Today we’re visiting the studio of Jarrett and Jerome Pumphrey, talented brothers with amazing combined backgrounds of creative direction, entrepreneurship, graphic design, technical writing, illustration, and fatherhood. Their delightful picture book, The Old Truck, utilized a colorful stamping technique – you can read more about it, as well as try it yourself, on their website! Based in Texas, the two are hard at work on their second picture book The Old Boat, which will be released next month.
Photo 1: We each have our own studios. This is Jarrett’s and serves as the space we use to collaborate. At the center of the space is a giant, sturdy workbench. It’s perfect for all the printmaking activities we get up to. We’re right in the middle of making a bunch of prints for preorders of our new book THE OLD BOAT.
Photo 2: We keep our flat file storage under the bench. We use some of the drawers for storing supplies, but mainly, they store all the stamps and prints we make for every project we do.
Photo 3: This is Whiskey. She’s our studio assistant. Her primary duty is to lie down right in the way so we’re constantly almost tripping as we move around the space. She keeps us on our toes.
Photo 4: We like to be surrounded by the work of creators we admire, so on one wall Jarrett has a collection of original art from illustrator friends and favorites.
Photo 5: And then on the opposing wall, he has a library of books.
Images courtesy of Jarrett & Jerome Pumphrey
Today, we’ll be visiting Barbara DiLorenzo, a New Jersey-based illustrator, writer, and teacher! Her books include Renato and the Lion (Viking Books, 2017) and Quincy: The Chameleon Who Couldn’t Blend In (Little Bee Books, 2018). In addition to this, Barbara has gone skydiving, hang gliding, surfing, and whitewater rafting. YES! In 2019, we were delighted to invite her to our library to read, make 
I sit at this desk and Zoom teach art classes – hence the big light and mic stands to hold cameras. I’m a messy artist, so I have to clean up frequently. Otherwise the clay and paint would be all over the keyboard and mouse.
This is another angle of this area – showing that one whole drafting table is covered in paint and other supplies. Even vitamins. Those are important!
Daily, we lay our fingers on our QWERTY keyboards. But while we type out words, German artist Robert Dörfler conjures portraits, buildings, animals, and landscapes. An artist with a mechanical easel and alphabetic brushes, his 
But one day I came across other specimens of the older typewriter art again and realised that there might be some logical connection between the two styles, figuring that some ASCII art techniques could be applied to the typewriter, and I could apply what I had learned from the newer style to the older… with mixed success. Of course, the paper page isn’t limited to columns and rows the way a fixed-width screen of text is on a computer, so you can still manage to go outside of the box and push boundaries outside a strict grid even typing with straight lines.
Typewriter drawing can feel like you’re using some analogue Photoshop with layers and a wide range of colours, except of course without any “undo” function for erasing mistakes that might come up.
How do you translate landscapes and buildings to typewriter keys?
What is the most difficult thing about creating a piece?
What brands of typewriters do you use?
Name your top 5 typewriter keys to use, and tell us why!