Austin Kleon

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Something to do

I was feeling angry and despondent yesterday, and I drew these two cactus plants on our back porch and immediately felt a little bit better. (Drawing is part of a cure.)

In this video, John Green talks about drawing and productivity and thinking about time and why he’s attempting to draw 170,000 circles. My friend @craghead, one of my favorite drawers, had a great response:

I love that he talks about drawing as more than representing – as a process, as discovery, as a battery recharger…. My wife says to me – “Go draw something” and then I draw a leaf or a synth or something and I fell better. Even drawing Trump helps. We are so lucky to have drawing.

There’s an essay in Zadie Smith’s Intimations called “Something To Do,” in which she thinks about why she writes. She comes around to this very simple truth: “It’s something to do.”

Of the pandemic and lockdown, Smith writes, “The rest of us have been suddenly confronted with the perennial problem of artists: time, and what to do with it… There is no great difference between novels and banana bread. They are both just something to do.”

On a recent episode of Call Your Girlfriend, however, Smith says she discovered that writing was more than a hobby — Can you imagine? Being Zadie Smith and still thinking of writing as a hobby? — it’s something she needs to do to stay alive.

I, too, am grateful to have something to do, whether it’s making a zine or drawing a cactus or writing this blog. Like Smith, I am not by my nature an activist, and so, as she puts it: “I just do the thing I can do.” The work in front of me.

How to draw what is invisible

The text of this zine is cut out of the book How to Entertain With Your Pocket Calculator.

After I posted it yesterday, a few readers mentioned that it reminded them of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince:

Here is my secret. It’s quite simple: One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.

The original French hung on a sign in Fred Rogers’ office: “L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.”

When I was making the zine, I was singing Kate Bush:

I found a book on how to be invisible
Take a pinch of keyhole
And fold yourself up
You cut along a dotted line
You think inside out
And you’re invisible

Filed under: zines

Self-portraits

Here are four self-portraits I drew today, in the order I drew them.

The first was a blind contour like I’ve been drawing every day since Valentine’s Day. The second was done completely blind — from memory, not looking at the paper or a mirror. The third was done from memory while looking at my paper. The fourth was done while looking in the mirror and looking at the paper.

Taken together, they suggest to me that my latest blind drawings rely more on muscle memory than actual looking. Probably time to move on to another subject. Or draw myself upside down or something.

A friend on Twitter said they reminded him of these self-portraits done after taking different drugs. (Probably inspired by this famous series done during an LSD trip.) The way my face shifts and morphs over time makes me think more of these terrifying and sad self portraits by William Utermohlen “as he slowly deteriorated under the effects of Alzheimer’s disease.”

A final thought: like with all images and words, the meaning of these drawings shifts based on the words I put underneath them. It’s worth pausing to think about what these images would or wouldn’t have said, if anything, without words underneath them…

Drawing with kids


I know lots of parents are stuck at home with kiddos right now, so I thought I’d put together a big list of my favorite resources for drawing with kids. (If you’re stuck creatively, by the way, nothing helps like drawing with a 4-year-old.) I’ll start with instructional books and videos, and move on to supplies.

Instruction

Ed Emberley’s books


My all-time favorite drawing book is Ed Emberley’s Drawing Book: Make a World, which takes a collage-like approach to drawing:


Here’s a sample of one of the spreads:


If they like Make A World, there’s a ton of other Emberley books for them to get into.


And here is a short documentary for kids to get to know the wonderful man behind the books.

Super Simple Draw


Think of Super Simple Draw as a kind of animated version of Ed Emberley’s books. My kids love to sit side-by-side and follow the directions. There’s a couple seasons on Amazon Prime, but there’s also a ton of videos on YouTube.

Here’s their video for how to draw a robot:

And here are some drawings from when Owen was 5 and Jules was 3:

Lynda Barry’s books


Nobody has taught me more about the magic of drawing than the queen, Ms. Lynda Barry. Her latest book, Making Comics, is filled with exercises perfect for kids of all ages, but I love everything she’s done. Most recently, she’s posted some draw along videos to her YouTube channel.

Here’s a video of Lynda talking about how anyone can draw:

Here’s how to draw a chicken:

And here’s Lynda drawing a cat, a turtle, and a dog.

Lunch doodles with Mo Willems

I love Willems’s books and these Lunch Doodles not only provide a drawing lesson, Willems also shows off his studio and talks about the process of making the books. (They’re all archived on Youtube.)

Other great illustrators who are sharing lessons on their Instagrams: @wendymac, @carsonellis, and @mikelowerystudio.

Supplies

Art supplies are some of the best gifts you can give kids, but so many art supplies made for kids are straight-up junk. Here’s some stuff my my boys love that isn’t terribly expensive:

Crayola Slick Stix

Regular crayons are cheap and they don’t make a mess, but they’re hard to hold in tiny hands and kids have to really press hard with them to get any kind of decent result.

These Slick Stix are easy to grip and they lay down a really silky smooth line.

Give some of these to your kids along with some big pieces of paper and pretty soon you’ll have a bunch of Jean-Michel Basquiats to hang around the house.

Box of single-color Crayola Markers

 

This tip comes from my wife:

If your kid has a favorite color of marker, instead of buying another 8-color pack from Target or wherever, go online and buy a box of a single color in bulk.

(Our youngest goes through a ton of black.)

Do-A-Dot Markers

My youngest son had trouble making circles early on, so he loved to use these for wheels on cars, faces, etc.

They’re a little expensive, but they last a long time.  (Try the exercises in Ed Emberley’s Funprint Drawing Book or copying pages from Little Blue and Little Yellow).

If you print them on top of each other, they mix color, so you can do a little Toddler Color Theory.

Sidewalk chalk

If you have a sidewalk, a driveway, or a concrete porch (see above) give them some sidewalk chalk and kick their butts outside.

Don’t forget paper. Lots and lots of paper.

Worry less about the quality and more about the quantity. We just go to Costco and buy whatever gigantic boxes of cheap copy paper they have and let the kids use as much as they want. (People would probably be shocked if they knew how much paper our 4-year-old goes through. But it’s worth it.) My friend buys paper for next-to-nothing in thrift and re-use stores.

Happy drawing!

False lines

After doing a lot of blind contour drawings I’ve started noticing when I make false lines — lines that seem like they should be there, but aren’t based on actual looking.

This happened last night when I was watching a William Kentridge documentary and found myself filling in features on his face after the screen switched from a shot of him talking.

It’s not about a line not looking right, exactly, a false line does not feel right when you make it.

Once you train yourself to notice false lines and that icky feeling you get from making them, you push yourself to go back to looking harder.

There must be a correlation here with writing. We use the same term — “lines” — to describe units of words across the page.

How do we know when we’ve written a false line?

If you draw, the world becomes more beautiful

Here is a quote from E.O. Plauen’s In Defense of the Art of Drawing, written in 1943. (If it sounds familiar, I used the first sentence in Keep Going.)

“E.O. Plauen” was a pseudonym for Erich Ohser, a cartoonist in Nazi Germany, who was forced to work under a different name after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933.

From 1934-1937, he drew a (mostly wordless) popular weekly strip called Father and Son:

Here is a photo of Ohser drawing with his son, Christian:

Unfortunately, Ohser’s story has an unhappy ending: in 1944, just a year or so after he wrote the words that began this post, he hung himself in a prison cell after being arrested by the Gestapo and sentenced to death.

Drawing Miles

Last night Meg and I watched Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool on PBS and this morning I drew a zine about him for Owen’s lunch.

One thing I had completely forgot was that he started drawing and painting in his 50s. He said he thought painting helped with his “demons.” He wrote in his autobiography:

“It keeps my mind occupied with something positive when I’m not playing music. I get obsessed with painting just like I get obsessed with music and everything else that I care about.”

A couple of his drawings:

(The one on the left reminds me a little of Kafka’s drawings, and the one on the right a little of Miguel Covarrubias.)

You can see more of the paintings here and in Miles Davis: The Collected Artwork.

Drawings from Pop-Up Magazine

Here are some drawings done in the dark during a Pop-Up Magazine show last weekend. My favorites were, no surprise, two of my favorite artists: Esther Pearl Watson and Liana Finck. (Both of whom I finally got to meet!)

Drawing is often talked about by drawers like me as this ultimate tool for capturing and processing life, but when does drawing pull us out of an experience rather than pull us into it? When does drawing cause us to pay less attention rather than more?

I used to do these kinds of live drawings all the time, and now I find them terribly distracting.

Years ago, when I went to live events, I wanted so badly to be onstage myself that I think I felt drawing was a way of pulling some of that spotlight towards me. Sure, it was a form of sharing, but it was also a “Look at me” kind of thing.

Drawing at performances was itself a kind of performance.

Now that I’m onstage all the time, I want to be offstage. I want to sink into the audience and disappear into the experience. I want to honor the performer by giving them my full attention.

Not sure I can do this while drawing!

Left to their own devices

I find it almost impossible to draw my kids unless they’re absorbed by some other activity. (I drew Jules drawing the other day, but I had to wait patiently for his bouts of getting up and pumping his 4-year-old fists in admiration of the lines he’d put down.)

One activity they get absorbed in, of course, is staring at screens. Hence these drawings, made in the Dart Bowl Cafe.  (Owen, above, is transcribing graffiti on the cafe wall into a note on the old Kindle we gave him. Jules, below, is watching the PBS Kids app on his mom’s phone.)

Every parent I know angsts about screen time. My position is: Not all screen time is created equal.

“[T]he most important issue with screen time is not quantity but quality,” writes Mitch Resnick in Lifelong Kindergarten. “There are many ways of interacting with screens; it doesn’t make sense to treat them all the same.”

I read a good op-ed the other day about how the Amish use technology and how we should emulate them:

When a church member asks to use a new technology, the families discuss the idea and vote to accept or reject. The conversation centers on how a device will strengthen or weaken relationships within the community and within families.

I was fascinated by this case:

In another case, a family wanted to run propane gas pipes for lights to every room of their home instead of running them only to the kitchen and living room. (The Amish choose not to tap the electrical grid.) Church members discussed how the change would affect the family. If the family members could separate into bedrooms to read at night, instead of gathering in the living room, would their ties fray?

When I heard about that discussion, I thought of a woman at my children’s school who said the disintegration of her family began the day her husband bought a TV for every kid’s bedroom.

You don’t have to adopt the values of the Amish to adopt their approach… but you do need to have your own values! Otherwise, you and your loved ones will be swept away in the tide of whatever new junk comes around.

For example, in our house, we value reading, space for personal alone time, and lots of sleep, so we trust our 7-year-old to use a night light to read in the top bunk while his 4-year-old brother sleeps in the bottom bunk. (In this story, by the way, the night light and the bunk beds are pieces of technology.)

But back to screen time: One thing I find interesting looking at these drawings is that both kids are hunched over screens, but their faces and hands give away their level of engagement. Both sets of eyebrows are furrowed, but one set is in concentration, the other in grumpiness. Look to the lips: Owen’s are raised into a mischievous smirk, Jules’s are turned down, in boredom. The hands, too: Owen’s out like spiders on the keys, Jules’s bunched into fists…

Another lesson of drawing: it helps us see what’s right in front of us.

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