jabberwick

[jabberwick]

Darling little beasts.

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YOUR PAPER STYLE IS SO COOL???!!?! WRAAAGHADIGJFJSG HOW DO YOU DO IT HOW DID YOU COME UP WITH IT PLS 🙏

oh haha, thank you

The short answer is that I wanted to bring a sense of dimension and tactility to my work, the long answer is:

It was mostly just time and experimentation. I've played a lot with papery themes over the years, as I like how stylized-yet-dimensional origami can be. For my own work, i try to avoid a "flat" style- i want shapes to be stylized, but also present and weighted in 3D space. I like art that feels tactile and has a "touchable" feeling to it.

Cardboard and ribbons were a lot of what i tried to emulate early on

While not always emulating it 1 for 1, I took a lot of inspiration from how faces are folded in origami and cardboard sculptures:

This just kinda developed and evolved over time. Some of my early stuff leans into it more, and then some of my later stuff leans into it less. I think developing a style causes a lot of eb and flow as you learn to navigate it and move towards your goals. I got into abstracting faces, bodies and colours more and more, but paused sometimes to do realism studies.

Paper, cardboard and ribbons has just kinda been a touchstone that i repeatedly return to

I think it really kicked off as i found my rhythm in scrapbook-style work. It felt like the missing piece. It'd been something i did for years prior but I thought of it only through the lens of journal utility. As I unlocked the idea of it as art, the paper facet of my work just kinda fell into place.

Its something that im keen to just lean into and go really ham on now. As my aesthetic has become more papery, I wanted my characters to fit within it, and resemble paper as well- something i want to lean into and experiment with more and more. I feel like the puzzle is mostly complete and I get to just have fun within the boundaries of it.

I think if you want to develop a bold style, the thing that holds you back most is uncertainty about it. You can't really do things by halves or be shy in your decisions. You gotta go whole hog and do it with your chest. You'll make awkward stuff you don't like sometimes! And then that will inform your future decisions and you'll improve and grow.

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hello jabberwick, I love jack and merlin so much and wanted to hear about how you created hem/where they came from :3

Hiii this actually has a really long answer 🙃

Jack and merlin come from celebrating and accepting my own queerness, my transness, my autism.

Jack has a pretty long story:

Something that has consistently persisted throughout my work is this archetype. A thin, scrawny figure, a little too tall with arms a little too long. They never settled design-wise though. They were always just kinda haunted. They took different forms, but rarely wore clothes, and were an outlet for me to express abuse I was suffering, OCD, and symptoms I didn't at the time know were undiagnosed Autism

They were an amalgamation of everything I felt stuck in, everything I was dealing with alone. It was only as I escaped that life and found likeminded people to seek self acceptance among that this archetype started to change. First came Elvor, then Hickory (he also looked like this), then I combined the two into Lucille, who was a funny magical dragon person inspired particularly by the art of Beidak. Lucille slowly evolved. Became more dragonlike, and more associated with water. More importantly she represented a huge change in myself. It was around this time, when i started accepting my own nonbinary identity, that I started reffering to her by an alternative name: Jack. Any pronouns.

The piece I feel i really "found" early jack in, was this one here. Prior, I could never decide on his hair. Sometimes i depicted him bald, other times it was long, other times it was shoulder-length with a blunt fringe to mirror my own haircut at the time. But this change helped me almost like. "See" this character i'd been trying to create. Old themes came back, the lanky guy with the long arms returned but there was something just so fundamentally different this time around. He still went through hardships but he was loved, supported and accepted, and more importantly, it felt like he loved himself too.

Jack, as he is now, is first identifiable in this illustration. Exploring further stylisation, it was the very first time i gave him The Curls™️And it was just like....(: "ah. Yea. there he is. I've been looking for this guy for years."

As jack's design settled, he moved away from being a self-expressive character, and was just his own weird but sincere little guy, which i think hallmarked a sense of peace with my own trans identity.

Merlin came as a response to Jack. Like jack, he went through a few evolutionary states too, but it was much MUCH shorter, as by this stage I knew who I needed him to be. While jack was trans-nonbinary, he was also 8 feet tall and green and a shapeshifting magical dragon man with fins and scales and tails. I wanted a FtM character grounded in achievable humanity, representing me and the trans people around me, who depicted what trans people actually look like. A regular 5'3 chaotic trans guy: Beautiful and perfectly mundane.

Sorry for the essay and I hope this answers your question

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Muse 💚

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Roommates 🏳️‍🌈

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ok lmao immediately got a few "how do you pick where the line goes" and yeah! thats a valid question.

I use dark lines to define shadow and create clean edges. Knowing where those definitions need to be comes from experimenting. I often delete the lines entirely and do them a few more times. The goal is to find the places they feel strictly nessecary. Where they don't feel needed, they arent. You get better at making these choices the more you do it.

your art is so beautiful it makes me so. GAGHRHJ........ please jabberwick,, could you bless us with some lineart tips 🙏🙏

Hey anon! TY for the kind words!

I am often shunned for my line art methods, but here's a guide I whipped up about my own process!

My Bluesky

My Instagram

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I got asked for more examples displaying what my line art looks like with and without the colour underneath it, as to further display that not everything needs a line!

here are two studies i did with their isolated line art and colour layers.

This type of limited lineart is like. near impossible to do without putting colour down first! It is the best way imo to blend a painterly style with a line art style. It lets facets of the painterly rendering speak for itself without overworking it.

your art is so beautiful it makes me so. GAGHRHJ........ please jabberwick,, could you bless us with some lineart tips 🙏🙏

Hey anon! TY for the kind words!

I am often shunned for my line art methods, but here's a guide I whipped up about my own process!

My Bluesky

My Instagram

[jabberwick]

I love jack and merlin so much, i hope we get to see more of them/their lore etc ;u;

I KNOWWW i'm so sorry, I have been so busy with work, moving, and other life events that I've consistently put my fav guys on the backburner. Rest assured this is going on in my head at all times:

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Severance 🎈

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your art is so beautiful it makes me so. GAGHRHJ........ please jabberwick,, could you bless us with some lineart tips 🙏🙏

Hey anon! TY for the kind words!

I am often shunned for my line art methods, but here's a guide I whipped up about my own process!

My Bluesky

My Instagram

[jabberwick]

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick 🕯️💀

⭐ Bsky - Insta ⭐

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Mind's Eye

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The Obgob Family

Obgobs are a long standing species of mine, I created these guys over 10 years ago now! They're a type of Whiskered- the magical, fae-like denizens of my lore world, Looming.

⭐ Bluesky - Insta ⭐

[jabberwick]

I notice you like eyes a lot, and was wondering if they have a spiritual meaning to your work ? I always kinda interpreted them that way

Oh, that's awesome that you find your own meaning! I really encourage people to find their own things in my work.

My art has a lot of sentimental and personal meaning hidden in it. It's not something I talk about much, as I assume folks aren't all that interested.

Eyes are a Hallmark of my work, but I'm not a spiritual person! They do have meanings though, and you can kinda decode the story behind some of my art based on how they are presented.

I draw eyes in three main categories: floating, scribbled and ornamental.

Floating eyes represent either the subject of my focus or outside observation: an audience. Eyes that float lazy and scattered are at peace, while eyes that group and focus on a subject are not.

Scribbled eyes represent questions. Questions asked in fear, grief, and longing.

The ornamental eyes are objectively true answers to unanswered questions. But like. Not answers that anyone knows about yet. Answers that stare us in the face, that we wish we could know. Answers to questions as small as "where did I lose my favorite toy as a child" and as big as "what existed before the universe"

You don't know the answer yet. Maybe you never will. But its there. Staring at you. Silent and objectively true.

[jabberwick]

can anyone reccomend me some cool sockeye salmon merch?particularly stuff made by small business artists!

[jabberwick]

YOUR PAPER STYLE IS SO COOL???!!?! WRAAAGHADIGJFJSG HOW DO YOU DO IT HOW DID YOU COME UP WITH IT PLS 🙏

oh haha, thank you

The short answer is that I wanted to bring a sense of dimension and tactility to my work, the long answer is:

It was mostly just time and experimentation. I've played a lot with papery themes over the years, as I like how stylized-yet-dimensional origami can be. For my own work, i try to avoid a "flat" style- i want shapes to be stylized, but also present and weighted in 3D space. I like art that feels tactile and has a "touchable" feeling to it.

Cardboard and ribbons were a lot of what i tried to emulate early on

While not always emulating it 1 for 1, I took a lot of inspiration from how faces are folded in origami and cardboard sculptures:

This just kinda developed and evolved over time. Some of my early stuff leans into it more, and then some of my later stuff leans into it less. I think developing a style causes a lot of eb and flow as you learn to navigate it and move towards your goals. I got into abstracting faces, bodies and colours more and more, but paused sometimes to do realism studies.

Paper, cardboard and ribbons has just kinda been a touchstone that i repeatedly return to

I think it really kicked off as i found my rhythm in scrapbook-style work. It felt like the missing piece. It'd been something i did for years prior but I thought of it only through the lens of journal utility. As I unlocked the idea of it as art, the paper facet of my work just kinda fell into place.

Its something that im keen to just lean into and go really ham on now. As my aesthetic has become more papery, I wanted my characters to fit within it, and resemble paper as well- something i want to lean into and experiment with more and more. I feel like the puzzle is mostly complete and I get to just have fun within the boundaries of it.

I think if you want to develop a bold style, the thing that holds you back most is uncertainty about it. You can't really do things by halves or be shy in your decisions. You gotta go whole hog and do it with your chest. You'll make awkward stuff you don't like sometimes! And then that will inform your future decisions and you'll improve and grow.

[jabberwick]

My girlfriend and I love you Don't Starve animation so!!! much!!! Is there any chance you'd take on animated paper puppet commissions?

Aaa Frog and I are so glad you like it! We would consider taking on much smaller animated commissions. I'd love to do paper puppet commissions in the future in general. Stuff you could print and assemble yourself. They'd be so much fun to make, I think!!