“I like bones and shit.”

Artful Bones (aka Kristina Smethers) is an artist, illustrator, and educator born and raised in the Puget Sound region of Washington state.

Growing up sailing, hiking, and gardening with her family (and watching an extensive amount of nature documentaries) instilled a love and fascination with the natural world and the process of life, growth, and death. Scientific and botanical illustrations inspire her, along with the detailed intricacy of Art Nouveau, and the vivid illustrations of rock (gig) posters. Her work combines these inspirations through the lens of her struggles with anxiety and panic disorders; utilizing both beautiful imagery and a love of detail with dark, macabre, surreal, and fantastical concepts. She is interested in the contrast of life and death, beautiful and disconcerting, and challenging the separation between them.

While watercolor, acrylic inks, and digital work are her primary materials, she loves to experiment and explore with a wide variety of media. Cut paper, embroidery, lino block and screen-printing, acrylics, color pencil, graphite, and others all make their appearances in her body of work.

Artful Bones has a B.A. in Visual Arts Education K-12 from Central Washington University (2008) and an M.F.A. in Illustration from Savannah College of Art and Design (2024).

She enjoys kayaking, hiking, gardening, reading/watching fantasy and sci-fi, playing Magic the Gathering, video games, cooking, rock/metal concerts, travel, and going on adventures with her husband and her dog Yuki.