by Sam Joslin Mueller
Within Tallahassee’s creative scene, you may start to notice certain people at nearly every art market, workshop, festival, and gallery opening. They’re the ones who show up consistently, not for recognition, but because they care about the art community.
John Lhotka is one of those people.
Soft-spoken and quick to pivot praise toward others, Lhotka admits talking about himself isn’t exactly his favorite thing.
“I can rave about my friends’ work all day,” he said with a laugh. “But promoting myself is a little trickier.”
And yet, his fingerprints are all over one of the city’s fastest-growing creative events, Tally Zine Fest. This year’s event will be held at the Challenger Learning Center on March 28.
A Tallahassee native, Lhotka grew up attending the SAIL High School. He later earned his Associate of Arts at Tallahassee State College, studied graphic design at the University of Central Florida, and completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of West Florida in Pensacola.
But the digital creative spark came earlier in a high school digital design class.
“I was already kind of Photoshopping before I knew what Photoshop was,” he said. “I would erase things in MS Paint, copy them into another document, and Frankenstein them together.”
His early experiments included placing friends’ heads into iconic paintings like “The Last Supper” or “The Crossing of the Delaware” — inside jokes he crafted into thoughtful gifts.
“I always enjoyed making friends smile and laugh,” he said. “Just doing the unexpected.”
That instinct to create something personal, clever, and generous still defines his work today. While he has experience in traditional media, Lhotka gravitates toward digital illustration.
Now working as a freelance graphic designer and illustrator in Tallahassee, Lhotka balances client work with personal creative projects and community involvement. Some of that involvement includes being a Community Catalyst for Knight Creative Communities Institute Tallahassee (KCCI) as part of the 2022 “Fully Booked” project, installing book benches and story trails. Yet the balance between them is of utmost importance.
“I’m more of a messy traditional artist,” he admitted. “What I see in my head, I can’t always get onto the page the same way. I’ve taken oil painting and watercolor, and like a lot of the different mediums, but I tend to go towards more digital work because I can control it more.”
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