Advertise here with Carbon Ads

This site is made possible by member support. โค๏ธ

Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.

When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!

kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.

๐Ÿ”  ๐Ÿ’€  ๐Ÿ“ธ  ๐Ÿ˜ญ  ๐Ÿ•ณ๏ธ  ๐Ÿค   ๐ŸŽฌ  ๐Ÿฅ”

kottke.org posts about drawing

My Writing/Drawing Process

Note: I accidentally published this already, but I managed to back-date it to yesterday, so I deleted and am republishing. I apologize.

In the comments section yesterday, Caroline G. asked:

Really interested in knowing more about your writing/journaling/drawing process and practice!

And because I love being asked questions, I thought I would respond in a post!

Basically first thing each morning I drink coffee and draw for an hour or so. I usually draw whatever seems memorable from the day before. This is like three days worth of the journal comics:
comics-pages-journal.jpg
The habit started about seven years ago when I stopped drinking and found I had a lot of energy in the morning, and that I really enjoyed doing something manual while I drank a ton of coffee. So I began keeping a traditional journal, and then I started a second journal for sketching (following the classic sober advice of “you might still like doing the stuff you liked doing as a kid”), and eventually the two journals melded into one. Also I was reading a lot of Julia Wertz and Gabrielle Bell, whose work and diary comics have been very influential.

I started posting a few of the comics to an Instagram account in 2017, and I enjoyed doing that so much that in 2019 I quit my job to publish the comics to a newsletter instead, with the hope that I might one day charge people to read it and make a living doing so. That never quite happened (the making-a-living part), but it was going well and growing, until eventually the whole thing started to crumble, for reasons that are still not totally clear to me. But basically I stopped liking my work. I think I was shaping it to try to appeal to people. Or I had lost sight of something. Or both. Or something else. Also I had a baby who was turning into a toddler, and it was easy to accept being a stay-at-home-mom as an identity.

But I kept doing the journal comics, just privately. And a year+ passed, and then Jason Kottke asked me to guest-blog for him, and it got me thinking I might get back into publishing things again! (Plus some other factors, like general boredom and hunger for a project.) I’d love to find a new rhythm for my own newsletter, and I have a few ideas about how I might do it.

On a more technical aspect, I use Micron pens (size 01) and Staedtler Ergosoft colored pencils, on Borden & Riley Paris Paper No. 234. I scan it all in using a Canon LiDE 220 scanner and then tweak it using the Preview application on my MacBook.

Reply ยท 2

Robert Howsare’s Drawing Apparatus

Robert Howsare’s Drawing Apparatus attaches a Sharpie to records spinning on a record player at different revolutions. It’s a good thing this video is only 1 minute 45 seconds, because I could watch it for at least 17 minutes and 6 seconds, and really who has the time?

Via Stellar


Regarding my post about Tim Knowles’ work,

Regarding my post about Tim Knowles’ work, Greg sent in a couple of links to similar projects. Olafur Eliasson created these drawings much like Knowles did with his Vehicle Motion Drawings, except he used the motion of his father’s fishing boat. William Anastasi has done drawings for almost 40 years by letting his pen drift on a piece of paper while riding the subway.