October 4 Morning Practice

Today I took the theme of “windows” and ran with it. Just let myself doodle, basically. An altogether quick morning page. Worked on varying line weights and values while still staying monochrome.

I’m coming to the end of this sketchbook and I’m wondering what I want to do going forward. I’ve been focusing on black and white ink because 1) I love the bold contrast of black and white and I love using ink pens, and 2) drawing with pens is probably the easiest way to make art (especially when traveling). But I find myself yearning for color and other mediums.

Lately, I’ve been admiring several other artists who create visual diaries—Amandaworks with her wild expressive and colorful mixed media daily pages, Kevin Mercer’ and Marc David Spengler’s shape-driven collage journals…collage is definitely calling me back. Jane Davies shared a collage artist this week, Ashley Mary, whose work I loved…and then also Michelle Allen has some visual journal pages in either/and ink and paint in her instagram feed call that me too. (I’m not bothering to provide links because as a digital journal on my own website I’m not expecting too many people to stumble here—but if you do, you can find the above artists on instagram or pinterest or a quick browser search.)

Not sure where I’m going next, creatively, but I do know that I want to continue doing morning pages and most likely I’ll switch up the media. I also have to make a decision about whether to bring this digital journal project out into the world on those other platforms. We’ll see.

It’s been all black and white drawing this month and I do like this group of morning

October 13 Morning Page

One of the best things I do are early morning outdoor workouts three days a week with a lovely bootcamp group. Recently we moved from a fully landscaped park to open space near wetlands and I am so loving nature all around us.

Today was my first day back to bootcamp after our trip so maybe I had new eyes, or maybe it was the light between all the clouds not gathered yet for rain, but it was a truly beautiful morning.

Instead of Morning Pages October 11-12

I don’t know why I did this exactly, but I had woken up as usual, grabbed my coffee, started reading on my ipad…and when I came to Anne Lamott’s newsletter in my inbox (because Anne just started a Substack newsletter and of course I subscribed), I was inspired to pull out my sketchbook and sketch out her essay in comic form. Here’s what happened in a snapshot (larger images at bottom of post):

It didn’t look like this on the first go round. I just quickly penciled it out in the messiest way for each panel —I wish I’d taken pictures at that point—and I was done for the day.

Again, I really don’t know why I created this illustrated essay. Lamott’s writing is SO engaging and especially visual. I just “saw” the images in my mind in her text and I wanted to draw them out.

And also, as a writer (and a former English teacher) I appreciate her take on writing that “shitty first draft” (her own moniker that I think she defined in Bird by Bird). It’s nice to be reminded that writing IS hard for everyone, especially at the beginning. I find myself in that lost place all the time when I write. It may or may not be why I’m not writing newsletter posts over on Substack much at the moment…

But that idea to make a comic? It just came to me and I went with it and I’m glad I did. It’s true what Anne says about ideas being like goldfish, and not just for writing—for any creative idea. Too often I let that bright goldfish just swim away and I lose it.

This time, though, I acted on the idea of making a comic and I made it. I went back the next day and inked it out, and copied her essay and pasted the excerpts of her story to finish it, even if still pretty rough draft-ish (but it’s a sketchbook so that’s ok!)

Comics intimidate the heck out of me. I don’t often make them, although I have come to love and appreciate comics as an art form and I follow several artists who make comics…Lynda Barry, Mike Lowery, Edith Zimmerman, for example. Occasionally I have created visual diary pages in comic form (that I have to say I like very much). But still. Comic making REALLY intimidate me! I don’t have a lot of confidence in my ability to draw from imagination.

This little exercise, though (and it is just an exercise in my sketchbook. Without Anne’s permission I would NEVER share this for commercial purposes), this little exercise was super enlightening for me. First, I was so very judgmental about the drawing, especially the humans, as I drew and inked it all up. I wanted to give up a million times—my inner critic was screaming!

But you know what? I kind of like it now. Someone said that a big part of being an artist who draws is to accept what comes out of your hand. I think I’m in a part of my drawing journey where I’m just beginning to let my “bad” drawing come out as it wants…

The other thing I learned is that this feels like something I should do more of—tell stories and illustrate them in some way. Hmmm.

Okay, here are pages in readable form (click on each if you want it even bigger):