Is Rudy Willingham a marketing master, an artist, or a content creator with 4.5 million followers on TikTok and more than 440,000 on Instagram? The answer is yes. Rudy creates playful, engaging work that effortlessly functions across platforms—social channels, TV ads, print ads, billboards, guerrilla marketing, and so on. He employs a variety of techniques, including street art (transforming a neighborhood fire hydrant into Homer Simpson, for example); stop motion, a process in which he prints and cuts nearly every frame of the video himself; forced perspective, which involves holding up a cutout in front of a large object to create an optical illusion; and cutouts, in which he literally removes sections of a portrait and fills the voids with something beautiful found in real life, like flowers or a sunset.
Rudy spent a decade as an advertising copywriter, and he knows from experience how to deliver for clients. And yet his work never feels calculated. His content is intentionally low-fi, his primary tools being paper, scissors, and his imagination. Using Photoshop would be faster, but then he’d lose what makes his work so special: its unexpectedness, charm, and humanity. Because rather than impress people, Rudy wants to connect with them. “I try to add a pop of positivity to people’s feeds to make them smile and brighten their day,” he says.
Select clients
Whole Foods Market, ESPN, Hasbro, WWE, the NBA, Volvo, Starbucks, Amazon, Sony, Max, Lionsgate, NBC Universal, Paramount+, Puma, Reebok, Zillow, Coachella, Virgin Voyages, State Farm, Microsoft, Pixar, Cisco, T-Mobile, Laureus World Sports Awards, Electronic Arts, United Airlines, Pearl Jam, and Adidas.
Select press
"Artist Uses Pop Culture Paper Cutouts to Make the World Around Him a Lot More Fun," My Modern Met
"Sticky Pete Carroll mural honors the gum-chomping former Seahawks coach," The Seattle Times
"The Art of Everything," Gigantic magazine
"Whole Foods Debuts Whimsical Stop-Motion Ads by TikTok Creator," Muse by Clio
"Rudy Willingham Creates Valentine's Day Cards for Paper," Paper magazine
Bootstrapping in America interviews Rudy Willingham
"How this artist created a viral video of Simone Biles using 100 cutouts," Today.com
Bonus content
Rudy is also a DJ, and if you’re looking for a summer anthem, we highly recommend his self-released single “Pool Party,” which made a splash on KEXP when it was released in 2019.
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