Today’s newsletter is about how I added color to my beloved Pentel Pocket Brush pens.
Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics
My May pick for our Read Like an Artist book club is one of my all-time favorites and a bonafide classic: Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics.
Here’s my intro:
This a comic book about comic books. But it’s also much more than that: using the medium of comics, Scott McCloud explains a whole world of visual communication and teaches lessons that apply to anyone working in any kind of visual medium. To quote Art Spiegelman, the “simple-looking tome deconstructs the secret language of comics while casually revealing secrets of time, space, art and the cosmos!” Originally published in the early 90s, this book has become a contemporary classic, and is in my top 10 all-time influential books on my own practice. Even if you’re not at all interested in comics, I promise that you will learn something from McCloud. And who knows? It might even open up a whole genre for you. I love this book because after you read it, you see the whole world differently.
Proplifting
“It is better to take what does not belong to you than to let it lie around neglected.”
—Mark Twain (quoted in Steal Like an Artist)
“Stolen plants always grow.”
—Beatrix Potter
My wife routinely picks up clippings and fallen plant parts off the road when we go on our daily walks and brings them home and propagates new plants from them, so I was delighted to discover that there’s a term called “proplifting”:
This tweet recently went viral and caused an online row about whether it’s right or wrong. (Or legal, which is often different from right or wrong!) I love this Reddit page, which is titled “one man’s trash is another man’s propagation.”
My friend Matt sent me this photo of a plant he grew from a single leaf he picked up at a big box store which will go unnamed. (On yesterday’s bike ride, I told my neighbor Hank, a gardener, about proplifting, and ironically, at the end of our walk we found a whole fern in the gutter to take home.)
I often wonder how different Steal Like an Artist would be if I had been interested in gardening then as much as I am now. It provides such rich metaphors for creative work. (Gardening was a big influence on Keep Going, hence the final chapter, “Plant your garden.”)
Filed under: gardening
How I copy quotes from a library book
Instagram has once again changed its algorithm, this time rewarding accounts that post short “Reels.” (They’re also pretty much destroying small businesses who have built up an audience on the platform.)
Luckily, I don’t run my business off Instagram, but I have been experimenting with Reels as a little creative challenge, mostly to see if you really can convince the algorithm to pay attention to you. (You can.)
How I copy quotes from a library book pic.twitter.com/y9rTBeVOrj
— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) April 12, 2022
I have 151k+ followers on Instagram, but most of my posts barely crack 500 and max out at about 1000 or 2000 likes. This “How I copy quotes out of library books” post I made about using the iPhone’s “Live Text” feature took me about 5 minutes to make and cracked 6k likes. (This is not, by the way, how I want to plan my days, I was just curious.)
Re: the quote-copying: I got some good replies. One of the most helpful: you can do Live Text straight from the Notes app, just open a note and click a blank space and the icon appears. (Other people told me Android has done this kind of live OCR for years and I should get Readwise.)
The funny thing is that I actually believe strongly in copying quotes by hand or typing out poems. When you go to the actual trouble of copying with your fingers, I think you have to pay more attention to the quote — you really read it…
Winter diary walkthrough
In this Tuesday’s newsletter, I did a full HD half-hour walkthrough of my winter diary. (If you’ve been on the fence about becoming a paid subscriber, I’m running a 20% off deal this weekend!)
- ← Newer posts
- 1
- …
- 73
- 74
- 75
- 76
- 77
- …
- 618
- Older posts→