Austin Kleon

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A day of zines

It rained all morning yesterday, so I took the 5-year-old into the garage with me, made him a blank booklet, gave him a stack of NYTimes magazines, and let him go. Here’s what he made (with a little glue help from papa):









A few hours later, we headed over to Staple. We bumped into Katia Lara, who praised I Hurt (she’d just seen it on my Instagram!) and let us check out her skull:

Then we checked out the screenprinting station:

And a lecture on zines by Maria Heg, who co-heads Zine Fest Houston. This slide of zinester Martin Luther got a big laugh from O:

And Heg actually made a one-page zine live for the audience:

Now I’m gonna leave a copy of Whatcha Mean, What’s A Zine? lying around for him to find, and maybe we’ll hit the APL zine rack soon…

Filed under: zines

Inspiring diaries

Duncan Hannah, diary

I’m devouring Duncan Hannah’s 20th Century Boy: Notebooks of the Seventies right now. My only gripe with the book is you don’t get a sense for how wonderfully visual his notebooks were.

Owen Kleon, diary

More inspiration came this morning, courtesy of my 5-year-old’s diary. (Everything on that page after the words “as usual” is invented.)

I keep a huge file of inspiring notebooks on my tumblr, which I relied on when making The Steal Like An Artist Journal. Here’s a slideshow talk I gave a few years back with some of the highlights:

See also: Diary of a 5-year-old.

I dare say

Yesterday I got a big overnighted envelope in the mail with the printout of the first pass of the next book. I dare say, it’s pretty damned good! Here are some teaser pics of some spreads:

I walked into the kitchen to tell the 5-year-old that it was tubtime, and this scene unfolded:

Unfortunately, we have to wait eight months for it to come out in April of next year, which is actually super quick in publishing time, but glacial on one’s nerves. Soon the book will enter what Jonathan Lethem calls “The Gulp”: “that interlude where the book has quit belonging to you, but doesn’t belong to anyone else yet.”

Diary of a 5-year-old

We have talked the 5-year-old into keeping a casual diary of sorts, and, while it’s so fun to see his days summarized in his little hyphenated paragraphs, it’s also really surprising, too. For instance, we’d thought that he had a terrible time on the day mentioned above! He moped around and complained about the heat and all the walking. It’s a reminder that if you have a kid who keeps things close to the chest, giving them tools to express themselves (in O’s case it’s Garageband on the iPad to write songs, or a pen and a nice notebook for a diary) gives you this whole different glimpse into who they are and what they’re feeling and thinking.

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