Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Jeff Williams

It began back in 1995 when Jeff was working on a campaign for Barq's root beer. He saw Christian Clayton's artwork "Sweet Dreams Baby" in an illustration annual and decided he had to get Christian and his brother Rob -- the Clayton Brothers -- to do some posters for Barq's.

Unfortunately the client took the work home one night and showed it to his daughter, she said it scared her, so they killed everything.
They still ended up producing a pretty cool campaign for Barq's, but more importantly Jeff had made a couple of new friends. Both Jeff Williams and his creative partner, copywriter Jeff Kling got the Clayton's working on designs for some tattoo's.

In 1997 they got the Clayton brothers involved in the Miller Genuine Draft campaign they were working on, shooting a few TV spots at one of their art openings. The Clayton brothers managed to scare a whole new set of clients with their art and some of the interesting people that came to the party, so none of those spots ever got on the air, but we did get to air one of the spots of a guy going to a tattoo studio to get a tattoo, his friend meets him outside when he is done with a six of MGD.

All of Jeff's tattoos (except one) are based on paintings by the Clayton brothers. They were all done at the Purple Panther Tattoo studio on Sunset Blvd. in Los Angeles.

The one exception is the girl tattoo, which is a tribute to Jeff's friend Sierra. This tattoo is not finished yet. She is holding jumper cables and the cables run down her leg, but he needs to add the battery charger at the bottom and the words, "A willing helper."

Next time you talk to Jeff, you can get him to tell you what his mom thinks of all his tattoos.