From TXST Student to Rock Poster Artist: Billy Perkins’ Journey to Designing for Music Legends

Art was the only answer for Billy Perkins. The question was: What kind of art?

Perkins, who graduated from TXST in 1987 with a degree in communication design, explored his passion for art during his years as a college student. Though his career would take twists and turns, he credits his experience at TXST with setting the stage for his ultimate success as a poster artist who has worked with the likes of Fleetwood Mac, the Foo Fighters, AC/DC, The Cure, and Alice in Chains.

“I’m happy doing work for all these bands, but I’m most proud of the fact that I’ve clawed my way up that ladder from a family who had never gone to college before,” Perkins says. 

Perkins started drawing as a kid in Belton, inspired by Marvel Comics and psychedelic album covers. In a roundabout way, it was art that first introduced Perkins to TXST. His eighth grade art teacher, Mike Amato, took his class on a field trip to the old Aquarena Springs amusement park (now Spring Lake) in 1977. It was Perkins’ first introduction to a college campus. He was impressed by the San Marcos Campus, but he wasn’t convinced that he wanted to go to college. “I didn’t know if it would ruin the experience of making art for me,” he recalls.

Perkins was not ready for his education to end after high school, so he attended Temple Junior College (now Temple College) as an affordable and low-risk way to test the waters for a few semesters.

“After working for a year in chemical plants on the Texas coast, I knew that was not the life for me,” he says. “That was when I committed to continuing my degree plan at Southwest Texas State.”

Once he enrolled, Perkins found professors who helped him shape his artistic interests into a professional path. He credits Chris Hill, former adjunct professor and founder of HILL Branding, a Houston-based design and marketing solutions company, with teaching him how to adapt his work as an illustrator and his eye for composition and design to a commercial focus.

“Billy was a great student,” Hill says. “I knew early on that his creative spark and passion would be the foundation for his success. Besides being an amazing artist and designer, he’s a great guy. I'm very proud of Billy.”

Hill’s Advanced Creative Design class (held all day on Saturdays) was so inspirational to Perkins, in fact, that he stayed in San Marcos for an extra semester after graduation just to take his class again.

“Chris has an amazing mind,” Perkins says. “It was so inspirational and made me want to just really open up my mind and try to think the way he did, because he is a brilliantly creative person. We still keep in touch to this day.”

While Perkins was still at TXST, his younger brother enrolled at the university. They worked on art projects together and joined the Sigma Chi fraternity. Perkins’ niece graduated from TXST after them, too.  

“We’ve started this family legacy that did not exist before us,” he says. “And now there's three.”

After graduating, Perkins moved to Austin to pursue a career with design firms and advertising agencies. The economy was in a tough place, and he couldn’t find the right job. He ended up keeping a job at a screen-printing shop he’d had as a student and became its art director from 1990 to 1992, when the company went out of business.

“Once again, there I was with nothing to do,” Perkins says. “While I was at the print shop, my interest in posters began to kindle because I noticed the poster series for events in Austin like the Austin Music Awards and Carnaval Brasileiro. The shop also did flat printing, and, unlike other print shops, they screen-printed posters there. So, I became interested in the various printing methods.” 

Through working at the print shop, Perkins built a contact list of artists, bands, music venues, and other businesses, like Chuy’s Tex-Mex restaurant, which hired him for freelance graphic work that kept him financially afloat. He says he created from three to six posters a year through the 1990s, and he sold them as collectible pieces for fans.

“I did all the poster work I could get, but I didn’t have the connections to get as much as I wanted,” he says. “I did get to make some right off the bat for bands like Arc Angels and Concrete Blonde.”

He credits patience and his love of music and art as the reasons he stuck with it, even though it was a struggle financially. Eventually, his hard work and creativity began to pay off as his reputation spread and he took on more poster design work.

Perkins started to appear on the radar of larger bands in the late 1990s, and in 2002, he helped start Flatstock, a San Francisco poster show that tours around the country to this day, including as part of the SXSW music festival in Austin.

“Much of my name recognition outside of Austin has to be attributed to the Flatstock poster shows,” he says. “The group shows garnered a lot of attention, and we have been doing multiple Flatstocks every year since in cities all over the world. It’s an ever-expanding brand. Our group efforts helped propel many working poster artists to some notoriety and have also made life a lot of fun."

These days, Perkins works in a recently remodeled 1950s brick home in Temple. His office occupies an old spare living room, which he remodeled in 2020 with sliding warehouse doors to separate it from the house. There’s also an adjacent room for his printer, flat files, and a light table. Multiple windows allow ample natural light, which is crucial to designers and illustrators.

Perkins says the time it takes for him to illustrate and print a poster depends on the complexity of the design. If he’s working with a band that he hasn’t heard before, he likes to close his eyes and listen to their music for a while and wait for the imagery to form in his mind. A fully illustrated poster he created for a Metallica concert—October 18, 2018, at the PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania—took him 150 hours to complete, which he called “extreme.” Others can take 40 to 50 hours.

Authors of poster art books, including Art of Modern Rock, and several others have published Perkins’ work dating back to the early 2000s, which has helped propel his reputation.  

“I’ve done well over a dozen prints for Widespread Panic, over 15 posters for taped performances for Austin City Limits, a series of show posters for H-E-B Center at Cedar Park over the last decade, and a few posters each for Cheap Trick, Alice In Chains, X, ZZ Top, Black Pumas, and others,” he says. “I was Cheech & Chong’s primary artist from 2008 until 2024. Some of my recent big gigs include Widespread Panic’s recent Valentine’s Day shows in Austin, Foo Fighters taping for ACLTV, Sleep Token at Cedar Park Center, and AC/DC in Arlington last year."

Success hasn’t come easy for Perkins, but with talent and resilience, he’s built a successful career in a difficult industry. He credits TXST with helping him get his start.

“Working at an ad agency wasn’t what life had in store for me,” Perkins says. “It was working in my own studio, being my own boss, and doing the kind of work that I want to do. Texas State has played an important role in my career in helping me discover that.”