Punk rock, science fiction movies, and dark art are
all part of Tod’s ethos and inspire his illustrations
which eventually transform into a custom piece of
clothing for a client. As the frontman for his own punk
rock band, Houston based DieFast, Tod’s creative
outlets do not stop there; he also paints and sculpts
in both his L.A. and Houston clothing design studios
commuting between the two cities, Houston, where
he owns a home, where his band is based, and where
he anticipates opening a store in the near future, and
L.A., where Junker Designs business is primarily run.
Junker Designs has been in business since 2001, and
Tod has been mutating, ravaging, deconstructing, and
custom making clothes for musicians for over 15 years,
and when asked about inspiration and overcoming
“creative block,” Tod acknowledged his own:
I have had a block for six months to a year, so I have
been drawing and working on scripts in the meantime,
and trying to get back to the other place which is sci-fi.
Mostly, I do rock bands and when you rock and roll it
out for however many years it starts to feel the same. I
guess when you are talking about inspiration, I heard
someone else describe it—I am like a vampire. I would
rather work in a creative type community like when
you work on a movie that really gets the ideas going,
your idea or someone else’s, and something gets
added to it, and that gets slipped around and then it
gets kicked down the field really fast, and you know
about the turnaround time so you have to come up
with the concept, and finalize the concept with a bunch
of input pretty quickly, and then do something about
it, and then produce something. I feel like a vampire
and I also feel like I am kind of cheating because
luckily, other people have seeds of an idea and tell me
to do my thing to it. I definitely get inspired by being
around other people. It’s an illusion that artists work by
themselves. You can’t ever really work like that. If your
art is sustaining you it is only because other people
sustain you.
Tod’s creative process is a pretty simple one; he
likes to listen to music when he is working. He most
definitely does not like to listen to punk rock because
as he puts it, “Why would I want to hear it?” he asks.
Because that’s what I play!” There are times when
Tod does like to work in silence but those times are
rare. “I seem to be the most creative if I play the
same CD for 8 hours straight,” he confesses. Tod still
listens to a lot of KISS and Rush, and a moody band
similar in his words to Bauhaus called White Lies. He
often searches YouTube for white noise with different
variations running as long as 10 hours at a time. It
helps him focus on his inventiveness, vision, and
imagination, allowing him to design such amazing
pieces you see on the likes of Dave Navarro, Johnny
Depp and longtime friend, Alice Cooper’s bass player
and frontman of his own band, “Beasto Blanco” Chuck
Garric.
Venturing outside of his comfort zone is something
that Tod is used to, not only with his designs, but taking
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