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Thursday, November 29, 2018

St. Francis Statue and Thinking About DeCluttering

In my household, we have a lovely St. Francis carving.  I used it as inspiration for a sketch.



This got me thinking about something I read once (I forget where) about a great strategy for decluttering a house. 

It said something like:  if you have items you keep for sentimental value, but you don't really use them, consider sketching them. 

Why not write details about the item, even a story about it or the people and places associated with it.  What a great way to fill a page in your journal.

Then decide if you want to still keep the object, or if you can donate it to someone who will use it.

Sometimes, giving the items some moments of focused attention, and commemorating them with a sketch, is all it takes to feel like you can let them leave your home!

Tuesday, November 27, 2018

Loving Early Snowfalls

Inspired by an exercise provided by Jill Badonsky during a workshop at SketchKon 2018 (more on that in upcoming posts!), I drew this little comic.



Love this season of early snows!

This is a great way to make a journal entry of a delightful moment in the day.

Tuesday, November 20, 2018

Thinking about Dressing Up and Turkeys

Just a quick sketch for fun, this holiday week.


Drawn with my eyes closed, except for the eyes.  Watercolor added with my eyes open.

Confession:  that lovely turquoise feather and pink hat?  When my eyes were closed those lines were supposed to be her head.  They got disconnected from her body... but the rest held together pretty well.

So when I opened my eyes, I fussed a bit with how to save it.  So I created the feather, added her eyes, and splashed on the watercolor.

Great fun! 



Thursday, November 8, 2018

Sketchnoting and Comics Workshop with Big Read Educators

About two weeks ago, I had the wonderful good fortune to do a short workshop with local educators who are participating in the NEA Big Read Lakeshore program.

The Big Read program coordinates one community reading one book at the same time.  The Lakeshore program includes all kinds of amazing programs, classes, speakers, opportunities as we read Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven.

I got to think with the educators about how to incorporate comics and sketchnotes in classrooms at all levels.


We had a lot of fun thinking about how combining the verbal and the visual aids learning, thinking, and communication.  It helps students pay attention, synthesize material, consider what they value, and think about the relation of things as they design a page.

In a few days I'm doing a public workshop on making comics! Looking forward to it!

Tuesday, November 6, 2018

Covers and Title are So Hard for Me

Having finished the zine I share in the last post, I realized I needed to make a cover.

Covers are always hard for me.

Mostly because they involve titles, which I have been lousy at my whole life.

And then there's the inside of the front, and the inside of the back, and then the need to do something clever with the outside back cover.

I so admire the artists I've watch confidently doodle these lovely, inviting designs, with enticing typography, lines that move from front to back, from outside to inside, wrapping the content of the book itself in a separate, artistic blanket.

Me, not so much.

But I share here the cover I did come up with (because I was on a deadline and I needed something!).

Outside Front Cover





















Inside Front Cover


Inside Back Cover
Outside Back Cover











Thursday, November 1, 2018

Go To Dinner, Get a Zine...

When I attended a low residency comics workshop earlier this month at SAW (the Sequential Artists Workshop in Gainesville, Florida), I got to go to dinner with Tom Hart, who runs SAW, my fellow comics memoirist, Jesse, and my spouse.

Shop talk ensued.   I told the others a story about something that had happened to me while researching my story.

At the end of the conversation, Tom said something to me like "THIS conversation, the way it just happened, should go in your comic."

I needed a topic for an 8-page mini-comic challenge that I and another artist had given to ourselves, so I grabbed at this.

For the next two days, I sketched, scripted, inked, colored, printed, folded, and stapled (all in between lectures and other workshop assignments).  I did all the work on my iPad Pro in Procreate.

The result held together very nicely, I think.



























































































Not sure if it works entirely as a stand alone zine (since it offers no explanation of the blackout or of "finding the body"), but I really like it as a discreet episode!  It has potential to fit right into the longer work!