Kuczmarski Designs LLC | Studio JKD
Hi! I’m Jill Kuczmarski, a Designer, Illustrator and Writer living in the Northwoods of Wisconsin. I’m also the creator of Happy the Hodag and Buddy the Bulldog, est. 2006.
After spending the past two decades living and working in the big cities of the midwest and coming home on the weekends — I’ve finally come home full time. A Creative Director by day, I work with my distributed team virtually, from a private office space in downtown Rhinelander which offers speedy internet, walkable restaurants, and shopping.
The Northwoods is an amazing base camp, located a little Northwest of the Middle Coast. The Rhinelander Airport offers convenient and affordable daily flights to and from Chicago and Minneapolis and is within easy driving distance to Minneapolis, Madison, Green Bay, Milwaukee and Chicago. The Mosinee Airport, 60 minutes away, offers direct flights to all of the above plus New York and Detroit.
My family and I enjoy exploring the near, traveling the far and I keep myself busy capturing the in-between with photography and sketches. I also create stories and characters for picture books and then subsequently apply those characters and pieces of that artwork to fabrics, paper, and products — usually under the Happy the Hodag brand.
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Who is Happy the Hodag?
There are many different depictions of hodags in my hometown of Rhinelander, WI and when I was growing up all of these hodags were shown to be mean and scary. I decided to add a new kind of hodag to the landscape and in 2006 I created Happy the Hodag to be a friendly hodag.
Crafted to exhibit traditional hodag characteristics but in a more accessible style for children, Happy the Hodag stars in my first children's book Tales From The Trees (2006) which is an introduction to the hodag legend for children. I published a second Happy the Hodag book in 2007, a prequel called A Monster Misunderstanding, further expanding on and diffusing the legend of this green beast for little readers and Hodag enthusiasts.
Happy the Hodag is as chill as a Northwoods Spring evening, as sharp as a Blue Spruce pine needle, and allows very little to harsh his hodag mellow.
HODAG, my third Happy the Hodag book, was released in 2016 for Happy's 10th birthday, and is dedicated to hodags everywhere. A departure from the linear storyline of my two previous books, Hodag is a book I had been thinking about for a long time and I finally executed in 2015 for Happy the Hodag's 10th birthday in 2016, it's a hodag homage.
HODAG, Color The Seasons is my fourth Happy the Hodag book and features eight new hodag depictions. It’s the exploration of what hodags are up to season by season in a keepsake coloring storybook. (2019)
Keep up with Happy the Hodag at: facebook.com/happythehodag.
[This page is the official replacement of studiojkd.com]
REVIEWS
"...the books... offer the message of understanding and breaking stereotypes in a colorful way children will understand and enjoy." -FrontStreetReviews.com
"Tales from the Trees is a fun rhythmic book with great illustrations. The pages are durable and made for little hands. A fast favorite." -Dr. Tami Brady , "Whole Health Therapist"
"A Monster Misunderstanding reminds us all that appearances can be deceiving. In order to have a friend we have to be willing to be a friend." -TCM Reviews