Hi, I’m Jarfly! But you can call me Hannah if you please. As a digital artist, I specialize in character design and illustration. Although most of my art is digital art these days, I also enjoy experimenting with all kinds of traditional mediums.
I am passionate and inspired by nature, especially animals. I’ve always loved animals, the living and non-living. I’ve been collecting animal bones since I was about 6, when I found my first coyote skull on a mountain hike. I was awestruck that something so beautiful and delicate could simply be found in the leaves, like a precious gemstone. Collecting bones and furs made it possible to study wild animals so much more closely and intimately in death than I’d ever have been able to in life. In preserving and displaying animal pelts and skulls, and using them in my art, I feel like I’m able to honor them and give them a sort of second life, a celebration of life and nature. I also consider myself an amateur taxidermist, although my focus is primarily on skulls and bones. I am a rescuer at heart and use all things I collect to inspire my work wherever possible, including reclaiming and repurposing garbage. One man’s trash is Jarfly’s treasure! I hope that my works can give people a new appreciation for animals and nature and all the details that make life (and death) so beautiful.
Bio
Hannah Henderson is a self-taught artist heavily influenced by her artistic family members, several of whom attended Ringling College of Art & Design. She was homeschooled alongside her earliest collaborator, biggest fan & and partner in crime, her younger brother. She has been practicing art and drawing since she could hold a crayon and always keeps a sketchbook by her side. Hannah has been working semi-professionally as an artist from a young age doing freelance illustration and design work including and a weekly comic strip in the local newspaper as a teen. She has been doing digital illustration and character design work for over 10 years, and it has become her main source of income and fulfillment. Battling chronic health issues and mental illness, Hannah developed her online persona, JOLLY JARFLY, and began working from home with digital art and drawing tablets. She has lived most of her life between FL and KY, but now lives here in Spartanburg with her partner and their menagerie of rescue animals. Most of her days are spent tending and observing her creatures and plants and drawing silly pictures of them.
