Jahnathan Jones
Illustrator • Graphic Designer • Creature Designer
Where imagination meets the natural world.
Jahnathan Jones is a Los Angeles–born illustrator and graphic designer specializing in animals, prehistoric life, and original creature design. Inspired by the extraordinary diversity of life—both real and imagined—his work explores a question that has fascinated him since childhood: What forms can life take?
Growing up in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles, Jahnathan was surrounded by art, culture, science, and history. His childhood neighborhood placed him near some of Los Angeles’ most iconic destinations, including the Original Farmers Market, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and the La Brea Tar Pits. Frequent` visits to the Tar Pits helped ignite an especially deep fascination with prehistoric animals and the creatures that once inhabited the world beneath the city he called home.
But his fascination with animals began even earlier.
As a young child, trips to the zoo became a regular part of Jahnathan’s life. His family visited zoos throughout Southern California—including the Los Angeles Zoo, San Diego Zoo, Santa Barbara Zoo, Orange County Zoo, and Santa Ana Zoo—giving him endless opportunities to observe animals, their anatomy, their movement, and their behavior.
The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County became another childhood favorite, with family visits sometimes occurring multiple times each month. Dinosaurs were a particular obsession. By the age of three, Jahnathan could identify, name, and spell an extraordinary number of dinosaur species. Before he was formally studying composition, anatomy, or design, he and his younger brother were already creating their own large-scale dinosaur images across the family living room floor using colored craft sticks.
In many ways, creature design began there.
As Jahnathan grew, his imagination expanded beyond the animals that existed in the natural world to those that existed—or could exist—somewhere beyond it. Movies and games including Jurassic Park, Madagascar, How to Train Your Dragon, Monster Hunter, Plants vs. Zombies, and Angry Birds introduced him to worlds where recognizable characteristics of real animals could be transformed into entirely new creatures, personalities, and visual stories.
His childhood passion eventually became an artistic discipline.
Jahnathan attended Fairfax High School’s Visual Arts Magnet, where he continued developing his artistic foundation before pursuing his education at California State University, Northridge (CSUN).
Today, his work combines observation, imagination, anatomy, behavior, and visual storytelling.
Whether illustrating an animal that exists today, reconstructing one that disappeared millions of years ago, or designing a species that has never existed at all, Jahnathan approaches each creature with intention. He considers the physical characteristics a viewer can immediately recognize: How does this animal move? Where might it live? What does it eat? How does it defend itself? How has its environment shaped its body and behavior?
By studying the animals of today—and the remarkable species that came before them—Jahnathan pushes the boundaries of what life could look like while grounding his creations in enough biological familiarity to make even the most fantastic creature feel believable.
His work exists at the intersection of art, natural history, character development, and world-building, transforming a childhood fascination with animals and dinosaurs into an evolving visual language uniquely his own.
For Jahnathan, drawing creatures isn't simply about imagining monsters.
It's about imagining life.