One result of the pandemic is that I’m actually able to attend author events at the same frequency I did before I had children. Last week I watched Edward Carey discuss writing and drawing his re-telling of Geppetto’s time in the belly of the whale, The Swallowed Man (and one of my favorite reads of last spring), while highlighting treasures from the Ransom Center here in Austin, Texas. (You can watch the whole talk on YouTube.) Here are my notes:
It’s been one year since Jason Polan died. I am re-reading my diary entry from August 8, 2018, the last time I saw him. It is no coincidence that seeing him made me think about seeing — he was one of the great see-ers of our generation, always looking, always seeing.
I have been practicing a lot of Debussy on the piano, and read a letter he wrote to his friend, quoted in Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise:
I confess that I am no longer thinking in musical terms, or at least not much, even though I believe with all my heart that Music remains for all time the finest means of expression we have. It’s just that I find the actual pieces — whether they’re old or modern, which is any case merely a matter of dates — so totally poverty-stricken, manifesting an inability to see beyond the work-table. They smell of the lamp, not of the sun…. I feel that, without descending to the level of the gossip column or the novel, it should be possible to solve the problem somehow. There’s no need either for music to make people think! … It would be enough if music could make people listen….”
Jason’s work smelled of the sun, and if it ever smelled like a lamp, it smelled like a lamp in Taco Bell: absolutely delicious.
If you don’t know his work, watch this video, narrated by his friend, Fritz Swanson, for the new site by UNIQLO, which features a letter from Jason’s mother. Jen Bekman also wrote a remembrance at 20×200.
Then pick up a Uniball Vision Elite Bold and a Strathmore 4×6 pad, take a walk, and draw what you see.
And be nice to people.
I was putting together a climbing dome for my kids out in the yard a few days ago (it’s December in Texas, you can still get a sunburn outside) and there were two kinds of nuts I had to distinguish between, and I thought, “How many damned kinds of nuts are there, anyways?” Many, it turns out, so I drew a bunch of them in my diary. Now I can name nuts like Harlan Pepper.
I copied those nuts from a diagram I found on the internet, much like I copied this timeline of composers a few years ago. It’s not enough, for me, to just print out a diagram and paste it in my diary. I need to copy it by hand, slowly, to really look at it and let the information sink in. Copying is how I learn, it’s a way to understand what’s really going on, and drawing is a way of slowing down long enough to really look at something. (It’s like I said in Keep Going: “Slow down and draw things out.”)
Here’s a drawing I made when I was trying to understand the moon phases. I thought I had it figured out, until I was playing with the Sundial app on my phone and realized that, duh, when the moon is full, it’s got the full sun shining on it from the other side of the earth, so lunar noon, when it’s at its peak, is at the opposite time of day from solar noon. (I think?) Again, drawing helped me understand:
If you draw something, no matter how mundane the subject, no matter how badly, you really look at the thing, and therefore, you remember it better.
If you want to remember something, try drawing it.
I signed hundreds of copies of my books at Bookpeople in the past few weeks. Because of the pandemic, we sign masked and socially distanced on the picnic tables outside:
This cart is probably, oh, 1/3 of what I signed for the holidays:
As you can imagine, I go through a lot of Sharpies. Because I’m a weirdo, I have a technique to break in new ones, which I demonstrate in this video (also on Instagram):
How to break in a Sharpie pic.twitter.com/1VnHWi3EVL
— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) December 2, 2020
Happy huffing drawing.
In his latest newsletter, L.M. Sacasas writes about the “emotional roulette” of checking social media. “You never quite know what news you’ll encounter and how it will mess with you for the rest of the day.”
Worse is “doomscrolling,” the endless surfing we do “when we give ourselves over to the flood of information and allow it to wash over us.”
Whatever else one may say about doomscrolling, it seems useful to think of it as structurally induced acedia, the sleepless demon unleashed by the upward swipe of the infinite scroll (or the pulldown refresh, if you prefer). Acedia is the medieval term for the vice of listlessness, apathy, and a general incapacity to do what one ought to do; ennui is sometimes thought of as a modern variant. As we scroll, we’re flooded with information and, about the vast majority of it, we can do nothing … except to keep scrolling and posting reaction gifs. So we do, and we get sucked into a paralyzing loop that generates a sense of helplessness and despair.
In his essay about Iago in the The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays, W.H. Auden makes this life-changing distinction: Instead of asking yourself, “What can I know?” ask yourself, “What, at this moment, am I meant to know?”
I’m usually good at avoiding doomscrolling and the Pavlovian pull and release of refreshing Twitter (ever notice how there’s very rarely anything refreshing about refreshing?), but the election has destroyed most of my willpower. I’ve been busying my hands with The Cube and soothing my brain with the calm of collage, especially “ugly” ones like this one:
Some kind souls on Twitter said, “How do you consider this to be ugly?” The product might not end up ugly, but the process is my attempt to make ugly or “bad” art, which I think is often much more fun and more helpful than trying to make “good” art. (“Every time we make a thing, it’s a tiny triumph.”)
I’ve also been doing a lot of doodling on notepads. (In addition to all my notebooks, I keep one of these little legal pads on my desk for random notes.) Drawing is something to do and it is part of a cure and when you draw the world becomes a little bit more beautiful. (If you need some guidance, try a blind contour drawing or my friend Wendy MacNaughton’s four drawing exercises to help with a hard day.)
Here I’ve combined collage and drawing: I ripped a picture of Abe Lincoln in half, pasted one half in my notebook, and as I was copying the second half, got the idea to make his hair shaggy… and then add a barber? Who knows where these images come from…
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.
My blind contour drawing project I began in February hit 100 drawings, so I made a zine out of them. (You can see them all in higher resolution on Instagram.) My friend Wendy MacNaughton has a blind drawing exercise in this weekend’s NYTimes: “How to See, in Four Minutes.”
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
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…
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.)
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.
If you have a sidewalk, a driveway, or a concrete porch (see above) give them some sidewalk chalk and kick their butts outside.
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!
This site participates in the Amazon Affiliates program, the proceeds of which keep it free for anyone to read.