Austin Kleon is a writer who draws.

From my letter, “The Art of Messing Around”:

Priya [Parker] asked me if my newsletter had a title (it doesn’t) but the more I think about it, it’s funny that her book is called The Art of Gathering, because a title for this newsletter could be, The Gathering of Art. (At least, that’s what I’m trying to do.)

I’m in a big input phase right now — the heavy lifting on the next book is pretty much finished until the release next year, and I’m casting about for what comes next, or at least what I want to spend the rest of the year on.

I’ve been dreaming a lot and writing them down. From my letter, “What do you do with your dreams?”

I started writing down my dreams as a teenager, after I got my hands on Jack Kerouac’s Book of Dreams. He collected his dreams by scribbling in his notebook the minute he woke from sleep. Over the years, I’ve been on and off again with dream logging — lately, I’ve been writing them down in my diary again after I finished another James Hollis book.

The responses to that letter led me down all sorts of rabbit holes, from artists playing with the hypnagogic state, to the brain’s nightly cleanse, to this video of a Windows 95 screen defragging a hard drive.

I followed it up with another letter, “Dream, baby, dream,” which quoted Werner Herzog in Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams:

“If I abandon this project, I would be a man without dreams. And I don’t want to live like that. I live my life or I end my life with this project. It’s not only my dreams. My belief is that all these dreams are yours as well. And the only distinction between me and you is that I can articulate them. And that is what poetry or painting or literature or filmmaking is all about. It’s as simple as that. And I make films because I have not learned anything else and I know I can do it to a certain degree. And it is my duty, because this might be the inner chronicle of what we are. And we have to articulate ourselves otherwise we would be cows in a field.”

Music is the other thing I can’t get enough of. (Really, ever.) Just listening to a ton of music. Somehow this blackout, “Overheard on the Titanic,” just keeps getting realer and realer.

In my letter, “On working bigger (or not),” I shared some notes on scale, reduction, and enlargement, including an old theory I have about the web:

Online, big work gets smaller, while smaller work stays the same or gets bigger.

You can use this to your advantage. For most of my career, I have worked essentially in miniature, with almost every image I create happening in a small sketchbook or a page no bigger than a piece of typing paper.

It occurred to me very early on that if you take a little sketchbook doodle, scan it, and put it up on your blog, you essentially don’t lose anything in the transmission. (Unlike, say, looking at a tiny reproduction of Raphael’s School of Athens in an art history textbook or something.)