Artists: Joel & Ashley of This Paper Ship
Hometown for Joel: Columbia, MD
Hometown for Ashley: East coast (military kid), mostly WV
and NC
Current town of residence: Saxapahaw, NC
Would you rather travel by plane,
train, car or ship?
A ship is the
most romantic option as well as the most fitting for us! However, seasickness
might be an issue, so our official answer is train. We've taken train trips
together in DC, Germany, Italy, and Scotland and hope to take many more!
I spend most of my work day...
Drawing,
taking pictures of drawings in progress, coloring drawings in Photoshop,
networking about drawings, shipping printed drawings to people all around the
world, and planning future drawings!
You can find me eating
__for breakfast.
Concoctions
that, under most standard definitions, would be considered lunch! Our
favorites: kale, sausage, feta, and eggs over easy; savory french toast with
seared grape tomatoes and sharp cheddar drizzled with honey; and puff pancakes
of any kind, especially involving the aforementioned savory ingredients. And of
course, there's the obligatory British cuppa (milky tea with 1 scoop of sugar)
for Ashley and a cup of French press coffee for Joel.
On the weekends, you can find
me...
Relaxing in
our loft apartment in a converted 1800's cotton mill and exploring the
surrounding town of Saxapahaw, NC; strolling around/catching a movie/tracking
down a food truck in Chapel Hill, Durham, or Raleigh; or exploring other
exciting areas of the beautiful state of North Carolina. We also occasionally
find ourselves visiting family in eastern NC, WV, CA, and Scotland when we can.
Got any pets? Tell us about them.
Four cats and
a chicken! Aki, Tsuki, and Pepper are our 3 "home" cats and Ginger is
our silly reclusive "studio" cat who lives in our cozy illustration
office. They're all rescue kitties and are all a little crazy in their own
ways. Henny, our chicken, lives at the local community garden down the hill and
next to a creek, and she's a feisty bird—in her 3 years she's fought off
raccoons, hawks, and even a fox!
What was the coolest, most
exciting thing that you ever bought?
Joel's
favorite piece is an old hand-carved statue of Tintin holding Snowy, about 1.5
feet tall, that he found in an old shop in the fishing village of Peterhead in
northern Scotland. He wouldn't fit in Joel's luggage, so he stayed out the
whole journey home on a plane, several subways, a bus, a train, and finally a
taxi ride. Several years later his sister-in-law went back to buy the other two
Tintin statues, but the shop was closed!
Our favorite
piece we bought together is our circa-1870's Golding Pearl #8 letterpress.
She's a beautiful cast-iron beast—the guy who refurbished it for us even got a
replica foot petal recast by a local blacksmith to replace her missing one!—and
her name is "Golda." She currently lives in our print shop right off
our main living area, right at home where
huge cotton-spinning machinery once was.
If you were a crayon, what color
would you be?
Ashley would
be fire engine red and Joel would be lime green.
What’s a song that you never get
sick of?
"When
You Wish Upon a Star" from Pinocchio!
If you could posses a superpower,
what would it be?
Flight! (Of
course, we could always choose superhuman drawing ability—but that's a not a
power, that's a skill...)
You’re stranded on a desert island, with only a
volleyball to keep you company. Luckily, you brought a book, a person and
an object. Who and what are they?
The Bible,
because it's the only book we'll ever need; each other, because we actually
enjoy spending that much time with each other, we make a really good team, and
we could make it the tropical getaway we always wanted; and a really good knife,
because otherwise building a hut out of bamboo and palm fronds would be a lot
more time-consuming.
Tell us about
your Nod Institute of Art print, how you made it or your inspiration behind it.
We love
nautical imagery for obvious reasons, and are constantly looking to
add more to our offerings for printed illustrations. At the same time, the
great thing about being an independent artist is that you can draw whatever you
want, whenever you want. One day it struck Ashley's fancy to draw a mermaid
surrounded by ocean-floor things while we were listening to the Peter
Pan soundtrack (at one point Wendy's "wonderful thought" is
a mermaid lagoon underneath a silver moon) and, lo and behold, "Mermaid
Lagoon" came into being!
