Why Do We Make Art?
Let's talk about working slowly and why we make creative work in the first place.
I’ve been thinking about the slowness of creative work this week. Sometimes it feels like it takes SO LONG to make things — especially when I’m working on sequential art and I’m trying to achieve consistency and a cohesive visual narrative.
I feel a wave of relief anytime I hear an artist I admire talking about how slow they are to make art. Marnie Galloway shared an incredible comic last week called On Fire and opened the post by writing about how slow she is to make comics. (Marnie writes a Substack called Sketchy brimming with autobiographical comics that are a joy to read, and I highly recommend it!)
All of this makes me wonder if the slowness is actually part of the magic. In a lot of ways, I think making art might be an act of pausing time and lingering in a moment. For both good moments and bad, when you are the artist, you linger in and process that moment longer than anyone — and then you show the work and ask people to “Look at this. Linger in this moment with me.”
Last week I wrote about Trusting Your Intuition and the tactile joy of using analog art materials. I’ve continued to pepper in some real ink on paper between digital art, and this is my latest offering (which is today’s downloadable art print for paid subscribers — scroll to the end to download your print!). Also, yes… it definitely already snowed here in Wisconsin this week! Here’s a tiny snowy video:
This piece was inspired by pre-snowy golden walks in the woods. I’ve been admiring leaves as much as possible before the season ends. This week I found the most incredible leaf:
I mean look at it! How is it a real leaf among all the other normal (but also beautiful) leaves?! I had to draw this leaf because I wanted to freeze it in time! Here it is before I added words.
I didn’t do it justice, but I had fun lingering in the moment of a walk in the woods and noticing the beautiful things around me, like this:
Next week, I plan on sharing my process and progress on a new poetry comic called Enough. Here’s a sneak peak at the first page (also inspired by leaves)!
Thanks for reading
Thanks for being here! It truly means the world to me to connect with you every week. In case you missed it, two weeks ago I wrote about How I Illustrate Poems and last week I shared the process behind a mini zine called Intuition.
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