the criticism that is always going to be there, and learn to separate things. I don't agree with that because before it's called a design I think it's an art and there is no such thing as something wrong when it comes to art, it depends on the taste of who is looking at it, you either like it or not but nothing is wrong, but always listen to suggestions, and the ones that hate on your work you can always ignore :)