Author: jankhambrams

Update! Feb 2023

It’s been a while since there’s been a post here! I’m not sure how much I’m going to, but we’ll see! My site crashed last year and was down for a few months. Lost some posts. So, no time like the present to at least get things up to date a bit!

Here’s some art from the last bit, to show off where I’m at now!

  • A scrap metal bunker floats on a small island, above a sprawling badlands. There's balloon-shaped trees floating on their own islands around it, with a broken planet with a ring around it in the turquoise sky.
  • A tree leans over a cliff ledge with a spirally sky in the background, and little metal bunkers floating toward it. In the sea is a bunch of rocky outcroppings.
  • A giant, steam-powered walking village wanders through a desert on spindly legs. A rope ladder hangs from behind it. There are giant turquoise trees that look like snails growing in the background, which is a hazy, cloudy sky. Some giant yellow-shelled snails wander the foreground.
  • A bright white cyborg whale cruises through the water. It is powered by jet turbines, has a pair of metallic fins, a laser cannon mounted to its forehead, and circuitry accenting its eyes and fin.

I’ve been leaning into digitally-coloring my ink drawings and having a lot of fun with it. Something I’m especially proud of is how much better depth and texture I’m adding, as well as increasingly-expressive line art. I find that embracing the loose and controlled-chaos of my work is beneficial to what I want to achieve. Plus it’s fun!

The three digital illustrations here are from my Ominous Doom Planet, world. I’ve been exploring and expanding upon it more. It’s a great playground to see where my creativity takes me.

Some lore: Those floating scrap-metal bunker things are from a cult I’ve been referring to as the “Temple of Tetanus”. It’s delightfully bizarre, isn’t it? Anyway, my thought is they’re like these not-dead-not-alive cyborg types who aim to catalog things and discover the purpose of their existence. And it’s an absurd existence, at that.

They construct these metal bunkers that often are floated on a chunk of ground. What a cool way to travel! Especially since gravity is strange here, on the edge of reality.

Album art for an album called Otherworlds, by The Astronaut King and Jank Hambrams. It portrays a mountainous landscape with two spiky, scrap metal bunkers. There are small plateaus, fluffy yellow and turquoise trees, and a path leading toward a bunker in the distance.

Oh! I should mention: My buddy The Astronaut King and I have a new split album up for pre-order. It has my art, his awesome spaghetti-western-in-space guitar music, and my delightfully bizarre “madman electronica” on it.

Two musicians. Two distinct styles. Ten songs. Two tales set in the Otherworlds. All awesome. We each have a song released right now, with another one coming sometime soon! Go check it out. I’m certain y’all will love it!

Well, there’s a fun tidbit for y’all to muse over! I fully intend to upload some more sometime soon. Been busy busy busy!

January Art Thoughts

Hey friends! Figured I’d write up some thoughts I’m having on Twitter, and share some art I’ve done in the last little bit.

Here’s a tree I sketched out for my dad’s birthday recently, with some indigo paints a friend gifted me and some muddy-green ink I picked up that I really like.

Here’s some thoughts I posted to Twitter today, that I think are a nice bit of insight to keep me going:

I can’t remember who posted it, but I saw something like “artists need plenty of time to do nothing”, and honestly? For real. Making stuff, at least for me, requires a massive amount of focus and energy to channel things onto paper. That, on top of more typical life shit lol.

So with that in mind I feel better about not hammering stuff out like in an assembly line. And even if I was? Still would need proper rest time.

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A healthy boundary I’m developing in regard to my ambitions, is “what I do and can do is good enough.” I see all this cool shit people make that I love the look of, and instead of having high expectations I just let myself make what I make and do a loose study if I’m so inclined.

I’m hitting a point where I’m fairly content with my level of skill and craft. I am playing around and figuring out what I wanna say, beyond making neat little vignettes to soothe my soul with. Biggest things seem to be “ha isn’t life fucking absurd” and “just gotta keep going.”

I think these speak for themselves, for the most part, but I’ll elaborate a bit just for my own sake, to get some more thoughts out.

A big thing I ran into for ages was having lofty ideals and ambitions, with no clear idea how to get there and limited energy just to brute force it. Even despite that, I’m proud of a lot of what I’ve done and the personal growth I’ve had.

My goal moving forward is self-fulfillment and sustainability. And remembering to live. Art isn’t just putting marks on a page. Music isn’t just hammering out some notes. A big part of it is in studying from life and studying craft — this includes not just learning to do the thing, but learning to say what I want with the thing.

Much of this is related to like, finding the light in the darkness. The world is a deeply chaotic, often unpleasant, but also beautiful place. Giving contrast to and bringing awareness to parts of it can really be enlightening and also sometimes encouraging, despite the deeply dark parts of reality.

Existence, this planet, the things we’ve got, us… it’s all an extremely unlikely thing in this infinite universe we live in. And there’s a lot to do if we’re going to keep existing, but that’s not the focus of this post.

I guess my point is, keep going, keep doing the thing, appreciate it ’til we can’t. I dunno, this post got more existential than I anticipated. I hope y’all got something out of this post, too!

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