The Analog Art Revolution with Jared Wiggins
Quick Answer: Jared Wiggins is a working artist and graphic designer who leads Unbound’s Art & Design Track. He champions analog art in a digital world—teaching students to tell redemptive stories through real, physical media while preparing them for professional, purpose-driven creative work.
When I say the phrase “analog art revolution,” I’m not talking about a trendy aesthetic or a clever marketing slogan. I’m talking about something I’ve watched unfold in real time in the life and work of my friend, Unbound alum, and long-time collaborator, Jared Wiggins.
If you’ve followed Unbound for a while, you’ve seen Jared’s fingerprints all over our early creative work—YouTube videos, marketing pieces, and other projects that helped shape our visual identity. Today, he’s back with us as the instructor for the Art & Design Track in the Ascend program, and I think he’s uniquely qualified for that role.
There are plenty of people who can “do graphic design.” There are few who are real artists and professional designers. Jared is one of those rare combinations: a working artist who sells his art, leads graphic design teams, illustrates books with his wife, and still carries a sketchbook everywhere he goes.
In this article, I’ll be sharing a conversation I recently had with Jared on the BeUnbound Podcast, shedding some light on the world of a working artist.
How Jared Wiggins Discovered His Calling as an Artist
Jared’s story with art starts early—and is deeply embedded in analog.
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He grew up homeschooled, one of five kids. To help her rambunctious boys pay attention during school, his mom came up with a simple strategy: she spread giant doodle pads on the floor, handed them pencils, and said, “Listen while you draw.”
It worked.
Their attention spans skyrocketed, and for Jared, drawing and learning fused together. That habit—listening while drawing—became a kind of baseline pattern for his life.
One of his first “big” projects came when he was nine or ten and reading The Lord of the Rings. For reasons he still can’t quite explain, he decided he was going to draw a scene from every single chapter.
He got halfway through The Fellowship of the Ring and stopped (somewhere out there exists a “50% collectors’ edition” of Jared’s LOTR illustrations). But that impulse—to tell stories through images—never went away.
Art, for Jared, became the way to capture what he was feeling and what he was seeing.
What Inspires Jared’s Redemption-Focused Paintings
Fast-forward to today and Jared’s art has grown into a wide range of work: drawings and paintings, book illustrations, children’s books, and what he calls “redemption stories” on canvas.
He loves painting Scripture—images that spring into his mind as he reads the Bible:
What did it look like when Jesus stepped out of the tomb?
What did it feel like when He walked on water?
What did Moses actually see when he glimpsed the back of God?
Those mental pictures become paintings that hold darkness and light together. They acknowledge the fallenness of the world without stopping there; they point toward redemption. In Jared’s words, he loves pieces that say, “Yes, the world is broken—but there is hope in it.”
Painting is the perfect medium for that, he argues, precisely because it’s so chaotic and clumsy. You’re working with messy, physical materials, and the imperfections become part of the meaning.
Alongside that, he and his wife have been quietly building another analog project: they’ve already illustrated children’s books for clients, and their first officially published children’s book together is slated to come out soon. It’s another channel for the same impulse: to tell stories visually in a way that captures what’s really true and beautiful.
And then there’s life drawing—something his mentors drilled into him and a practice he’s kept as a daily habit. Jared takes a sketchbook everywhere. He has “upwards of 20 sketchbooks” from the last decade, filled to the brim with quick sketches of real life: his kids, his wife, people in public, scenes that catch his eye.
Life drawing, he says, is about noticing the beauty that’s already there. It’s like seeing a sunset and thinking, “Jesus, this is amazing—and I wish the people I love could see it the way I see it.” Art becomes the way he shares those moments.
What Makes an Artist (and Not Just a Sketcher)?
From my vantage point, there’s something distinctive about Jared’s visual style. I’m not an art critic, but I think I can recognize good art when I see it.
If I had to put words to it, I’d call a lot of his work a “whimsical snapshot.” His sketches often have a breezy, light feel to them—especially the life sketches of children, families, and everyday scenes. But they aren’t shallow. There’s often a bittersweet note, a little twist of poignancy, that sneaks in and catches you right in the chest.
That’s what I think separates someone who simply “represents what they see” from someone who is truly an artist. A sketcher can copy reality. An artist can represent reality and inject emotion—by changing, suppressing, or exaggerating just enough of what they see to make you actually feel something.
As a speaker, I recognize the same dynamic in storytelling. You can tell a story flat, or you can tell it with just enough heightened detail and tension that listeners feel like they were there.
Jared does that visually.
Right now, his main site functions as a contact point—JYC Design—with commission-based work, and he and his wife hope to open a store for prints when their children’s book launches. There’s also a good chance you’ll see his work at Valley Pike Farm Market in Virginia in the future.
In other words: this isn’t a hobby. It’s not “someday maybe.” It’s a real, working artistic life.
How Does Jared Balance Art and Professional Design?
But as much as I know Jared the artist, I also know him as a professional graphic designer—and that combination is part of what makes him so valuable to our students.
He started doing graphic design around 16 or 17, mostly because he needed a way to make money. Selling art in coffee shops was nice, but it only reached the people who walked through the door. Graphic design felt like a way to go commercial and professional—“not a starving artist,” as he put it.
What began as a practical move has become a decade-plus career. Jared has worked full-time as a designer for a nonprofit organization, led graphic design teams, and trained interns.
Along the way, he’s noticed there are a few major “types” of designers:
The “mathematic” graphic designer who loves geometry, grids, and shapes and can make a layout beautiful with pure structure.
The illustrative graphic designer—where Jared locates himself—who brings hand-drawn elements, vectors, and storytelling into logos, shirts, websites, stickers, and more.
Both types can be taught in school. But Jared’s path didn’t go through a graphic design degree. Instead, he learned on the job, with bosses and mentors who trained him to be a professional—someone who can deliver real work, on time, at a high level, and that actually communicates clearly.
That last piece is important. He’s seen plenty of designers fall into two unhelpful boxes:
- “Everything goes” designers who treat design as wild self-expression; the results may be interesting, but they rarely communicate anything clearly.
- Trend-locked designers who are so rigid and obsessed with whatever is popular in 2025 that they can’t make something genuinely good, just something that checks a stylistic box.
Neither extreme serves real clients well.
What Jared has had to learn, and now teaches, is how to balance clarity, story, and function. Graphic design must work. It has to hit deadlines. It has to communicate. But it doesn’t have to be soulless. In his case, his illustrative instincts make his design work more human, emotional, and memorable.
How Jared Balances Creativity with Deadlines
One of my favorite parts of our conversation was Jared’s story about a painting he almost abandoned—the piece that became his favorite painting of all time.
He’d been studying ancient creation stories: the Babylonian idea of “chaos waters,” Egyptian gods being defeated by that chaos, and then the startling contrast of Genesis, where the Spirit of God hovers over the deep and simply calms the chaos by His presence.
Jared connected that image to Jesus walking on water—the same God, calming the same chaotic waters, now incarnate and striding across the surface.
He had a vision for a painting that combined those ideas: Jesus walking on water, creating and calming the world in a single image. He started it…and quit. It was hard. He moved on to the next idea.
His wife—his biggest supporter in art—called him on it. “You start a lot of personal pieces and don’t finish them,” she observed, and then she issued a challenge: don’t start any new personal artwork until you finish everything already on your desk.
Out of that constraint came the finished painting: Jesus walking on the waters of creation, calming the chaos, embodying Genesis 1: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…and the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the deep.”
It took grueling hours and multiple recoveries. But the result finally captured the emotion, the theological connection, and the story he had in his head.
For Jared, that’s the perfect example of what he means when he says: “Creativity is born out of restriction.” Broken moments, deadlines, and “I don’t feel like it” days are where real growth happens—if you push through and finish.
He makes the same point about following Jesus. You don’t grow spiritually by reading your Bible once and coasting for a week. You grow by showing up every day, especially on the days you don’t feel like it. Discipline and daily practice are as essential to art as they are to discipleship.
Can You Make Meaningful Art Even for Boring Clients?
There’s another side to this discipline: the ability to create on demand for clients you may not be emotionally attached to.
Not every project is a Scripture painting or a children’s book. Sometimes you’re designing for something as soul-stirring as…a car insurance company.
I recently had my own frustrating run-in with car insurance, so I used that as an example in our discussion: Is there such a thing as “emotional design” for a company you don’t love working with?
Jared’s answer was honest. There have been times when a project was basically just fulfilling the job. He still puts effort into making it visually strong—he wants his eyes to be drawn to it—but he doesn’t always craft some deep, personal story behind those pieces.
He also admits there are logos he’d love to redo but can’t, because the client liked a version he wouldn’t have chosen. Part of being a professional is knowing when to “let your personal take die” and deliver what the job requires.
Even then, though, he uses the same disciplined process he teaches his students:
- An Inspiration Phase, where he gathers every quote, color, image, and idea that might relate to the project and drops it into a folder.
- A Production Phase, where he stops looking for new inspiration and just works from that folder—sketching, refining, and iterating until he hits the deadline.
Those constraints keep the work moving without turning it into a joyless box. There’s still creativity and fluidity inside the boundaries.
Why Jared Rejects AI Art (And Embraces Analog)
In a world saturated with AI image generators, a lot of young creatives are asking a hard question: “Is there even a place for me anymore as an artist, designer, or photographer?”
I’ve experimented with AI images myself. I once needed a specific pastoral mountain scene for a slideshow and couldn’t find a photo that fit, so I generated one. Technically, it was beautiful. But when the slides ran, that one image stuck out like a sore thumb.
It looked right. But it felt wrong. Soulless is the word I keep coming back to.
Jared doesn’t mince words on this subject. He calls himself “unashamedly against AI” in the art world, even though he acknowledges a narrow use case: he’s used AI once in a professional project where an anti–human trafficking client needed images of children but absolutely could not use real kids’ faces. In that context, generating completely unreal images made sense.
Even there, though, the limits are clear. AI is built on algorithms and math. A prompt is not the same as the human, physical act of making art.
He points out that good artists don’t just move their fingertips. They draw lines with their whole arm, sometimes their whole body. There’s a physical shaping—what he calls the “potter’s hands”—that happens when you push a pencil, brush, or stylus across a surface. That embodied effort is part of the soul of the work.
His prediction is that AI will weed out lazy art. It will undercut people who were only ever interested in fast, surface-level images. But it will actually elevate real artists—the ones committed to analog, tangible, physical creation.
You can already see it in the hunger for homesteading, hand tools, and slow crafts online. People want to get out of the “fast food world” and back to work they can touch.
For Jared, that’s the opportunity: to lean harder into analog, not less.
How Beauty, Story, and Purpose Come Together in Jared’s Work
My co-host David pointed out something important in the middle of this: art isn’t just about beauty or expression. It’s also about purpose.
He’d recently attended a fundraising event where the speaker was wildly entertaining but clearly hadn’t been given (or hadn’t followed) a clear objective. It was fun to listen to him, but he didn’t actually do what the organizers needed him to do.
That same mismatch shows up in art, design, and communication everywhere. Beautiful images that don’t communicate. Clever logos that don’t fit the brand. Powerful stories that never get around to the actual point.
What Jared models—and what we want our students to learn—is how to marry beauty and purpose:
To create art that is emotionally rich and deeply rooted in truth.
To design graphics that are aesthetically strong and crystal clear in their communication.
To tell stories that move people and move them toward the right next step.
When those pieces come together, art becomes transformational.
Why Jared Leads the Art & Graphic Design Track at Unbound
This is why I’m so excited that Jared is teaching Ascend’s Art & Design Track.
He’s not just helping students “make prettier art” or collect a graphic design credential. He’s teaching them how to:
Grow as real, analog artists who can tell stories and capture emotion.
Build professional-grade design skills that serve real organizations.
Work with discipline, deadlines, and constraints instead of being crushed by them.
Think critically and biblically about the tools and trends—like AI—that are reshaping their field.
Pursue creative work as a calling that can actually support their lives and bless other people.
And he’s doing it as someone who actually makes his living as an artist and designer, not as someone who only talks about it.
If any of this resonates—if you’re captivated by the idea of sketchbooks full of life, paintings that tell redemption stories, and design work that’s both beautiful and useful—then I invite you to listen to the full conversation on the BeUnbound Podcast. You should also head over to beunbound.us, check out our Ascend program, and look specifically at the Art & Design Track that Jared leads.
It’s designed to help you become the kind of artist and designer who can keep creating real, analog work in a world increasingly filled with soulless images—and to do it in a way that serves others, tells the truth, and glorifies God.
Until we talk to you again next time, be Unbound.
Jonathan Brush is the President and CEO of Unbound, a homeschool graduate, and a homeschool dad of six. He worked for nine years as a Director of Admissions for a private, liberal arts college, and then spent over ten years working in non-traditional higher education.
Jonathan loves Unbound and Unbound students and dreams every single day about new ways to connect them to each other. He gets to work with the world’s best team and the most amazing student body in the history of the world (which is just as awesome as it sounds), and field questions about Rule 4 violations (ask an Unbound student to explain). Jonathan and his family make their home in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.