Granted, many, many of my sketchbook pages are aggressively unimpressive. But check out this little video I made, going through sketchbooks from 8 or so years ago. With the passing of time, I can see a lot of things I did well.

For example, I kind of love these mysterious inky panels:

This still might be a cartoon someday:

This actually became a cartoon:

This weird swarmy drawing is a hot mess, but also kind of fun:

This is a nice quick sketch of my dad actually that actually looks like him!

The Sketchbook paradox is that they can be occasionally brilliant BECAUSE it doesn’t matter if they’re lousy. When you’re not trying to create anything good, your guard is down. You forget to be careful.

But to “convince” yourself that sure, this is just a low-stakes-just-whatever sketchbook, ha ha ha no pressure, you need to completely ignore the judgey part of your brain, which takes awhile to get the hang of. If you’re “just doodling” but also secretly looking for gems, it doesn’t work. The good stuff HAS to sneak up on you. It also helps if you save your old sketchbooks and then don’t look at them for 5-10 years.

The other thing sketchbooks teach you: you are the worst judge of your own work. Have you ever looked through a fellow artist’s sketchbook and thought, “Whoa, these drawings are incredible!” while the artist just looked at you as though you had just said, “whoa, that wad of tissues you just pulled out of your purse is amazing!” Often this just means they are thinking, “Oh, so you mean the work I put time and effort into is NOT AS INTERESTING as the thing I may has well have dashed out on the back of a takeout menu? That’s just great.”1

My “Buy a Book / Get a Fish” Giveaway Returns for August!

If you buy a copy of my book Skip to the Fun Parts: Cartoons and Complaints About the Creative Process, I’ll send you a 5x7’’ watercolor drawing of a fish engaged in the activity of your choice. These are the rules:

1. Book must have been purchased within the month of August this year. So if you already bought a copy of my book, I thank you from the bottom of my heart, but you don’t get a fish unless you buy another one.

2. Please keep the fish activity PG-13.

3. To get a fish drawing, simply email me a copy of your receipt (you can just reply to this post or email danajeri@substack.com) along with a description of the activity you want me to draw, plus a mailing address of where to send your drawing.

I did this giveaway last year, and exactly four people participated. I would love to beat that record, and invite you all into the special club of weirdos to whom this might appeal. The fish from last year’s giveaway include…


A fish celebrating their 21st birthday (aw)!

A fish doing improv:

A fish celebrating a bar (maybe bat?) mitzvah:

Two fish reenacting the “steamed hams” bit from The Simpsons:

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I finally found it after another hour of searching, in a folder on a metal divider intended to be used for organizing pot lids, but that I use for vertically storing clear folders of artwork. Maybe my system was okay after all.

I have a common problem artists have, which is that to make any good art, you have to make a lot of bad art first, except that leaves you with a bunch of work in that awkward state of being too good to throw out and too lousy to do anything with. Every artist is cursed with their own version of these Bad Art Boxes; you need them, metaphorical or no, the way a novelist requires multiple Shitty First Drafts. And even the good stuff has to be stored somewhere. It’s not in your way, exactly, but it’s also not doing anything. You may not have signed up to become a part-time archivist of your own work when choosing an art career, but it’s an unavoidable byproduct of the profession, and also probably another reason working digitally has become so popular.

I once had a friend who would just come over and take a bunch of my art. This turned out to be the ideal system for me. Most people are either too polite to take your work for free, or too polite to reject it, but this friend was an interior designer specializing in restaurants, and knew a win-win situation when she saw it. She’d thoughtfully sift through my too-many boxes of art and then select ones to display in her clients’ walls; it’s why I have a sketch of a bartender I drew in Istanbul, and a black and white drawing Ruth Bader Ginsberg I’d once used for a cartoon hanging in a popular local restaurant.

But Dana, you may ask, why not sell your work? Surely for an esteemed artist like yourself, it should be flying off the shelves? To which I say, sure, would YOU like to buy any? I promise I won’t make it weird.

For inspiration, I looked at Shel Silverstein’s illustrations. No one could draw piles of stuff like Shel Silverstein, and he was my favorite illustrator without me realizing it for years. I still remember my elementary school librarian gently suggesting that there were other books in the library besides Where the Sidewalk Ends and There’s a Light in the Attic.

As someone who has accidentally destroyed many a drawing by overworking it, I understand where Shel was coming from. Of course, he knew the importance of clarity and when to say when (this is harder than it sounds), but I still credit him for teaching me that need to keep adding to the pile that’s been ingrained in my brain for the last 30 some years.

Much like an actual sandwich, adding too much can ruin it. I try to remember the parable of the second grade art teacher from Six Degrees of Separation:
I remembered asking my kids’ second-grade teacher: ‘Why are all your students geniuses? Look at the first grade—blotches of green and black. The third grade—camouflage. But your grade, the second grade, Matisses, every one. You’ve made my child a Matisse…What is your secret?’ ‘I don’t have any secret. I just know when to take their drawings away from them.’

Many years ago, I toured the Sagrada Família in Barcelona, and I immediately recognized Antoni Gaudí’s compulsion. He, too, needed to add more stuff. Weren’t there enough ornaments? Surely there was nothing to be gained by adding one more spire, or ceramic fruit? And yet, the cathedral is still considered unfinished. It was started in 1883. If you’re not careful, this is where I Need to Add More Stuff Disease will take you. There is an excellent chance the Sagrada Família will never be seen without scaffolding, no one willing to finally say, you know, I think we’re good, let’s call it.

I understand why people say it — it’s a Take. Not an especially Hot Take, since we’ve been arguing about this one since at least 2011, but still, you can write op-eds about it and then responses to those op-eds. It’s a good thing to argue about on the internet. (Here’s what makes for a good thing to argue about on the internet: if it doesn’t somehow inevitably lead to Jews, it’s fine. This one passes.)

But here’s why audiobooks ultimately “count” as reading: if I read a book and you listened to the same book, we’d both be able to describe the characters, summarize the plot, and have a conversation about what we liked or didn’t like. We absorbed the same information. The way we obtained that information is different, but the content is identical. If you want to get pedantic you can say you shouldn’t use the verb “read” in lieu of “listen,” but unless that’s central to the point you’re making about the book itself (or you’re like me and won’t shut up about a particularly good narrator), I don’t think it’s worth getting too worked up about.

Obviously this is not true for movie adaptations, even faithful ones. If you watched the 2008 Sam Mendes film Revolutionary Road without reading the book first, you’d think it was about a married couple fighting and looking sadly out windows.1 But if you read (or listened) to it, you’d see every character, even the annoying neighbor, is given a rich and complex inner life. Books give you interiority, and audiobooks give you the same interiority as print.

Also, there is nothing like dreading a huge pile of laundry, but then remembering, “ooohhh, but I get to listen to Jim Dale read Harry Potter while I fold it!” And although not all art can be created while listening to an audiobook, it is absolutely magical when that does happen; some of my happiest hours have been spent listening to a good book while drawing. I also love looking through my past work and thinking, “oh yeah, I was listening to I Have Some Questions for You when I did the final art for that one.” The book becomes embedded into the art somehow.

I come by this honestly. My dad is one of the more well-read people I know, and I grew up with books on tape always playing in the background while he did chores around the house. He’s the one who introduced me to Frank Muller (“the way he says ‘Chapter Three’ will send a shiver down your spine”) and years later, sent me an email describing driving around under a full moon listening to The English Patient, “with its rich layering of historical and emotional memory,” as he cycled through noir detective novels and Andrew Vachss and We Need to Talk About Kevin.

I’ve been on an unusually good audiobook kick lately. I’m listening to the latest Ian McEwan novel, What We Can Know, Frank Muller reading Moby Dick (funnier than I was expecting!) and just finished the excellent James by Percival Everett late last year.

What audiobooks do you recommend to get through several hours of drawing and/or a dreaded chore? Let me know in the comments.

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Pee-Wee’s Playhouse could have been created in a lab to scare the shit out of seven-year-old Dana. Claymation? You got it! Yelling for no reason? In spades! Puppets that were probably going to murder me in my sleep? Have you seen Randy? And Chairry too, come to think of it?

To be fair, I was an unusually fearful child, afraid of everything from vampires to styrofoam. And I always assumed Pee-Wee wasn’t meant for kids at all. It was meant for stoned college students. When he died in 2023, I was struck by how many of my peers described watching Pee-Wee when they were young, and how much the show meant to them as children.

But I finally watched Pee Wee As Himself, the two-part documentary about him that came out on HBO earlier this year. And I am happy to report that you all were right and I was wrong; Pee-Wee was an artistic genius. Jury’s still out if I would have enjoyed his one-man show as a weirdo in a light gray suit were I to see it live in the 80s, but the commitment to the bit was pretty incredible. Even the level of craftsmanship that went into the Playhouse alone was staggering (Gary PANTER!!??). It was fascinating to see how his disparate interests all came together in the Pee-Wee persona. And the once-terrifying TV show theme song now seems mesmerizing and ahead of its time when I watch as an adult.

Beatrix Potter

Alas, Potter’s exquisite watercolors did nothing for me as a kid. In the very crowded field of personified animals in children’s literature, her stories just seemed old-fashioned and twee. Her characters weren’t funny like Frog and Toad, or relatable like Frances the Badger, and none of her mice ever went on adventures like Ralph S. Mouse. Also, the stakes were always in the vein of, “rabbit gets trousers dirty.” Hard to compete with Stuart Little.

But because I am now a middle-aged lady, I could ogle Potter’s illustrations all day. An exhibition of her art at the Morgan Library from a few years ago is still one of my favorite shows in recent memory.

Holy cow was she a naturalist! The scientific accuracy in those illustrations is remarkable. And oh BOY am I delighted by a drawing of a frog wearing a waistcoat. Actually, I don’t even have to see it! Just say, “frog in a waistcoat” and I am delighted.

Plus, I’m 100% convinced that Beatrix Potter walked so that could run.

Any children’s art you like now that you’re older? Let me know in the comments.

In other words: don’t be too original. No wheel reinventing. If most people expect their login button on the upper right of the screen, and a link highlight to be under a word, don’t try to be cute and put it elsewhere, unless you have a really good reason. The best analogy I’ve heard is that you should think about how a kitchen is organized. If you ever find yourself in an unfamiliar kitchen, you’ll generally know that the silverware will be in some sort of small drawer, and the dishwasher pods will probably be under the sink. Same principle.

But here’s where it gets interesting for artists: Jakob’s Law can be easily exploited. We still expect what we see and read to follow certain conventions, which gives us the opportunity to then go in a different direction and pretentiously call it “subverting expectations.” Take any standard setup and flip it—suddenly you have material for a gag cartoon a surreal illustration, or a design that makes people do a double-take.

As someone whose natural drawing style hovers between abstract and representational, I’m always wondering what the line is between weird and too weird. How much do you have to give your audience to hold onto? This series of building watercolors I’ve been working on this summer has got me thinking about this. Hopefully they follow the rules just enough—you immediately recognize these as buildings. But then they go off and becomes studies of stairways to nowhere and experiments with brick textures. Ideally, the familiar elements give you permission to enjoy the weirdness.

Weirdness is easy to overdo, however, and everyone’s threshold is different. I feel like this one might have gotten a little away from me? I feel like the serpents on the right and left miiiiiigght be taking things a bit too far here:

I genuinely have no answers here. My drawings have a habit of telling me what they wanted to be only after they’re finished. Also, it’s not lost on me that you can hide behind weirdness; strangeness can sometimes be a substitute for having no actual message. (I certainly don’t in these drawings; this is me having fun and goofing around while playing with different brick textures, and using all the fun water colors.) But that doesn’t mean one can’t emerge, eventually, even if by accident.

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Like all of us, I’m often very wary of looking at old work and I have whole storage bins of journals that I wince just thinking about, but this time I felt as though 22-year-old Dana had much to teach me. At the very least she was less distracted.

The mini comic was born from my travel journal from that time, which I also discovered in a box of old sketchbooks. It was a beautiful mess of notes, half-finished cartoons, drawings of pubs and weird museum exhibits, and daily logs of benign observations.

I’m not one to glamorize what it was like travelling in the pre-smartphone era—I’ll be the first to say that paper maps were (and still are!) a huge pain in the ass compared to a little blue dot that tells you where you are at all times. I have very few photos from this time in my life, and all of them are crappy. I view it as downright magical that I now have entire digital scrapbooks of all of my vacations from the past decade, occasionally presented to me at random on my phone.

But man. Remember not having to mine your sketchbooks for Instagram content? Or how much thought and care went into creating something that was going out in the world, instead of sharing as a matter of course? Remember how little we even encountered the word mindfulness?

I still believe sketchbooks should be pieces of crap—safe places for exploration and bad drawings and random thoughts about Winston Churchill. I’ve been travelling a lot recently, and still keep a travel sketchbook, though a lot of pages tend to get filled with drawings of people looking at their phones. And more often than I’d like, I’m one of those people, too.

Sadly, this cartoon got rejected every place I submitted it (not uncommon!), but I still liked the way it came out.

Process-wise, this is one of the first cartoons that I tried scripting out on notecards first, which was helpful.

From there, some thumbnails with blue pencil later colored over various marker and ink. For the record, I exclusively swim breast stroke, because it’s the only one I feel like I can do all day.

A few more process sketches, where I tried to figure out which blue looked the most like “swimming pool blue” and if I should outline the aquarium sardines in pen:

If you any tips for learning how to do a flip turn, let me know in the comments!

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My own rule is that it’s a matter of clarity. An illustration, as the cartoonist Dash Shaw once put it, “tells you what a thing is and how you should feel about that thing.” For example, this ink drawing I did back in 2011 is not an illustration.

What are you looking at? And how should you feel about it? Well, it can be any number of things. The ambiguity is baked in. I can say that I am leading you in a certain direction, maybe—that definitely is a human leg, and probably a piano—but it doesn’t have the clarity needed to be an illustration.

This, however, is an illustration.

You know where you are, and have a sense about how the woman in the drawing feels. Your opinion of it may vary depending on how you feel about Rothko (I have mixed opinions, personally), but ultimately you’re grounded in some sort of time and place and space. After that, you’re on your own.

Anyhow, you can play this game for as long as it’s interesting to you1, but my larger point is that what makes something an illustration has nothing to do with how it’s drawn, or what materials were used, or whether or not an art director assigned it. Cartoons, for the most part, are illustrations—the intent to communicate something specific is there.

And speaking of putting art in frames, I have a gallery show up at Dwightmess for the remainder of the month. There is a mixture of fine art and illustration and everything in between, and my book will be for sale courtesy of People’s Books, so make sure to check it out if you can.

There’s also a closing party on Thursday, October 24th at 7:00 PM. Swing on by, I’d love to see you!

Unhealthy Obsessions: Closing Party
Thursday, October 24th at 7:00 PM 
805 Silver Spring Avenue
Silver Spring, MD 20910

Gallery hours by appointment: email a@adamgriffiths.ink to book.

Part of what made me wary of taking a class is that improv seemed cringe. When I told my friend Jeff I was taking a class, the first thing he did was make me promise not to invite him to my end-of-course showcase. (“I am very happy for you,” he said. “But I want entirely no part of this.”) And I was haunted by the episode of Bojack Horseman where Todd signs up for improv, which turns out to be a cult/metaphor for Scientology.

But being cringe is what makes improv kind of great. My classmates and I were all in a conference room playing make-believe, after all, so really there’s no place for egos.

Honesty > Being Funny

The most popular cartoon I’ve ever done is actually...not that funny. That is, it’s not NOT funny, but I think the reason that it got the attention it did is because I said something honest, and expressed it nicely.

And I found that to be the general starting point with improv. You don’t start a scene trying to say something hilarious. You start by saying something honest, and somehow the humor flows out of that. I’ve personally never felt less funny or clever than when I’m actively trying to be funny or clever, so a framework where you take that expectation completely off the table is reassuring.

Being in the Moment is Hard

I’m one of those people who likes to draw while listening to audiobooks, and guided workouts when I run, or cook dinner with a podcast playing in the background. One of my favorite aspects of improv was just how unsuitable it was for that kind of multitasking. Usually “being in the moment” requires some sort of conscious effort, but improv forces you into a situation where you have no choice in the matter.

Ideas are Everywhere

You know how when you go to an improv show, one of the players asks the audience for a word? After that happens, here is what is supposed to go through the mind of the improvisers on stage (or at least, that’s how my class was taught—I’ve only taken Level 1, remember, so I’m not claiming to be an expert).

Okay word is, print cartridge. Which makes me think of paper. Which makes me think of paper jams. Which makes me think of that scene in Office Space where they beat up their shitty printer. Which makes me think of… etc. etc.

And then someone starts a scene based on something triggered from the suggestion, ideally not the second word that comes to mind, but the third (or fourth). The term for this is A to B to C thinking.

If your mind is completely blank and you can’t think of a single thing associated with the word that could lead to a scene—which is what happened to me about half the time—good news! You have scene partners. And if you follow their lead, you can come up with something together.

I’m sure there is another metaphor for art-making here, but my main takeaway was just how little it takes to get started.

Before You Go

Spots are still available for my Omega Institute workshop, “Roaming in and Out of Your Comfort Zone” this Aug 25th through 30th in Rhinebeck, New York. If you need a summer break in a serene environment with drop in yoga sessions (don’t we all?), this is the place. More on the amenities here.

I’ll be tabling at SPX this year! SPX the DC-area’s biggest independent comic festival, is happening September 14th and 15th. I’m going back to my roots and creating some mini-comics for the occasion, including one that’s a collaboration between me and another local cartoonist that I’m super excited about. More on that soon!

Non-representational artwork, however, doesn’t give you as much to go on. You might get some lines, a shape, a color or two. Which means that the work becomes more about what you, the viewer, bring to the experience. This is likely what makes places like the Rothko room so popular. Are his paintings “pure emotion,” like he claimed they were? Sure, why not! We bring emotion everywhere, generally speaking. At the very least it’s a nice place to sit and take a breather.

Anyway, I think the temptation for us cartoonist/illustrator/general representational types is to draw inspiration from artists whose work is already kind of like ours, only far better—the art we ourselves would do if we were more talented, or smarter, or didn’t spend so much time on our stupid phones. Which makes sense. The “oh man, I wish I could do THAT” feeling is a powerful motivator when channeled properly. But it can also be demoralizing, not to mention a bit limiting.

So if you want to get out of your artistic routine, may I suggest the Richard Serra sculpture building room at Glenstone?

Glenstone is a phenomenal modern, mostly outdoor art museum just outside DC and a magnificent place to spend several hours. I was there last week with my friend Sarah. One of the best parts of entering the room is that the route there takes you down a lovely little path through the woods.

There are no benches to contemplate Serra’s giant sculptures, and you could see why—the entire space is the art, preventing you from simply sitting back and observing.

Speaking of Calm Places to Clear Your Head...

Big thanks to the folks who came to my SAW workshop last month. You can catch the recording here. And if you want to explore the ins and outs of your comfort zone in an even more interactive yet supportive environment, I’m teaching a class at the Omega Institute in beautiful upstate New York this August 25 - 30th. More about the class here:

The “comfort zone” often gets a bad rap. It's too safe, somewhere you go when you're not taking risks or challenging yourself, or working at your full potential. But our comfort zones also provide a lot of important information about who we are as artists and creative people, if we take the time to investigate them properly.

Join artist and cartoonist Dana Jeri Maier and engage in a variety of writing and drawing exercises, discussions, and readings. You learn more about yourself and the tools you already possess to create satisfying work and fulfill your artistic goals.

This workshop is for anyone who wants to do a deep dive into your artistic strengths and weaknesses in an encouraging and inquisitive environment. No drawing ability is needed.

Registration is still open—and feel free to ask any questions in the comments.

A few years ago I finally got rid of the damn thing, but then discovered a problem—over time, I’d accidentally become used to my bed as a working environment, at least for any work like writing that required my laptop. If I tried to type at my desk, I got antsy and kept wishing I could put my feet up.

Since I’m more of the “lean into one’s inherent laziness than try to fight it” type, I wound up getting a used couch on Kaiyo to replace the bed, along with various cute throws from HomeGoods. I can still nap on it, just not as comfortably, which seems like a good compromise.

On a good day it looks like this.

Most days, it looks more like this.

Before You Go…

I’ll be teaching another free SAW comics workshop this Friday evening, Exploring Your Comfort Zone Using Comics. Come join me!

This class will be a mini preview of the course I’m teaching in August at the Omega Institute, where we’ll explore what the much-maligned comfort zone can teach us about ourselves as creative people. You can sign up for here.

Sadly, I’ve never been good at this. I usually only have one or two ideas floating around that I keep going back to, not even necessarily good ones. Then I poke and prod at them again and again, until I can mash them into something I can use, or just as likely, unceremoniously abandon. I do NOT recommend this process, by the way. It’s far more time consuming and probably less effective, but it’s how my brain is wired. 

Thankfully my friend Gila Pfeffer is able to come up with usable ideas en masse, so we made a good team. Our first collaboration was published at the end of February on the New Yorker Shouts and Murmurs titled, “What Blurbs Really Mean.” Since both of us have gone through the awkward-yet-annoyingly necessary process of asking for blurbs, they were top of mind. And it goes without saying that most of them use the same twelve words over and over again, and are ripe for satire.  

The first piece we came up with wasn’t quite there yet, and was politely turned down. For this attempt we’d tried to think of fake dumb titles based on real books, but this didn’t pan out so well. 

Some of our rejected ideas:

One of the issues was that our premise had two jokes in one—the blurb translation joke, plus the title of the book joke—and were taking the reader off in different directions.

After many Google doc revisions / FaceTime calls / professional humor writer consults and joke trades later (“okay, how about we go with your current affairs if you agree to use my wellness influencer?”) we decided to change course and turn the titles to descriptions of what the books were in title-y fonts, rather than actual fake titles.

We also tried to make sure the typography was more in line with the kind of book it was, which we hadn’t done in the first draft. It made them look more like books you’d actually see (well, sort of), and also help illustrate the book’s tone. 

This time we were accepted! Hooray!

Now it was time for the final artwork. A few of the finals were easier than others—some of the pure typography titles were relatively straightforward, but the ones featuring people I had to sketch out several times to get the right expressions.

(At one point I actually Googled “smug politician” for photo reference, but this mostly just brought up that picture of Trump with his infamous shit-eating grin humping an American flag, which was not what I wanted to see, thank you.)

The crystal-toting influencer lady was another one of those people I wanted to get juuuuuuuust right. In the first several, the boobs looked weird! Obviously I could NOT have a weirdly-boobed figure in Gila “Feel it on the First” Pfeffer’s debut New Yorker piece! 

The memoir one also took a few tries. I wound up really liking the colors little drawing of a bottle and champagne glass I did here, and wound up using that as the cover art. 

I won’t go into the Photoshop work of combining and cleaning up the cover elements, but I’m happy to answer questions in the comments.

Anyhow, you can read the whole thing here! Think of us when you encounter your next “tour de force.”

Before you go:

• Pre-order Gila’s book, Nearly Departed: Adventures in Loss, Cancer, and Other Inconveniences now!

• Feeling too comfortable? Or not comfortable enough? I’m teaching a class on August 25th - 30th at the Omega Institute in upstate New York called, “Roaming in and Out of Your Comfort Zone” where we will explore what this often misunderstood place can teach us creatively. Join me!
  

  

A few weeks ago our 17-year-old cat Dennis passed away under our bed while we were on vacation in Encinitas. He had been losing weight, despite having taken steroids for several months, and recently was starting to walk funny. Signs were certainly there in retrospect. Still, nothing prepared us for getting the call from our cat sitter giving us the terrible news.

I’ve since learned that it’s very common for sick cats to die when their people aren’t around—not because they miss them, but because they prefer to be alone at the end. Maybe it’s a courtesy, a way of saying, “look, after everything we’ve been through, you don’t need to see this, okay?” And God knows we were spared a lot of anguish; finding Dennis ourselves, or having to take him to the vet one final time. He likely passed away in his sleep, too, which all of us should be so lucky to do.

Dennis was a little ball of feelings; his default state was one of concern. His (non biological) brother is an orange maine coon mix named Emerson, who was always a chill yin to Dennis’ decidedly non-chill yang. Now that he’s gone, we notice how much he ran the household. It was Dennis who woke us up in the morning, and then, once sated with cat food, would cuddle under my arm as I dicked around on my phone in bed, insisting that whatever else I had to do could certainly wait. One of my favorite sensations was his little cat body plopping contently into my side, after he found a perfect nesting spot.

I wasn’t a cat person until Dennis, either. I liked cats fine, and I was so taken with all the men I knew who seemed really into their cats that I once made a little mini comic called The Bachelor Cat. It was Dennis, with his big eyes and plaintive little face, who turned me into complete goo.

Dennis’ personality was largely projection, of course, but we could often land on assumptions that just felt right. Dennis, having been rescued from an alley as a kitten, was more than happy to remain inside the rest of his life. When the front door was open, instead of attempting to flee like Emerson would sometimes do, Dennis never wanted to leave the house. During the 2020 primaries, we knew that Dennis, with his need for safety and security would be a Biden voter; Emerson, independent spirit that he was, would be for Andrew Yang.

The beach town of Encinitas is home to Dave’s Rock Garden, a beautiful, meditative oasis where people can paint rocks with supplies left out by the owner. It’s steps away from the ocean, which glistened in the LA sunshine the days we were there. All we could talk about was how much Dennis would have hated it here—so much water and open space! We made him a rock anyhow.

At the same time, nothing can be more demoralizing than viewing another artist’s beautiful sketchbook page. A sketchbook is supposedly where we keep our shitty first drafts, after all, so the sight of someone talented enough to skip ahead to the unparalleled brilliance stage is unnerving. Why can’t I draw like that? I inevitably think. How come my attempts at perspective are always so labored? How did their composition come together so naturally?! Something like that would have taken me ages to figure out! Why aren’t I taking more risks like they are? I’m always playing it so safe! etc etc etc.

Thankfully, I’ve come to terms with my generally unimpressive sketchbooks—the important thing is that they are there when I need them. For this reason I’m very much into localized sketchbooks, as it’s easier to lean into my inherent laziness than try to fight it. I have a sketchbook I keep in the living room for drawings I do exclusively on the couch, one at my bedside, one that mostly lives in my purse, one in my other purse, and a little drawing pad I keep in the pocket of my winter parka, completely forget about, and rediscover each year.

And anyhow, drawing something that’s allowed to completely suck, no questions asked, is the only way to eventually create anything that’s any good. Besides, what’s the alternative? Not having a sketchbook? How would that even work?

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I am no different, of course, so I thought I’d share some of my favorites.

Pens

Most of my finished work is done with a Speedball pen, the kind with the cheap plastic holder and separate nib, but I always carry a variety of brush pens and pencils in my purse, for out-of-the-house drawing. Overall these are my go-tos:

Watercolors

For my color work, I use tubes of watercolors, along with an excellent set that a watercolorist friend gave me.

The brilliant cartoonist Richard Thompson was the ultimate authority on watercolors as far as I’m concerned. A lot of my palette recommendations I take from this thirteen year old post he wrote on his blog.

I also love this Daniel Smith watercolor sample sheet, which is a fun cheap way to try new colors:

Paper

My cheap paper go-tos are: tracing paper, slightly-nicer tracing paper, and graph paper. When find yourself drawing something you like by accident (which is like 70% of the time) it’s convenient to trace what you did, or perfect it a bit before committing to your fancy paper. I use a rechargeable lightbox for the same reason.

My nicer paper is Arches, Bristol Board, and Stonehenge. Pre-cut paper is also something I’ve always found very soothing:

Sketchbooks

My unpopular opinion is that Moleskines…aren’t that great. I mean, they’re fine. I like that they have a pocket in the back, which I think should come standard issue with all sketchbooks. But I think the Blackwing Slate Notebook, which has all of the frills of a Moleskine and comes with an elastic loop on the side for holding your pencil is a far superior sketchbook.

If you have your own strong opinions about art supplies—or pen recommendations!—I welcome hearing from you in the comments.

Last August I organized a Lazy Triathlon with a few friends, which I’d like to think embodied the spirit of the month. The problem with triathlons, in my opinion, is that they take three very pleasurable activities (biking, swimming and running1) and make them tedious and competitive. A Lazy Triathlon is a leisurely five mile downhill bike ride, then a 3-ish mile walk-run to the pool, where you can plunge in the water after working up a sweat. The route took a little planning, plus my trusty hydration vest, and overall I’d consider it a success.

Drawing-wise, I’ve been getting really into a Fish Doing Things series, which strikes the right balance of silly and…well, I’m not sure what other word to use here? Nautical? Quotidien? Piscine? A less-pretentious word that also means “of and relating to fish?”

I decided I didn’t care for the Jumping the Shark image, and replaced it with a fish going to therapy. Somehow every night for the past week I’ve been drawing a new one. There’s always something a little wrong with each therapy fish, which means that I feel obliged to try again:

If you want to buy one, a few are on sale on my website for Substack subscribers. You can use the code SUBSTACK20 for 20% off.

In case you were wondering, the Nude Post Service was part of our recurring cast. This was a Barbie who we didn’t bother to dress, but delivered packages to advance a storyline. (The joke, of course, was that Ken was always REALLY eager to answer the door whenever she showed up.)

Armless Joe was a Ken doll who was missing an arm, and also got his own story at one point, though it remained unfinished.

I don’t know if there’s a lesson with these stories, other than that as a kid I did find them sources for joy and amusement, and that I struggled coming up with endings from a young age, same as I do now (WHAT HAPPENED WHEN ARMLESS JOE’S FRIENDS SAW HIS NEW ARM?!?!?!).

“Playing Babies is not a babish [sic] habit like people say it is,” I had written in another entry, perhaps not as convincingly as I would have hoped—I was twelve, and the last of my friends to outgrow them. “You get to know (and love) your Barbies.”

Thankfully, now that I’m older I always have a fantastic time when I visit, even if it’s just for work meetings. The secret, I’ve found, is that New York is kind of like Vegas; you have to quit while you’re ahead. Leave when you’re still enjoying yourself and haven’t wasted all your money yet. 

What follows isn’t a guide, exactly, which I would be very unqualified to write anyhow, but rather a few recommendations I have from visiting new New York over the years. 

Getting There

My unpopular opinion is that the bus is a perfectly fine way to get to New York from DC, and more convenient than the train in a lot of ways—no price jumping if you book last minute, no dealing with luggage overhead bins, more pick up spots, often less crowded and of course vastly cheaper. (I’m not saying it’s the Orient Express or anything—it’s still the bus!—but the train saves me what, like an hour?) I generally like to take the bus there, and the train back home, ideally the Acela if I can get tickets for under $100.

Staying There

I’ve found that most of the hotels in New York—even some of the fancier ones—tend to do that thing where the bed takes up the entire room, which is annoying. A few hotels I liked that were actually spacious included The Bryant Park Hotel, Hotel Indigo on the Lower East Side, and M Social Hotel in Times Square.

The Classics

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Met is a whopping $30 for out-of-towners, but you really do get your money’s worth. Remember to use the side entrance to save time. You can also be sneaky and borrow a New Yorker friend’s library card to get in for free.

Reread From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler from when you were a kid (it holds up!), and don’t forget to check out the Temple of Dendur. Also, the Met Cloisters in Washington Heights is absolutely stunning and well worth a field trip. It’s about as close as you will ever get to stepping into a pack of Tarot cards.

Bemelman’s Bar

Pricy, but oh how I love this place. You can walk there after visiting the Met, admire the murals by Ludwig Bemelman of Madeline fame, and enjoy an expertly made cocktail.

Bryant Park and the New York Public Library

Bryant Park is your reward for making it through midtown. Also, are you working on a writing project? Grab your laptop and spend a few hours at the New York Public Library where the beauty and grandeur of the reading room will inspire and/or shame you into at least finishing a paragraph or two.

Central Park

One leisurely run or walk or bike ride in Central Park on a nice day, preferably at 9:00 AM on a random Wednesday when everyone else is at work, and you’ll understand what all the fuss is about.

How do you guys visit New York? Or do you live there and have strong opinions on what to do there? Let me know in the comments!

Before You Go

• Come draw with me! I’m leading a cartoon workshop this Friday, July 21st at 7:00 PM Eastern / 4:00 PM Pacific as part of the Sequential Artist Workshop called Comics About Museums. Register here! This is a really superb and welcoming workshop series and will be recorded if you can’t make it.

• If you missed my book talk with Tim Kreider in Baltimore in May, you are in luck because we’re doing another one at People’s Book in Takoma Park on August 19th, an absolute gem of a bookstore that just opened. Come say hi!

I managed to cull mine down to a reasonable page and a quarter, though now that I think about it, I’m sure there are people I forgot, so if you are reading this and feel snubbed because I remembered a pasta recipe and forgot your all-important help and guidance, I am very very sorry.

So other than friends, here are some more details about the things that fell under the “helpful and therapeutic” category that I listed out:

750words.com

Basically the premise is that you write 750 words and get a little green square. That’s it! But it’s an achievable goal, and it did get me to write every day and established the habit well enough so that if I miss a day or two, it’s no big deal. But it’s important to write every day, if only because if I don’t write things down, I forget pretty much everything. It’s very satisfying to go to a random entry from a few years ago and think, “Oh yeah, that happened.”

World’s Greatest Cats, Dennis and Emerson

I married into these cats. My husband had them since they were kittens, and although I always liked certain cats just fine, I didn’t really become a bona fide cat person until I met these guys, or as I like to call them, “booshie boo boo boos oh whose is the booshie boo Dennis is the booshie boo oh yes he IS” etc. Don’t ask me why! It just sort of stuck! I’m one of those people who talks to their pets like an idiot and it has only gotten worse over time!

Coach Bennett of the Nike Running App

I have been a devoted mental health runner ever since my mid-twenties, meaning that I’ve never once entered a race, but still dutifully throw down about 10-15 miles each a week, because running somehow keeps me sane, and you don’t have to do it long or fast to get health benefits. Coach Bennett of the Nike Running App has a guided run series that I absolutely love and embodies this, “just go for a run as often as you can, doesn’t matter how far or how fast or for how much time, it’s still good for you and you should take a moment to feel proud of that!” ethos.

A Nightly Episode of Crazy Ex Girlfriend

I am one of those assholes who just can’t with most romantic comedies1 so I didn’t even register CXG until I was at the Jewish Museum in New York, of all places, and stumbled upon a clip of Remember That We Suffered and from then on I was immediately sucked into a CXG music video rabbit hole.

Oregon Trail Remake

So the remake of Oregon Trial on Apple Arcade isn’t a fun game, exactly. Or it least it stops being fun once you make it to Oregon. But whether it was the surprisingly poignant music, or the gorgeous graphics, or plain ol’ nostalgia for the olden days of computer games I grew up with, I found it very soothing, even as I wailed to my husband that, “I have a book deadline! I don’t have time to get addicted to a fucking video game!” And not even a COOL video game! I justified it by figuring that when it comes to mindless time-sucks, it was probably better for my mental health than Twitter.

Smitten Kitchen's Vodka Sauce Pasta Recipe

Comfort food at its finest. It’s also what you will be getting at our house if you ever come over for dinner.