Where do these designs come from?

What is the design process?

I like to answer people "staring at the wall" but it's more like combing through inspiration and giving it time to live in my brain (maybe while swimming).

I eventually put pencil to paper, here is a sample of some of the original drawings.

The drawings are then scanned into the computer and manipulated, resized, and if symmetrical, the flipped side is added.

After printing the image, (pencil smudges too easily) I hand cut each design using a thin paper.

The process of cutting allows me to determine the line size paper can support and add a LOT of detail. Each design takes about 6-8 hours to cut, I took notes.

Finally, the cut paper is scanned again into the computer where it is brought into Photoshop to be cleaned up, then brought into Illustrator for vectorization.

I have a machine that helps me cut out the design but it's quite unreliable and I need to do a lot of cleaning up afterwards.

I assemble everything by hand and draw the type on very carefully.