Heart & Harbor Logbook

  There are some sounds that never really leave you. For me, it’s the call of a loon. Long before Florida became home, many chapters of my life were written on the lakes of Wisconsin and Minnesota. Dawn often arrived with a cool layer of mist drifting across the water, and somewhere in the distance a loon would call. There was always something hauntingly beautiful about it. Quiet enough to make you stop what you were doing and simply listen. I’ll never forget watching one glide beneath our canoe in the clear water of the Boundary Waters. Even underwater, those bold black and white feathers were unmistakable. Moments like that stay with you. High speed/ time lapse version: Full length feature film (15 min lol) As I worked on this drawing today, I found myself thinking about those lakes, the people I shared them with, and how certain memories seem to grow more meaningful with time. A single bird can carry an entire chapter of your life. This one is for those quiet morni...

  Funny how things work. A wall-mount sailfish, offered up by a neighbor. I've always wanted a sailfish or a marlin or any other large billfish to hang on the wall. Well, I didn't get to catch it, but, there it is on the wall in our lanai. It fits the room great: I picked up a simple overhead rig with a ring light and phone mount and hit record. The framing isn’t perfect, and I learned a few things along the way, but sometimes that’s exactly the point. You don’t wait until you know how to do something, you do it once and learn from it. It's fun to learn new things about making videos and getting to apply them in sharing my art makes it even better.  -- D & J

Coastal Florida has been a constant source of inspiration for my work. The Gulf, the wildlife, the salt air, and the rhythms of life near the water all find their way into my sketchbook sooner or later. Of all those subjects, few are more recognizable, or more loved, than the sea turtle. When we launched Heart & Harbor , the idea was simple. Bring the artwork living in my sketchbooks onto something people could wear. The bold linework, the influence of traditional tattoo art, and the imagery of the coast all came together to create pieces that felt connected to the places and experiences that inspire them. The sea turtle quickly became one of those designs. Over the years, it has remained one of the most popular pieces in the collection. What makes that especially interesting is that while I’ve shared the finished artwork countless times, I never documented the process behind creating it. So today I decided to change that. Rather than digging through old files, I sat dow...

  The compass rose is an important element of a nautical chart. Without it, charts would be far less useful to those unfamiliar with the area being referenced. Always pointing north, much like Polaris guiding mariners toward safe harbors, the compass rose provides a critical point of reference for navigation. These symbols have appeared on maps and charts for centuries, dating back to the Catalan Atlas of 1375. Early versions were known as wind roses because they indicated prevailing wind directions rather than magnetic headings. As magnetic compasses became more common, chartmakers incorporated the compass roses we recognize today, oriented around magnetic north. This piece is another from the archives. I don't believe we've ever turned it in to a store design, but it's one I've always liked. The compass rose is a geometric design that began with a ruler, measurements, and carefully laid out pencil guidelines. I didn't have the camera rolling for that part of the p...