Featured Artist: Nello Williams

Keepsake Artist Nello Williams shares some fun, new interactive ways to celebrate the Christmas countdown, and a jukebox that’s sure to get you rockin’ around the Christmas tree.

Nello Williams grew up drawing anytime, anyplace, even in school—and not just in art class. His class notes ended up looking more like artwork than a study sheet.

The young artist started out sculpting the ships and robots from the television program Lost in Space. Once, he saw a scary dungeon set advertised in a comic book, but like most kids, couldn’t afford to buy it. So Nello recreated the toy instead.

Popular culture kept on inspiring Nello’s art. In high school, he and a friend made masks of characters from Planet of the Apes—a big movie of the day. Now he keeps up on the latest trends for his creations in Keepsake Ornaments.

Nello spends much of his outside time nurturing one of his other big interests—music. He designed the album covers (wishful thinking) and T-shirts for his high school garage band. He even designed a guitar for himself, and twenty years later, he actually built it! Nello sees guitar design as a place where his two great loves, sculpture and music, meet.

Santa’s Hotline (2013)

“This phone is a follow-up ornament to last year’s countdown radio, the second retro concept I’ve done for Countdown to Christmas. It’s in a style that we call the Nellco line. Each one has a little logo and everything!

The Nellco line started out with an oven that we wanted to give a brand, so we came up with Nellco and it really gained a lot of followers. This phone has got the countdown feature—concealed as a rotary dial! Plus, the little sound clips that our editors and writers came up with are a lot of fun.”

North Pole Countdown (2013)

The North Pole Countdown Radio Ornament was so popular last year—we couldn’t help but reinvent it as a table-top version. Kids can turn the dial to hear updates from the North Pole every day leading up to Christmas. And now, you can even plug in your phone or MP3 player to hear music thanks to the new auxiliary input cord, volume controls, and an on/off switch!

“We started with the original radio ornament, but we changed some of the proportions. The dial on the little radio ornament had to be bigger than what I would have designed for an actual radio so that all the electronic parts could fit inside. When we scaled it up this year, I was able to correct that proportion on the big one. The dial was back to the size that I thought looked right for a real radio. We played around with the speakers and added lights that we didn’t have on the smaller version, too.”

Jolly Jukebox (2013)

“This is another Nellco! It’s the second Nellco jukebox that I’ve done. The first one was more in the Art Deco style, but this one is a little more modern. It’s still a little retro, maybe the ’70s, as opposed to what you’d see in the ’40s and ’50s. It’s got a magic cord component, so the lights can be on all the time. There are four songs in different styles that match the design. Don Palmiter gave me a book for designing the previous Jukebox, but I had to find more modern designs online for this one.”