Downtime Drawing

Hey friends,
We’re on to the next in the series of updates and honestly I’m not even sure how I am going to make this post work… The amount of drawing I have done the past few years has been more than I think my website can hold! Drawing does so many things in my life, beyond the occasional income from commissions. Drawing (and creating in general) is my therapy, my means of communication, my way of processing. It has been how I’ve tracked my progress, how I’ve recorded parts of my life, and how I’ve gotten out emotions that I couldn’t release any other way. It calms me and puts me in this state of flow more easily than most, if not all, other activities. Needless to say, it’s been a huge part of my life during these past years of surviving the pandemic and navigating so many other things. If you follow me on Instagram I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of the following work either in progress or completed, but I wanted to share it here as well, especially given my current love/hate relationship with social media.

Besides the everyday urge to draw, three things also contributed to my free-time drawing practice:

1. As I mentioned in a previous post, one of the activities I started participating in during the pandemic was the virtual Friday night comics workshops, then hosted by The Believer magazine. (At the time of this post, the workshops are still being held weekly, but are hosted by SAW (Sequential Artists Workshop). There also is an archive of the old workshops on Youtube.) Many of these workshops were absolutely vital for keeping me inspired and keeping my hand moving through the craziness of the past few years. Some of these drawings were directly prompted by those workshops. And even the ones that weren’t directly

2. I read a fantastic book/illustrated journal by Lynda Barry called Syllabus (available here) that also provided a TON of inspiration for my drawing practice. This has been added to my top 10 all time favorite books!

3. The third thing that greatly impacted my drawing was the purchase of my iPad and Apple pencil at the beginning of 2021. I found a great deal on Amazon and had a gift card so I decided to splurge and boy has it been worth it! I use the program called Procreate for all of my digital illustration now, which has even led me to getting a commission to work on illustrations for a fantasy novel! It also has helped me to more easily make and edit designs for my new Redbubble shop. (I previously used Photoshop, but I don’t have access to that on my new laptop, just my college one, and it is currently prohibitively expensive for my needs.) It has been fun to learn a new tool and see how the analog and digital methods of creation can interact, overlap, and intertwine.

Now for the drawings – enjoy!