The Vacation Edition

This will be short (well, short-ish)...back with more in September!

I’m Going on Vacation. Here Are My Art Supplies.

I’m going to Amsterdam in a couple days, so this is going to be kind of brief, because I’m already in vacation mode. I haven’t really been anywhere since Covid hit, apart from a few trips to see my family. That means that I haven’t exactly done what you’d call travel sketching in quite a while. I’ve been drawing and painting a lot, and I’ve been out and about in Portland with my sketchbook, but I haven’t actually filled a sketchbook on a trip since this visit to Mexico in February 2020:

I wanted to do something different this trip, but I wasn’t sure what, exactly. After a lot of experimenting and looking at other people’s art, I decided that my new thing would be to put down a few very loose watercolor shapes first, and then to draw on top of that. By putting the watercolor down first, the drawing would be guaranteed to look a bit wonky, because there’s no way I’d get everything in the right place.

Also, I decided to focus less on matching the exact color of what I was looking at—the shade of red in the brick, the precise green of the trees—and instead to pick an interesting and somewhat abstract color combination, and just run with that. The idea is to use color to set the mood, or create a vibe, not to accurately match the scene.

Also, I happened across some new markers and decided to play around with those.

Anyway, all of those ideas came together after a lot of experimenting. I posted the most successful of those experiments on Instagram over the last few weeks, but I’m going to show all of them, the good, bad, and the ugly, to you here. I filled one sketchbook and spilled over into a couple of others. It’s full of trial and error. Take a look:

New ideas about sketching require new art supplies (of COURSE!), so I re-thought my watercolor palette and bought a bunch of new markers to take with me. Here’s everything that’s going in my art bag on this trip:

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Here’s a Fun Look at the Publishing Industry

The book business: How does it work? No one knows.

If you’re interested in the weird and often opaque world of publishing but you haven’t been following the coverage of the Penguin Random House merger trial, here’s a highly entertaining Twitter thread that will deliver insider publishing gossip in little snack-sized bites. That’s all I’ll say about that: you’re either into it or you’re not.

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My Least Popular Class

Me and my scanner: a love story

I started teaching classes on Skillshare a few years ago as a way of answering the questions I’m most often asked about writing books—questions like, “I have an idea, but now what do I do?” or “How do you keep track of your research?” I actually have answers to those questions! But the answers are a bit longish and involved, so I thought a short online class would be better than a long-winded answer at a bookstore.

Anyway, then Covid happened, and we were all locked down for a while, and I started making art classes as a way of keeping myself entertained and connecting with people. The art classes turned out to be way more popular than the writing classes. Go figure.

But my least popular class? I was just reminded of it recently, because Skillshare does not like you to post classes that nobody watches. They don’t like the clutter. I can’t blame them. Ironically, my least popular class is about banishing clutter—sort of. It’s about going paperless, either for your home office or just your household. I went totally paperless a few years ago, and I felt like I developed a good system that would work for freelancers or anyone with a pretty simple operation, work or home-wise. So I made a class about how to go paperless! And very few people watched it, and no one reviewed it, which is why it has been brought to my attention that I have made a wildly unpopular class on Skillshare.

It’s useful, but boring. But you know what? How I run my little home office is something of consequence to me every single day. The system I set up is one I use every day. And if you’re going to go paperless, the time to do it is not in January, when you’re making resolutions about getting organized. The time is now, in August, so you can very gradually ramp it up, and be ready to go in January with a shiny new system.

Give it a try! You might like it. Or maybe not. Nobody else does.

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Recommended!

I love Anna Wilson's mysterious, playful, story-filled art. It was a delight to read her first newsletter, about how her art has changed over time and in different locations. I’ve scrolled through her Instagram before and noticed how her art makes these big leaps from time to time. How does she do that, and when, and why? In her first newsletter, she answers that very question. Apparently she wasn’t quite ready to launch a newsletter, but hit “publish” by accident and it went unexpectedly out into the world. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if a bunch of you ran over there, fell in love with her work, and subscribed? I hope you will.

Also, thank you to Neal Thompson at Blood & Whiskey, who had this to say about the newsletter you’re reading right now: “A hodge-podge of fun shit: books, birds, food, art, writing, drinks. Like a quirky email from your smart, arty aunt.”

Happy to be your smart, arty aunt, just don’t ask me to remember your birthday.

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What Are You Reading?

If you’ve read this newsletter for a while, you know that I became friends with Elly Griffiths after our publisher sent us on book tour together. Her murder mystery series about archaeologist Ruth Galloway is about to come to an end, or so she has threatened—she says she’s only going to write one more. It just came out in the US, so if you enjoy the series, go savor this second-to-last installment!

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