🌸 Spring 2026 • Heartfelt Quarterly

Creating heartfelt worlds for the curious, the kind, and the young at heart.

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Gettin’ Crafty

Let's get physical :)

As many of you know, I am a Visual Storyteller & Illustrator. I’ve been taking my hand drawn illustrations and using Nano Banana to turn them into “felt” looking characters.

After months of designing and working with these digital characters, in the back of my mind - a little itch began to appear.

I want to hold these characters, I want to feel how soft they are! 2 weeks ago I decided to order some needles and material and jump in head first.

I am having so much fun and making a ton of mistakes along the way. I’m not one for tutorials haha, i’m far too stubborn and learn best from experience.

What’s awesome about physical figures, is I’m able to photograph them and use them as reference to combine them in scenes with the digitally created characters that are based on my original character designs.👇

an upcoming vignette? perhaps :)

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Illustrating “Felt” Characters + Nano Banana

There’s been a lot of new faces here lately, welcome! I wanted to include this clip to show how I make the digital felt characters - as I recognize it might be a bit confusing that i’m now mixing physical creations with the nano banana-based characters.

I’m very proud of my progress so far in making the physical characters, but I want people to understand my process is rooted in drawing - and I’m not shying away from how i’m embracing emerging technologies and amplifying my artwork with GenAI - but it could partially misrepresent the work if you’re only seeing the hand made needle-felted work i’ve been sharing // under the impression that I’ve hand-crafted all of these characters.

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A Blueberry for Theo 🫐

I am so very grateful for the opportunity to design this Blueberry scene to bring a bit of comfort to a youngster during his upcoming bike-arm prosthetic fitting.

This started off as just the Blueberry, and naturally I got carried away haha

“… but our Blueberry needs a grass mound, but wait - he needs a friend - the micro teapot! yes - hmmm maybe we need flowers…..

Was so cool bringing Theo’s Mother, Anna | Tender & True - into the creative process as we selected the palette for the flowers. Though, a flower can get lonely without a bee 😆🌸🐝 and that tall grass…. just needed a 🐞.

Theo & Anna 💛🫐

Our Blueberry and Teapot are attached with a small magnet on their grass mound base - everything else is fixed in place.

While ya’ll have seen a few peeks at our micro bee, I wanted to ensure I had the family’s permission before sharing this fella.

This has got to be my most meaningful work thus far. This is purposeful on a new level and I’m hopeful to create more of these custom figures.

If you’d like to commission a figure,

or create something together,
you can start the conversation here:
https://www.studioheartfelt.com/commission

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Heartfelt Shop 🚀

Feel free to replace your entire wardrobe with Heartfelt Gear ;)

If you'd like to support, Vist the shop :)

I’m having a blast creating designs for the Studio Heartfelt shop. I don’t particularly love the business model of Substack for what I’m doing.

If you’d like to support my little studio without yet another subscription, get ya self a tee :) - everything adds up and it really helps right now as I’m kicking things off.

Shout out to my proud Ma rockin’ the embroidered sweatshirt 🌸

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🥜 Gallery Thoughts on Process

These were some rambles on creativity and process that came out as I was filming a tutorial for something upcoming I’m putting together for the Heartfelt site - totally on the fly while waiting on a long video render - my 2 cents, that felt needed to be said ❤️ -

Detach, and just let it come out, become a spectator. Get excited, make something! if things don’t turn out like we imagined, it’s all good - we are going to make sooo much more art.

So much more to dig into here….

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Best Viewed at a Slower Pace 🐌

I’ve been absolutely loving the vignette series. These are such a great way to explore ideas before committing to animation. While I romanticize about being a cartoonist illustrating sunday funny’s - I think I was born in the wrong decade for that!

The vignettes have been a very nice contrast to the animated work - which thus far has been music-driven, which kind of dictates a pacing.

“Please enjoy this 6 panel vignette • best viewed at a slower pace 🐌” has been included with all the vignettes as reminder to create space to immerse yourself in these. They really can be little stories when viewed at a slower pace. ANDDD some of them work forwards and backwards :)

Here’s a selection of some favorites:

“Cold Day // Crisp Veggies”

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“Welcome to Earth // You Are Loved”

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”Every 60 Years // Fire Horse”

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”Cup Vs. Cold”

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”Borrowed Light”

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”A Quiet, Porcelain Life”

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Animated Vignettes

”Space Brunch 🧇”

creating the actual images is a different workflow entirely - the clip below is a look at how the animated clips are produced in a platform called FLORA. Interpolation is created by linking nodes between the “start” and “end” images, generating a short animated clip. These clips are then chopped up in video editing software to form a longer sequence.

this aspect ratio is kinda funny 👇 - maybe go full screen ;)

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”Never Too Busy For A Friend”

fun fact: i mistakenly drew these guys with green tops - only to realize when posting and using a 🫐 emoji - and yeah duh - blueberries don’t have leaves - I should consider perhaps looking at photo reference - but - ay! that’s art baby! 😆🎨💥

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If you’d like to see more,
I’m building a home for this work over here
Visit StudioHeartfelt.com

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Do you have a favorite vignette or character? 🌸

Thanks for being here and sharing your thoughts in the comments.
If you enjoyed this, consider restacking for reach.

much love, atom ✌️