Artists I Like: Volpini

A bit of an unusual post this week because here's an artist I found on Bluesky and never heard of. The art was so fun and compelling I assumed they were a well known professional. But I can't seem to find much other than their Bluesky page and an ArtStation page.

This stuff is great. It's got that impromptu cartooning style that reminds me of 60s and 70s cartoons. I can see this being animated for a 1978 special feature. Volpini's profile says they are a "character designer for animation" and it shows. Love it.

 

Artists I Like: Jordan Speer

I recently discovered artist Jordan Speer. I saw a random post on Bluesky and once I laid eyes on his work I just had to order a copy of his book Umbra.

It is a jaw-dropping work of art, and I have a new favorite artist.

Speer lives in Louisville, Kentucky. I lived in there when I was a kid, roughly between the ages of 2 and 8. I went to school at Lowell Elementary... which no longer exists. In fact my entire old neighborhood is gone because the airport took it decades ago. I still remember my first Halloween memories on those streets.

Much much later I moved back to the city with my new wife and we lived there in our early 20s.

So it is very nice to see a great great artist so close to home whose style is so perfectly suited to my taste!

Whimsical, colorful, bold, cartoony, and FUN. This is the good stuff. So go check him out. And pick up Umbra... holy hell it's affordable and lovely. It's a huge picture book telling a story without words. Very nice.

 

Artists I Like: J. Freels

Another artist I like is Jeff Freels, or J. Freels. I know very little about this creator other than he created Bean! the d2 RPG and he is visually impaired.

Bean is a great little game. The central idea is it's a world of anthropomorphic beans and you use actual beans as dice. See, you get a sack of beans and paint one side of some number of them. When you roll the painted side, it is a 1 and when you roll the unpainted side it is a 0. Or something close to that. It's a coin toss. But unlike lame single coin toss systems (50/50 for everything? Boring.), this is a pool system. More beans = more chances for higher scores.

But that's a digression and unrelated to the meat of the post: the art.

Freels is an artist after my own heart. A great cartoonist! His bean characters are swanky and cool, simple and direct. And I love them.

There isn't a lot to be found about Jeff Freels outside his own website. But he has a nice bio page that explains quite a bit about who he is, what he does, and so forth. I don't care about the Reiki Master stuff, I just like the wonderful cartoon art.