Issue 166

Hello!

Winter is in full swing here in AZ. It's been rainy and relatively cold. I haven't worn shorts for over a month! Things here at the JP Creative Studio are humming along with freelance work and svs taking most of my time. However, I have been able to carve out a little space for some personal work, as you'll see below.

Alright, here's 5 things I thought you'd find interesting this weekend.

Enjoy!

---

LATEST

I do all kinds of things that never end up in the newsletter, so this spot in the header here is just a quick run down of what I've done recently that I didn't want to devote an entire segment to:

• Drawing Inspiration Roulette: 1, 2, 3​
• Latest Podcast Episode: How to Build a Fanbase​
• Previous Episode: Pop Culture Mastery with Jason Edmiston​
• Patreon Process Post: Rabbit Ride​

​

---

1) Dusk Bunnies

From the Drawings Unit

​

The dusk bunnies come out at sunset. Can you spot all of them hidden throughout? There's 26 of them.

This is my 3rd winter in AZ since moving here in 2019 and while I love the sunshine, I miss those big snowy days we'd get in Utah and Connecticut. I think this piece is me working through those feelings.

I've been working on this on and off since December and it went through a handful of iterations before landing on a fox and a boy fishing. I knew it needed one more little element to make it special, and the idea of the dusk bunnies came to me. (Alison coined the name, brilliant!)

These little guys are like mini-abominable snowmen, the size of rabbits. They are curious fur-balls who come out at dusk, and are mostly harmless unless threatened. Here's a bunch of sketch explorations of them:

​

I made this into a print for my shop! It's available in three sizes and ships out immediately.

ORDER A PRINT HERE

PATREON: Join now and see how I make illustrations like Dusk Bunnies from start to finish. Every week I show patrons the process of at least one drawing. At the end of the month some patrons get all my working files to learn from and pick apart. Sign up here: LINK​

---

2) The Homes and Studios of Famous Artists

From the Cultural Archives Concern

Photographer Isabelle Baldwin has curated and impressive image thread of the homes and studios of famous artists. The spaces range from ostentatious to austere, flamboyant to quaint, but there's one thing that they all have in common is personality.

The spaces are filled with furniture, art, and objects that are each little flourishes of individuality that tell you the people living there have their own vision. It seems like many of the items they've collected where rescued from the side of the road or collected from roadside antique shops and given a second life as a work of art to be sat upon, read the newspaper over, or just to add character to the space.

These spaces feel like they were designed for two things: Creation and restoration. You either want to curl up and read a book or sling paint on a canvas, both sides of the same coin.

Here's a few of my favorites. See the rest here: LINK​

Guy de Rougemont’s home — South of France

Salvador Dalí, Casa Dalí — Portlligat, Spain

Barbara Hepworth’s St Ives home – Cornwall, UK

Jean Cocteau’s home, Villa Santo Sospir — Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, France

---

3) Surreal symbolic art of Helvetica Blanc

From the Illustrators Division

Gosh, I just love the work of Helvetica Blanc. Based in the Pacific Northwest, with a back ground in graphic design, Helvetica is "an artist exploring mysticism, the subconscious, and worldbuilding with an emphasis on form and texture."

The compositions, shapes, textures, and colors hint to an unknown world of iconography that feels familiar but altogether alien. Like, if we discovered a long dead civilization on Pluto and all we had left were their statues and art, I feel like it would look something like this.

More here:

Website: LINK​

Twitter: LINK​

Prints: LINK​

---

4) The Globus INK, Soviet Gearpunk Tech

From the Department of Space Exploration

​

The Soviet space program used completely different controls and instruments from American spacecraft. One of the coolest of these instruments is the GLOBUS. This showed the cosmonauts their spacecrafts location above earth and it used some astonishingly sophisticated engineering do its job.

You see this isn't a digital computer here, "this navigation instrument was an electromechanical analog computer that used an elaborate system of gears, cams, and differentials to compute the spacecraft's position."

Wow.

this stuff just fires up my imagination. Who says digital computers are the way of the future? I imagine this thing is solar flare proof, doesn't lose information if the power goes out, and just looks sturdy as heck. Makes me rethink what kind of tech I want to use in my sci-fi comics.

More photos and information here: LINK​

(Kind of cool: Scroll to the bottom to see a comment by "Unknown" who says he has a working Globus in his collection with a link to a photo. Followed the link to find out it's Steve Jurvetson's Flickr account. Jurvetson is on the board of Spacex and is a huge space nut.)

---

5) On the Anti-Library

From the Inspirational Thought Unit

I have a lot of books. I forget who said this...or even if this is how it was said, but it's how I feel about collecting books: your bookshelf should not be a collection of your accomplishments, but of your aspirations.

Have I read them all? No. I have flipped through them countless of times. They're little hotspots of inspiration. In an effort to remove myself from too much algorithmic influence I keep going back to my bookshelf (and the bookshelves of others) to find things that I wouldn't normally come across while on social media or doing a google search.

Last week I was introduced to the concept of an anti-library from this article: LINK​

It was affirming:

I don't want to promote irresponsible consumerism of reading material, and I'm not suggesting you go out and buy a library wholesale, but if you see a book that looks cool and you can afford it, pick it up even if you know you aren't going to get to it right away. It'll be a reminder of what you don't yet know.

Steve Jobs said that creativity is just connecting dots. In order to connect them, first you have to collect them.

---

That's all for this week. Thank you for reading this newsletter and hope you have a great weekend!

-Jake

​

---

My sponsor for this newsletter is…me. It's me, because I'm not accepting sponsors for my email list, and don't plan to any time soon. Really, I'd just like people to buy stuff from my shop. If you like this newsletter, you can support it a few ways:

​Order something from the shop (Best)

​Back a kickstarter when I launch one (Also Best)

​Support me on Patreon (Second Best)

​Share the newsletter with a friend (Third best)

​Shop for art supplies using my affiliate links* (Fourth best)

Mention it on social media (Fifth best)

I'd appreciate any of these when you can. Thanks!

>>Any amazon link I post is an affiliate link<<

​