Rising Stars: Meet Tuffy “Lil Tuffy” Tuffington

Today we’d like to introduce you to Tuffy “Lil Tuffy” Tuffington.

Hi Tuffy, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
Ever since I was young, I had an interest in both art and music. My walls were covered with posters, album covers and pages from magazines. I was granted early college acceptance and spent my last semester of high school interning at a design firm in downtown Cincinnati. They hired me on as an assistant for the summer and that was the foundation of my design career. I moved to Pittsburgh to study design at Carnegie Mellon but ultimately received my BFA in a self-defend major from their Art College.

I landed a job doing web design for a fintech in the early days of the internet. That company was acquired and I moved to San Francisco. I was very ambitious and thrived for a few years in that industry but ultimately found it unsatisfying and left the industry to. freelance, bartend and book bands at local bars. I started making flyers for the shows I was promoting and ultimately met Ron Donovan and Chuck Sperry from infamous Firehouse Kustom Rock Art and I began hand-printing posters for them.

Over the next few years, I set out on my own and began traveling to festivals all over the US and Europe. Eventually, I left the bar industry to focus on my poster career full-time. Today, I produce over 100 posters a year, exhibit in galleries and festivals around the world and chair The Poster Institute, a non-profit dedicated to the art of the poster and producing poster-centric events.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I never knew that “poster artist” was a job one could actually have. I collected posters from icons like Art Chantry, Kozik, Coop and others but it simply didn’t occur to me that I could just do it so that process was purely accidental happenstance. I was dabbling with it as a side-hustle when I met the Firehouse guys and they took me in. I quickly started picking up clients and it became a second-job (side-hustle). Aside from very serious, non-poster-related accidents, everything just fell into place! It was a daunting decision to quit my bar jobs and focus on it full-time but now my only regret is not doing it earlier.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I’ve been designing and hand-printing limited-edition posters for almost 25 years. It took a long time to figure out where I fit in the music industry but once it clicked it CLICKED. Officially, my first screen-printed poster was back in 2002 and was for my own birthday party. The band booked that night was a relatively unknown blues/rock duo from Ohio called The Black Keys. That poster landed me some local club clients and within a few short years I was doing posters for the 30th anniversary of CBGB’s and traveling all over with my art. The joy and excitement of working with my favorite bands was so much more rewarding than anything the corporate world could offer – including money. I decided I’d much rather be happy and poor than rich and miserable.

I made the decision early on to fully commit to my own creative direction rather than be a tool for someone else’s vision and that allowed me to quickly define my own style, brand and aesthetic. Early on, that might have meant I didn’t get a few jobs but, within a few years, those same opportunities came back and I could do those jobs on my terms.

Is there any advice you’d like to share with our readers who might just be starting out?
I think the greatest advice I can give anyone starting out is to believe in yourself. I think too many people relegate what they love doing to after-work or weekend pursuits hoping someday that imbalance will magically flip but it requires intentionality and commitment. It’s terrifying to remove the safety net of a steady job and income but you have to make that leap and go all-in. You might fail but I still think it’s better to at least try rather than spend the rest of your life wondering about what could have been.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://lil-tuffy.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lil_tuffy/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/liltuffy
• Other: https://posterinstitute.org