VANCE FELDMAN is on a lifelong mission to create the world's longest psychedelic illustration. An impressive work of ink and watercolor, Feldman began his "ForeverScape" project in 2009. Pessimism sidles with surrealism within hundreds of sheets of tiled, letter-sized paper: a wood chipper eats astronauts; frogs are launched into outer space; a train track spirals endlessly. Feldman—who works by day as a programmer—recently completed a Kickstarter and raised several thousand dollars to create a ForeverScape app.

IN THE BEGINNING—"It kind of began without any plan whatsoever. I was in between jobs at that point. When I started, I happened to buy this ream of paper, a brick of cardstock, like 80 pounds. I drew about 10 pages—I drew this little landscape and thought, 'Oh, I could continue.' At some point I was like, I could get really serious with this. [Now I'm on] page 733."

ESCAPE—"I always knew I was going to do art. I ended up being a studio art major at Reed, doing digital animation for my thesis, but almost all my spare time went into painting. I was never really into illustration. I grew up in Denver; from the time I was 12, I was always oil painting. My dad died of a rare form of bone cancer when I was 10, so I kind of abstained from the world for a while, found some oil paints in the attic, and I decided to be doing that all the time, almost as an escape."

GOING DIGITAL—"First, I thought I'd market ForeverScape as an art app, but I'm just going to go for the type of gamer who likes finding things—which is a whole genre of games. It's like Where's Waldo, but on this huge scale. I figured, how about I try to give to this market that already exists: You like finding things? Well, here's a giant thing you can find!"

LIFER—"My original motto was, 'It goes until I do.' I definitely don't have an end in sight."

See "ForeverScape" for yourself at foreverscape.com.