This is a video I’ve been thinking about making for a while. A lot of my drawing and painting over the last few years has happened in between other things, and even while getting from place to place, as a passenger in our family car. As a parent of two young kids—they’re five and two—I have had to be very flexible about where and when I work. In this video, I share a few of the things I’ve learned. I hope they’ll be helpful to you if you’re trying to make art fit into a busy schedule, or if you’re thinking about taking some art supplies on an upcoming trip (do it!!).

Thanks for watching. ∆

P.S. I’m not the only one thinking about this! I loved ’s post about making 40 sketches while traveling with her kids this summer, and ’s essay about learning to work within the constraints travel imposes.

During my childhood, I believed I would be taken up to Heaven after my life ended and, there, folded into a new phase of being and belonging alongside family members and friends. What we would do in the after was pretty vague, and this was worrisome, given that we would be there for all eternity—forever and ever, amen—but at least I knew where I was going.

When people in my church spoke about Heaven, they mostly spoke about it as an achievement: the place you went if you had managed to avoid Hell. Its material qualities and “benefits” were also often emphasized—the streets of gold, houses given to believers, the granting of new bodies, and the presence of always bountiful food.

As I got older, this picture seemed very specific to my Baptist community, and to the wider strand of Christianity that links earthly wealth with God’s blessing. (Though this view is quite obviously antithetical to Jesus’s own teachings.)

Since leaving the religion I grew up in, about 15 years ago, I’ve often felt an intense fear of my own death. Where would I go, on that final day, after that final breath? This fear strikes when my kids are sick, or when I’ve been woken up in the middle of the night. There, in the midst of metaphorical or literal darkness, I slide into the old anxiety: no matter when I die, if it’s tomorrow or fifty years from now, I will never have done everything I wanted to do.

And I hate to leave a thing unfinished.

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Recently, my mind quite suddenly shifted on all this. I had been reading Claire-Louise Bennett’s 2015 book, Pond, and delighting in the way her descriptions slowed me down enough to consider the best place for a bowl of whole fruits, and the prospect of what it would do to my life to live in a home with slate windowsills, cool to the touch.

The book has no discernible plot. It is about living in the world alongside others, and the frustrations and joys this living can bring, especially to an absorbingly observant person.

In the way that reading literature can tend to affect, I found myself unexpectedly changed by my experiences alongside the protagonist. One afternoon, while not reading, or even consciously thinking about what I had read, I realized that my vision of death was still tainted by the old connection between security and productivity, or monetary wealth and that, if I thought about my life using a different metric, I was already prepared to die, and no longer beleaguered like the “faithful” person at the center of the engraving below.

Instead of tabulating what I’d done (or not done), this other metric measured relational joys, sensations, and embodiment. Thirty-six years in a body surrounded by other bodies, able to push into discomfort and find a newness both in myself and outside, all this again and again—that’s a good life! Already.

The shift in my thinking is not permanent. I have to remind myself of it to spurn the death-anxiety. This really quite monumental change in my thinking wasn’t prompted by a religious encounter or conversion. It wasn’t handed to me when I expected to know something holy. It came to me through the experience of a really pretty profane book—a book about sex and sense and the feeling of leaning against a fence. In other words: a novel obsessed with the feeling of being alive.

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Throughout my time in my comparative literature PhD program, I’ve often thought about the claims people make about books: that the very act of reading literature can be transformative; that books can help us to encounter “the other” (whoever or whatever that is, in each reader’s case); that we can travel without ever leaving home, or “live inside someone else’s skin.” As the world not so subtly falls apart, these claims have seemed, at times, to be merely the self-serving wishes of devoted book people. Will a novel about a queer kid really make a homophobic pastor question his ways? (Who would make his eyeballs track the words in the first place?) Can accounts of “humanity” — the stories that make a person, or a people, more relatable — stop wars?

Should we even expect this kind of power to emanate from language, whether spoken or written down?

I’m not sure yet, what happened while reading Bennett’s book. The experience, though, gave me a kind of name for the process I feel taking place when I read something that an author has clearly lived inside—it’s the difference between gimmicks and tricks, and a concept that someone has embodied. Bennett’s book is kind of messy in the way that a lot of literary fiction is—I wasn’t sure of the chronology. I was sure there wasn’t a traditional plot structure or “point.” I read these books because they make me come out of myself, not so I can go into someone or something else, but so that I can separate myself from my assumptions and predilections long enough to really observe.

I don’t think we have souls. But it does feel like this thing that reading does is to prompt a kind of suspended embodiment—a hovering, if you will. Awareness of this possible effect of reading might be part of why the affront of book bans feels so very egregious. What we’re losing is not just the stories themselves, but that chance to hover, however briefly, and see something clearly, maybe for the first time. ∆

I thought maybe you would enjoy seeing all the paintings that I made this month while I tried to learn gouache. I’m really enjoying this new medium and we I’m excited to start working with the next color. Keep an eye out for more paintings and let me know what you think of these ones. Thanks for all your encouragement as I was teaching myself this new medium.

S.

We’ve all been there—you want to sketch or paint, but you have a time limit and are stuck at your desk or table (or even in bed next to your napping kid). You need to find your subject quick so that you don’t waste precious creation time.

You might choose to work from an old drawing, or from memory, or from a sticker. A lot of us, though, at this point in the process, will turn to the internet to find a subject.

But an image search can quickly devolve into a rabbit-hole dive to learn about, say, whale menopause. Obviously, learning something new isn’t a bad thing. If you sat down to sketch, though, it’s not ideal to find yourself spending 30 of your 40 minutes finding out about the importance of grandmothers in some cetacean cultures.

Or, maybe this is exactly what you want to be doing instead of sketching. I probably should have chosen a less compelling example. sure makes whale-painting look fun.

But most of us don’t regularly encounter whales, and so: the image search. If you want to make the most of your painting or drawing window, I have a suggestion that can steer you clear of these rabbit holes.

I have a library of images I’ve taken on my phone and set aside specifically because I think, sometime, I might like to draw or paint from them. When I’m stuck for a subject, or just want to be able to get right to working, this library—rather than Pinterest or Google—is where I turn. The pictures there are mostly of the sky, fruiting or flowering trees, hills and mountains, bodies of water, fence-lines, orchards, and insects. I have been meaning to photograph the vases and jars around our apartment to add those to the album too.

Building your own visual library in this way can give you much from your own world to feel inspired by.

Your own photo album isn’t a diving board (usually) from which to spring down deep into some as yet unknown subject. It will inevitably be filled with pictures of things and places you have actually seen, even if just for the moment it took to snap the photo. This has a secondary advantage.

Say you want to paint some mountains. You might put this into Google and get some generic mountain pictures of unspecified places, such as the one I got in my search and pasted below:

This is a beautiful mountain, clearly in a beautiful place. But, since it’s not my photo, I don’t know if it’s been edited or AI-generated. I know nothing of the surroundings, the feel of being there, or what the local people are like.

Now, if I go into my own album and look for something, I get a very different result (and if you’re using relatively up-to-date tech, you can term search in your library). When I searched for “mountain” in my own photo album, this is one of the things that came up. It’s a picture I took of these wild rock formations my family and I saw on our drive to Table Rock Campground in 2023.

The landscape was stunning, but it was also very hot and dry, and there were discarded diapers and water bottles full of urine on the side of the road where we stopped. It was our first camping trip with our then toddler, and it was strange to go from our norm—hiking 10-15 miles sometimes in a single day—to barely making it around the campground.

All these memories are connected to the picture, and though what I make depicting this place may include none of those details, the knowledge of place will shape my work. Other artists, for this reason, say to paint what you love. I would broaden that injunction to paint what you have feelings about—not in a gushy way, but as in, paint what you have sensual experience of, what you have memories about, what you have experienced.

Building your own photo library to work from is a way to bring voice into your work, both because of these connections you’ll have to what you’re painting, and because you are the one who chose to take the picture, how to frame it, what to include, what to leave out. You own it, from beginning to end.

This has been my approach this month when choosing images to paint from for my gouache value studies. I took each of the reference photos myself and, for that and other reasons, the resulting paintings all feel connected—to me and to each other.

What do you think? Will you make such a library for yourself, of your world? Do you already do this? If not, will you start to?

This month’s video is all about this. I hope you’ll enjoy it, and let me know if you feel you have a voice, how it shows up, or if this is something you never think about.

—s

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My family and I live in graduate student housing on my university campus, which means we share a laundry room with dozens of other people. It has also meant that sometimes, when life gets hectic and we forget that we started a load, we’ve had our clothes taken or thrown away. This just recently happened, and the load had almost all of my older child’s favorite dresses in it.

My spouse and I did everything we could think of, once we realized the things were missing and that this meant we had left them in the wash. We checked the laundry rooms, asked maintenance staff, checked garbage cans, and visited our complex’s reuse store. Nothing. We were both so upset, knowing how much our four-year-old loved those clothes (many of which were too well-worn for anyone else to want). As we frantically — really, there was a lot of sweating — tried to make up for our failing (we were the ones who left the clothes in the washer), I started to wonder: What actually is my responsibility, in this kind of situation, as a parent?

I began to really think this through because, even as I tried everything in my power to shield my child from the great disappointment of discovering many of their favorite clothes to be gone, I had another nagging feeling that I was missing an opportunity. It can feel like we aren’t doing our jobs as parents when our kids get upset or face disappointment. Like, if we were doing the parenting thing well, they would always be perfectly happy, all needs met.

Happiness isn’t just the peak concern for parents who love their kids. Worry over happiness plays into everything else—it is part of why we want to know if our kids have eaten, if they are being treated well, if their clothes still fit. It is probably why adults invent games and go to the trouble of making art in refugee camps—sparking joy in a child means something key is still alive.

This impulse to try to keep one’s child happy is maybe a result of what babyhood makes us think is possible, and why so many people miss it so intensely when it’s gone: that the needs are numerable. It is easier to run through the list—diaper, food, sleep, cuddles—than it is to figure out the source of upset for a 3-year-old, or to prevent a 7- or 12- or 20-year-old from experiencing disappointment, frustration, or pain.

But actually, what this situation with the laundry showed me was that this expectation of always preserving perfect equilibrium for my children doesn’t align with my values as a parent, which aren’t to shield my child from experiences that will cause them negative feelings, but to show them how to live with both negative and positive feelings and experiences.

This laundry situation was also a chance to let them in on the great secret of childhood: that their parents, too, make mistakes.

recently wrote about the work of Dr. Dana Suskind in a post that asked the question: “Will Human-Raised Children Become a Luxury Product?” In his post, Charles noted that Suskind is worried about the growing quiet of kids in her waiting rooms with everyone in them, little people included, absorbed by the screens in their hands.

“Suskind notes that ‘learning to be human is friction-filled’ — and should be,” Charles writes. “But those little irritants, delays, compromises, and negotiations are the very things that AI is designed to eliminate.”

The same technology that is reducing friction for children in wealthy countries is being used to kill families elsewhere. This coincidence isn’t accidental. Making life easier for one group of people has frequently come at a very high cost for much of the rest of the world. (Think about consumer culture’s relationships with plantation slavery, sweatshops, and extraction mining.)

The laundry being taken or thrown away by one of our neighbors was very irritating, and I wouldn’t have chosen to have it happen. But, it gave us the opportunity to do what I most aspire to as a parent, and help my children learn what it means to deal with difficulty. This time, it’s lost clothes, which may not seem like a big deal, but clothes are a very big deal to kids just forming their identities. Next time, it’ll be something bigger, like a breakup.

We have already, unfortunately, had the privilege of guiding our child through grief and loss. We already are — in small steps — making them aware of the many ways that the world is unfair and horribly sad. We talk candidly about racism, sexism, the ways people hurt each other, hierarchies, and so much else. As they get older, we will not only share information, but resources and our own ideas about how they can work against these very bad things.

One big thing that is missed, I think, when we assume our job as parents is to take the negative out of life, reduce the friction, not talk about the hard or uncomfortable things with our kids, is the chance, too, to experience the joy of overcoming, of figuring out what lies ahead, though we’ve been surprised by an obstacle or hurt by an experience. We miss the opportunity to see our kids all the way through growth. And by not walking with them through disappointment, sadness, anger and everything else, we show them that those aren’t topics they can approach us with.

I don’t know about you, but I want my kids to come to me even when they’re no longer children. I want deep and lasting bonds with them built on trust and shared humor and love.

Do you think talking about the difficult things is a way to get there? What did your parents do? What are you doing, or what have you done, in your roles as a caretaker?

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Their incredible pigmentation and the immediacy of using them made me eager to work with them as much as possible. When I was first trying out these media, I could find a lot of information about using soft pastels (the ones with the chalky texture), but there wasn’t much I could discover about oil pastels—their potential uses, basic techniques, or, of most interest to me: how to incorporate them into a sketchbook practice.

Since I’ve been using them fairly regularly, and have learned a lot from experimentation—and from taking classes with Jo Blaker and reading Sarah Dyer’s posts for Jackson’s—I am sharing a few tips for bringing this wonderful medium into your everyday (yes, sketchbook, too!) practice.

I hope you enjoy, and that this inspires you to pull out your pastels.

—sarah

P.S. Sorry about the varied audio quality in this video! I know I need to buy a mic, but haven’t had the budget room for one. Also, I recorded a lot of this in the very early morning, and my voice betrays my recent waking. I hope you enjoyed the video all the same <3

Links:

Natural Earth Paint Matte Medium
Natural Earth Paint Acrylik (or Gloss) Medium

I don’t know how it lands for you, but the injunction to “take the unbeaten path,” for me, calls forward a smooth sense of possibility and potential. This phrase feels linked to the western ideal of a “pristine wilderness,”1 in that, if you spend a moment thinking about the actual words involved, you can see the disconnect that has formed between how they’re idealized and the realities they represent.

This is the well-noted effect of cliché: it takes away the productive friction of working something out by offering a well-used idea, or even string of ideas, that feel right in their familiarity, but which may not actually suit the situation at all. It’s why a lot of writers try to avoid using them, and why George Orwell said they allowed us to “shirk” thinking and the “trouble” of carefully crafted language, by instead “letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in.”2

An unbeaten path is an uneven, overgrown place, one that poses difficulty, challenge, and even hardship. It is a way not stamped down over the course of years and many criss-crossing footsteps. Of course, the sense of possibility brought up by the cliché remains, maybe, once the phrase has been broken down to its literal meaning. But what also happens when this meaning is described is the recalling of the initial sense of warning that may have attached to these words.

Would you encourage someone to walk such a path without also saying, Watch for snakes! Or: You’ll want good shoes! Or: Others have tripped at this spot!

A lesson from walking: the beaten path often runs right alongside the unbeaten one. So, why choose to walk the rockier ground?

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In January, I got some very tough news about a book project I started all the way back in 2016. In its current form, which is its third iteration, it isn’t working. I got this news from two trusted readers, who also told me the book wasn’t “dead on arrival,” and gave me some of their ideas about how to rework it.

I did, immediately, start the writing again—the would-be fourth version. But then, with an aching heart, and after a lot of crying and talking to my best friend, I put the most recent version, printed out, into a drawer.

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I have chosen a rocky career path, one with lots of stumbling places and unforeseen blocks. It isn’t easy to be a writer, especially in a country without reliable and affordable housing, healthcare, childcare, or education. My schooling is geared toward a future in teaching, but higher education, too, is more imperiled by the day.3 I plan to hand in my dissertation within the next six to 18 months, but the constant stream of news tells me that my years-long efforts can be replicated in a few hours by “regenerative AI.”4 (I don’t believe this last claim is true, and neither should you!)

In 2021, I began teaching myself to be a visual artist. In the slow-rolling wake of childbirth, I needed an activity to pull my mind away from the drain of new parenthood and origin-family grief. In the years since, hand-making images has become an exercise I depend on to process and connect with the wider world. This visual realm, too, is being cut to pieces—funding dropped, programs slashed.

It has always been difficult for unmoneyed people to choose careers in the arts but, with the threats posed by technology, the dwindling amounts of available institutional supports, and the ever-rising costs of living, it has begun to feel impossible for many of us.

As an artist-writer-academic-parent from a working class background (a.k.a. no parental backup, ever), I’ve started to wonder: where do I go from here? Is there even a “path,” rocky or not, to follow?

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I started babysitting when I was eight years old, joining my older sister every Friday to take care of a group of 15-20 kids; I usually came home from working with a headache, and with spit-up and baby-snot on at least one sleeve. Anxiety about money has been with me for as long as I can remember. Though I’ve always worked, there has rarely been a moment when I’ve felt financially secure. This comes from having parents who nearly always seemed stressed about making ends meet, from working early in life, and from the very real difficulty in making a living that covers everything.

Getting stuck in that reactive anxiety loop about money is one way I’ve long dealt with financial difficulties, but, most of the time, I had faith that I would get somewhere in my vocation. Now that my vocations—all of them—are so imperiled, and I’m about to be on the other side of thirty-five, I’ve tipped into a new place.

Despair as an option for dealing with this new reality is one that I’ve unwittingly explored over the last eighteen months. Around the time I was preparing for and taking my PhD qualifying exams, in April of 2025, I found I could do nothing more at the end of the day, as I nursed my nine-month-old to sleep, than binge Netflix shows I’d already watched. I didn’t even have the energy for a new series.

I try to make sure my own kids are aware of money. That they know my spouse and I work for everything we have. I do this because I want to teach them to care for their possessions, to value the ways other people take care of them, and because I don’t want them to be shocked by adulthood. My plan is to gradually teach them how to make and save and think about the money they need, hopefully without also teaching them to obsess or stress about it. We’ll see how it goes. I also do what I can to protect the dream-space of childhood. I will not have them working at eight years old.

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Ok, here’s the part where I give you some of the answers I’ve come up with, but please don’t understand these to be neatly transferable solutions or signs that I’ve found eternal-artmaking-happiness. Each of us creatives has to come up with the blend of work that’s sustainable and invigorating for our individual lives. For some, like , that might mean quitting your 9-5 and taking on a full time freelance practice. Others, like YouTuber Rachel of Green Velvet Creative, figured out that the anxieties of running a full-time art business are not what they want. We need structural change in the U.S., and institutions to be reimagined and rebuilt, so that regardless of the balance you imagine, things feel possible in a way they simply do not right now.

Until then, one thing we can each do, as often writes about, is develop partnerships and community. These won’t solve our financial problems (at least not right away or in whole), but they can help us see that what we perceive to be our problems or failings are actually widely experienced phenomena related to the structures we inhabit. They can also be ways in to opportunities we would otherwise not be aware of. That’s how I heard about the Pollinator Co-op (thanks, Joy!).

It’s important to show up for each other, and to invite people to show up for you. When I had work up as part of a show at my university, I nervously invited my writing workshop, and many of them drove all the way out to support me and learn about my visual art practice.

I’m also going to more things. In person. Each month, I look for events, shows, readings, and openings where I can go and support others in the arts, invigorate my own work, and make new friends. (If you can’t or don’t want to leave home, Substack is also a way to do this! I’ve invited people I hardly know to Zoom-drawing calls and made new and lovely friendships this way; hey, , , and other drawing buddies! There are also lots of online art and writing events. I sign up for author and editor newsletters, as well as the mailing lists of writing programs and residencies, to learn about these.)

It’s also been important for me to make time for as-yet-undefined projects. For a few hours on some recent Saturdays, my spouse has taken our kids so I could explore nonfiction ideas that have been in my head but under-developed. I read and took notes and just let myself think during those hours, with no defined projects in mind.

Since taking up this additional, amorphous work time, I spontaneously wrote two pitches, three days apart. I have no idea if they’ll get anywhere, but had I not already been doing that thinking and working, nothing would have been there to suddenly gain enough definition to shape a pitch. I also went to an online writing workshop with , put on by Shirin Yim Leos, who often holds these kinds of events. It was free, and I learned so much, including some things that might get me to take that book up there out of the drawer. We’ll see. (In the meantime, I finished the first draft of my third novel (!!!!).)

To solve the money problem, I’m using what I already have as much as possible, mending our clothes, pretty much never eating out (I suggest picnics with friends, instead), and pitching work and applying to things as often as I can, in addition to, you know, working my jobs.

How are you facing down the dread? Especially if you made it this far, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

— s

Continuing on the theme of sustainability and buying less for Earth Month, I want to tell you about a little experiment I’ve been running. I’m always thinking about how I can buy quality things so that I don’t constantly have to throw things out and re-buy. That’s also true for pens. In this video, I show you the three refillable and totally reusable pens I’ve been using over the last year, let you in on what I like each best for, and give my honest opinion of each, in case you have also been looking for a quality thing to write and draw with.

Take care,
Sarah

p.s. If you end up buying an Ellington pen, I’m an affiliate with them and will earn a small commission. You can use my code ARTPOST, or shop via this link. The other two pens I mentioned are the Lumos, made by Tom’s Studio, and the Sailor Fude de Mannen. Happy reusing!

This vlog goes into my recent experiences with gender dysphoria, which is basically distress over the person you feel yourself to be not matching the person you’re perceived to be. It’s something a lot of trans and nonbinary people go through, but you can also be trans and never experience this negative feeling over the mismatch. It’s one end of a spectrum, with gender euphoria on the other side.

We just had spring break with our kids, which was very tiring, but also very sweet. I did a couple small studio things—mixed some paint, cleaned a palette—that I show you in this video.

I’d love to hear from you about your own experiences with gender, and about how you’re keeping your art practice going.

s

It’s not just the beauty of new crayons or full tubes of paint. It’s the promise these things seem to carry, as though they’re whispering to us: we’ll (finally) make your art what you’ve always wanted it to be.

I’m not immune. I loathe shopping, but I love the art supply store. Buying a lot in the beginning of your art journey can be fun (if overwhelming, once home). Over time, if you use the things you buy, you’ll see what you like and what you don’t. You might also experience some remorse over money spent and things that sit unused. All this seems to be fairly normal. If this wasn’t the case, there wouldn’t be so many videos on YouTube with some version of the title, “All the Art Supplies I Regret Buying.”

If you’re still stuck in this cycle of buying a lot, there’s hope.

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As you learn what you love to use, and see what you use up, you might also find you become more selective, and that this selectivity allows you to see what your “style” is. In other words, by gradually giving yourself fewer options, and continuing to practice your art, you might glimpse those gestures and colors and textures that you want to see show up again and again in your work.

Using what you have can actually be a productive constraint, pushing you to access creativity rather than your wallet. Lately, when I use something up, instead of rushing to re-buy, I have gone into the supplies I have sitting around, to see how I might supplement something similar in my process without spending any more money. This both allows me to experiment with something I’ve used less and lets me continue my ethic of winnowing my overall stash.

For example, I love buff titanium watercolor. I tend to use it to lighten other paints and on its own, especially in landscapes and still life. My little tube is almost gone, and I don’t have a replacement. Rather than go spend $11.74, I looked at what I have, to see if I could mix a similar shade myself. This posed both a fun challenge and brought some interest to a process that otherwise would have remained purely transactional: money for supplies.

What I’m really getting at is this: In the beginning, it’s the promise of the new supply; later, it’s the promise of skill and invention. Does this mean you have to go to art school to stop feeling compelled to buy a slew of new supplies each month? Does it mean, to get through the urge, to the inventive “other side,” that you have to draw every day? Or perfect a certain style? No! It means you have to spend time working out what you like, and don’t like, on a surface with some kind of implement. Learning to do something well is not a race. In fact, when I’ve gone about my own practice in a rush, I usually end up frustrated with the experience and disappointed with the result.

Getting to this place of exploration over consumption doesn’t mean you’ll never feel tempted (or the genuine need!) to buy a full tube of paint. It is so fun to try new supplies, to replenish your stash, to give whatever hot new thing everyone is talking about a whirl.

But it’s so important to understand that seeing your work move close to whatever idea it is you have for your practice usually doesn’t come from more stuff. When you start to feel that urge to go spend money, especially if it’s money you don’t actually have, it might help to ask yourself if what you’re trying to buy is time to do your work, or the possibility of leveling up, or recognition for your efforts. If the answer to any of those is yes, then what you actually need to do is rearrange your schedule to allot time for your practice, and I mean that literally. Look at what can be moved or cancelled so that you have time to focus (even if that time is only ten minutes) and then really do focus.

Recently, feeling overwhelmed by the weekend busyness and caring for a sick kid, I went outside with the simple goal to try to mix colors that matched some of the things I saw. This led to a full blown painting, attempted while my kid listened to an audiobook and we pretended to be on an airplane together.

This brings me to my last point: buying brand new art supplies can give you the sense that a perfect process is possible. Just look at those unused paints! So pristine.

New products can give you the idea that your “practice” should be presentable, shareable, and cool. That you shouldn’t have to struggle or fail. But ugly drawings and paintings, as so many people have also said, are part of it. If you’re enjoying making them, who cares? Use what you have, see what happens.

And remember: the promise lies in doing the work, not in what you’re using, who will see it, or whatever happens with it once it’s done.

So, go do that work. <3

Thanks for continuing to engage with my work and being here as I think about art and life. This is a short one. Let me know what you think of this new series I’m working on.

— s

P.S. Here are the links to the natural (plastic-free!) eco gesso kit, and to the Ecosolve, a natural, nontoxic paint thinner and brush cleaner. I love them both. If you use those links to buy, I’ll earn a small commission. <3

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This person with the huge plein air setup and evident loads of time is decidedly NOT my life. At least not at the moment. Maybe in five years. And that’s ok.

In this video, I also go through little updates from my desktop studio (directly adjacent to my 4.5 year old’s studio, the laundry rack, and the spare bed). Life doesn’t happen separately from art-making. They’re intertwined, and that’s how it will stay. Hope you have a good week.

sarah

When I first started drawing regularly, in 2020, I would position each sketch on its own page, or even within little penciled-in squares on a single page. These strictures kept things oppressively tidy, and — honestly — a bit boring, both to make and to look at.

The choice to draw between the lines was in part driven by my avoidance of sketchbooks that looked like books. Meaning, ones that were stitch-bound. These seemed like such serious places to create, and like they should only be used by real artists. I stuck mostly to spiral-bound pads.

As I drew more and got braver about taking up space in my sketchbooks, it started to feel so interesting to me to begin a drawing on one page and have it end up on another. It helped that I had begun using my first ever Art Creation sketchbook, which afforded me the experience of a bound book without the pressures of something expensive.

And as I discovered how I liked to work with multiple media, and transitioned to some of my all-time favorite sketchbooks (made by Stillman & Birn), the trend continued:

You can even use the gutter as part of the composition, as I did with this watercolored marestail. In this case, it looks like it’s growing out of the sketchbook’s center in the same way you might see an industrious plant growing out of a sidewalk crack:

Of course, using the gutter in these ways isn’t just a me thing: start looking for it, and you’ll see artists doing it all the time.

But why is this so pleasurable? Is it the rebellious thrill of literally crossing a line? Or the satisfaction of filling a whole spread? Was it the different orientations of sketches that become possible outside the boundaries of a single page?

I asked about this on Substack Notes. had similar questions to the ones I’d been asking: Maybe it’s that “bigger drawings seem impactful?” she asked. Or that we finish sketchbooks more quickly, filling two pages with one drawing?

brought up the sad fact that pages made in this way will rub together when the sketchbook is closed, or when more art is made further in the book. This is definitely a downside. (Whether materials transfer, though, also has to do with what you’re using, how you’re using it, and if you seal the pages or put paper between them when you’re done.)

It was ’s comment, that working across the middle “makes the illusion more real,” that really got me thinking.

In the beginning, a lot of us want our work to be “realistic” — like photographs, even — to prove to others, and ourselves, that we can do what we think artists are supposed to be able to do: reproduce images from life.

But this isn’t what I want art to do, or what I want to do as an artist. It is making the illusion real that matters to me, and I’m so glad Joseph brought this up.

Let me explain: What I think art should do (whether visual or not), is convey for the person receiving it a bit of the experience of its making, as well as a narrative born of a very specific way of seeing. Let’s look at the drawing I shared at the start of this post, zooming in on some specific aspects:

When I take the above sketch apart, it doesn’t look like much. There are pleasing marks (the bendy-ness of the pine’s trunk, for example), but I don’t think they’re the big reason that making this drawing brought me so much pleasure.

I was out on a walk when I drew that little pine, interesting myself in my very ordinary surroundings—apartments, overused landscaping plants, bark-covered soil. This is what I do most days: go out for ten minutes or so and take little mental notes about who else is out with me (recently: cedar waxwings), what’s changing, how the sky looks. Then, I try to convey that interest on paper.

It’s the quality of open interest, the let’s just see where this ends up, that pulls me into the acts of making and looking, and into drawings that span multiple pages. It’s the illusion of something real that comes from pairing marks on a page with feeling.

Using the gutter, either as part of your composition or as an obstacle to cross in order to make a larger or more interesting image, is just one way to create interest for yourself and for others. What’s important is finding the processes that give you that feeling of, oh, wow, I have to see where this ends up!

What acts of crossing, whether figurative or actual, keep you interested in your work? I’d love to hear in the comments!

Thanks for coming along with me as I figured out an oil painting process that works with my time constraints as a parent and PhD candidate, and that I love to use. In this vlog, I share more about how I’ve been prepping my substrates, what I’ve been using, and how it has been to be able to paint regularly in this more “serious” (read: in-depth) way.

As always, let me know what you think, and if you’re taking on anything that feels big and making it manageable.

s

P.S. Here is the gesso kit I describe in the video! If you buy using that link, I will earn a small commission, and you’ll be supporting Natural Earth Paint: a sustainable, woman-owned brand. <3

These videos will be happening every two weeks, not every week. Over the last fortnight (does anyone in the U.S. use that word? maybe we should?), I plodded through lots of problems in The Painting, and made it to the end! (Or an end.) Now I can’t wait to make more oil paintings. But I’m also deep into the writing of my third book now, and so we’ll see when I actually start The Next Painting.

We also took the kids to Joshua Tree last weekend and, wow, was it nice to be out on quiet trails, and raucous with our babies in a swimming pool, and baking in the sun to PAINT.

Let me know if you’re enjoying these videos so I have motivation to keep going (and get better at it!).

yours,
sarah

Katerina knows books, and always surprises me with wonderful finds. Over the holidays this past year, she gave me The Art Lover’s Sticker Book.

This book, thoughtfully designed by Kelly Lynch, contains matte stickers perfect for “master studies.”2 And, because there are so many stickers included, it also takes the pressure off any individual attempt. In short: though it’s not marketed this way, the book is a great resource for learning in a fun, low-key way, and a vehicle for adding another dimension to a regular art practice.

I also quickly saw a secondary use for the book itself, once emptied of stickers. It’s designed to have beautiful interleaved pages between sections, and it’s hardcover. As I slowly take out and use all the stickers, I am covering over the elements that made it The Art Lover’s Sticker Book with scraps of watercolor and drawing paper. In this way, it will transform into a kind of art journal—a place for writing, reflecting, drawing. It will have a second life.

I’m a self-taught artist, and have learned so much from attempting to remake other artists’ work—not to take credit for it, but to see, in however much detail I have time for, some of what the original work took to make.

There are lots of ways to add this activity into your practice, and I detail four low-stakes methods below.

One of my favorite ways to learn from the work of artists I love as a time-strapped parent, is to look through art books or photos of artists’ work, and then to focus on a detail of interest and, rather than trying to replicate the full work, only doing so with that more limited area. This can be a great way to see how artists create atmosphere.

Another way is using gallery cards or other small prints of artworks. This is an especially approachable method if you’re afraid to attempt a master study freehand, though not as limiting and rigid as making a full tracing.

With a gallery card in hand (or a printed copy of the artwork), first take a piece of tracing paper and draw out the main areas of shadow in the image. For this initial step, I like to use something that doesn’t press into the paper, like a marker.

Next, take your tracing paper off the print and turn it over so that your simple sketch is facing away from you. On the backside of your sketch, use charcoal to lay down a uniform layer of black. (A very soft pencil also works for this.)

After that, lay the tracing paper, with the charcoal-side down, on your drawing or painting surface. Then, using a pointed implement (I used a red pencil), trace your tracing, pressing firmly enough that the drawing transfers.

Then, paint or draw in however much more detail you would like, using the image transfer as a guide.

Here is a painting I did, using this method, of Mabel Alvarez’s Still Life (1916-1917). She made her painting (top) using oil on canvas. I used gouache (bottom).

A third way is to make impressionistic copies, only depicting one element, such as value (dark, mid and light tones) or shape. Below are some ways I did this, working from William Wendt’s paintings. If you want to study value, it helps to take a picture with your phone and convert the image to black and white. If you’re working with shape, squint or take your glasses off when looking at the original.

Lastly, you can make a freehand copy, as I do with the stickers.

For any of these methods, you do not need to render a perfect copy to make the exercise worthwhile. You will learn so much, even if you just mimic one thing (color, line, compositional elements, etc.).

—s

(Pardon the sound of my breast pump in the first video.) It’s been four years since I started drawing and painting regularly. To see what I could learn from how my work and processes have changed during that time, I pulled out my first sketchbook (video one). I found a lot to be as I expected—work that is overwrought, or where I didn’t commit at all (likely out of fear of failure or lack of time), a hesitancy, and an over-reliance on line. I also found things that surprised me, and which have remained in my work throughout the ensuing years. I have continued to be preoccupied with domestic space, mostly outside my sketchbooks, and with the ways shadow can convey mental state. To illustrate these points, I brought out a sketchbook I haven’t toured here from this year (video two). I hope you enjoy watching. Happy New Year.

—Sarah