Jennifer Dunn’s family moved a lot was she was very young, but she spent most of her school years in Morton, Washington, a town of around 1,000 people about an hour east of Centralia. “It was tiny! But that allowed us a very idyllic childhood,” she says. “We grew up as a very tight family that had sit-down dinners at the kitchen table.”

Dunn spent much of her childhood visiting the neighbor’s horses and playing in the woods. She remembers telling her father she wanted to be a naturalist. To this day, there’s still a large part of her that wants to spend the day in a forest, observing and drawing all of the plants and animals she finds.

But back at the house, there was a heavy emphasis on accomplishment at school, to help insure a successful career. And since her father was a talented watercolor painter, Dunn was told the family didn’t need any more artists. Instead, she was pushed into piano lessons, science classes, and whatever would get her ahead academically. As a result, she graduated when she had just turned 16, and had a two-year degree by the time she was old enough to vote.

A Home in Ferndale

With the credits she gathered in the Running Start program, Dunn began looking for places to finish her degree. Not all schools accept all credits, though, and the best path she found was to earn an Associate’s at Whatcom Community College, with the plan to transfer to Western Washington University for her bachelor’s degree.

But the move north from Monroe wasn’t entirely Dunn’s idea. “My grandparents basically lived for their family, and since they were retiring in a couple of years, they bought a house in Ferndale so the grandkids could have a place to live while they went to school at Western,” she says. With a solid home base to work from, Dunn made her way through every available core science and math class and filled her elective slots with math and science, as well. This course load led to an unexpected, but very meaningful, conversation with her advisors.

“They said, ‘You need a humanities class,’ and I asked, ‘Why?’” she says with a laugh. “But it was my favorite class, because it was all the things I really enjoyed outside of the things I had to study. We went over everything: architecture, mythology, writing, and art — and I aced the class. It’s everything that makes us human. Math and science are great, and I do love technology, but the humanities are the heart that we put into our world.”

A Turn Towards the Arts

Dunn’s newfound respect for the arts played right into her childhood plan: to sit in nature and transcribe what she saw onto paper. At the time, she didn’t know that her art would soon become a little less scientific and a lot more playful, and that it would expand to fill a much larger part of her life than had been allowed to as a child.

“When my dad passed away in 2017, I started an art career out of spite,” Dunn says with a spark of dark humor in her eye. This brush with mortality reminded her of the attraction she’d always felt for the arts but had been constantly steered away from.

The collection of art supplies her father left behind had always loomed large to Dunn. She’d been curious about them, but was told it would be wasteful to use them without training. But life had also taught her that the best way to figure out new things is simply to try them. Even if she had to do them badly, she would do them.

“If I could talk to myself as a kid, I’d say ‘You’re not going to get good unless you use the good stuff. If you keep using cheaper materials, you’re not going to get the results you can with the premium stuff,” she says. “The struggle is always going to be there, so why make it harder for yourself?”

In the Public Eye

Dunn started with the most basic exercises and made mistakes until she turned out something that made her feel good. From there, “it’s all about following the dopamine,” she says. Dunn began to post art to her Mossy Hollow Instagram account, sharing the first shaky and juvenile attempts, followed the experimental explorations that broadened her style.

Ferndale City Councilperson and Arts Commission member Ali Hawkinson came across Dunn’s work and sought her out to paint one of the murals that popped up around the city a few years ago. Although she’d never worked with acrylics, or on such a grand scale, Dunn dove in and created a 640-square-foot piece that’s visible across Alder Street from Fringe Brewing.

Back at home, she took another new step in a different direction: On a whim, she added a funny slogan to a painting of one of her whimsical critters, and the results went viral. Dunn’s creation, Edgrrr, is a loveable raccoon, who turns out is also a bit accident-prone. At the height of holiday madness in 2023, Dunn illustrated Edgrrr tangled in a string of Christmas lights, added the tagline “Merry Crisis!” and made him the subject of her Christmas cards.

Soon Edgrrr — and his opossum friend Aaamy — started to appear on Instagram regularly with a group of friends, some of whom are fowl and some of whom are a little foul-mouthed, and the world fell in love.

Following a spate of requests from some of her more than 40,000 followers, Dunn has opened an online store that offers prints, stickers, and other gear featuring Edgrrr, Aaamy, and all their well-meaning but all-too-human animal friends.

Maintaining a Balance

Dunn doesn’t complain about the difficulty of making a living as an artist, but she does want to remain grounded when she thinks about the future. She’s heard the old saying, ‘If you choose a job you love, you’ll never work a day in your life,’ but has found it really means you’ll work every single day.

“I’ve had to make some decisions, and sometimes I feel almost like a kid and being told what to focus on,” she says. “I want to do more urban sketching and more drawing of people, I want to explore and challenge myself.”

But Edgrrr and Aaamy have helped her get where she is, and she can’t turn her back on her friends.

“I can’t afford a single mistake, I can’t even think about it — I just keep putting one foot in front of the other, cross my fingers and hope for the best,” she says. “And I still always carry my coveted security blanket, the sketchbook, which I solidly recommend for everyone.”