We loved seeing what you shared in response to Wendy’s prompt to draw the same thing every day, and to see how you might capture change. We watched flowers bloom over the week, colors shift with the sun, and steam rise from the day’s first coffee. Seeing how many wonderful ways there are to draw the same thing also reminds us that there’s no one “perfect” image, which leads us into our topic for this week…

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Perfectionism and us

Wendy has written at length about our old friend perfectionism here on the DrawTogether GUT before. After hearing an interview with the author and researcher Thomas Curran about his new book The Perfection Trap, she immediately bought it and now recommends it to everyone!

Viewing Curran’s book through the lens of drawing led us to wonder: What motivates people to draw—and what holds them back from starting? How does perfectionism shape the way we judge both the process and the finished work? And how might we learn to feel more at ease with ourselves and what we create?

The perfectionist trap

What is perfectionism?

Perfectionist narrative: According to Thomas Curran, perfectionism isn’t just a character quality. It’s an entire worldview. Perfectionism is a deep-down fear that we are never enough, and that we could always do—and be—better. As a result, we live in a perpetual state of deficit, always feeling bad about ourselves and/or others.

Perfectionist’s behavior: By trying to make things perfect, we attempt to alleviate the shame we feel about that perceived deficit. We are terrified that we will be seen, and judged, for who we really are. Our standards are so high that we work around the clock—or else we procrastinate and never start on things in the first place—to avoid failure. Because if we did do less than we expected, the secret would be out: We aren’t all that after all.

Ugh.

Maybe you relate to some of that. Maybe all of it. Maybe none. Though none would be surprising, honestly, because as Curran points out (and this is in contrast to some earlier research on perfectionism), these high expectations are the air we breath.

Where does perfectionism come from?

According to Curran, these massive expectations for improvement and growth are foisted on us not only by family and genetics, but a society that requires us to always be more, want more, and grow more. If a capitalist system ceases to grow, the entire thing falls apart.

Messages from advertising, work, and even our “growth mindset”-preaching education system tell us that we should always be striving to do better, do more, create better. If we do grow and get better, we’re taught, we will be better people. And therefore rewarded with more love and respect.

OOF.

One of the reasons for the skyrocketing levels of perfectionism (and its bedfellows anxiety and depression) in young people today? Two words: Social. Media.

OOF. OOF.

Sure, we’re products of both nature and nurture. But Curran’s work nevertheless resonates deeply with us. How about you? Do these forces influence the standards you hold yourself to? How about others?

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So what can we do about it? Be “Good Enough.”

Curran suggests the antidote to perfectionism is “good enough.” Think about the most tender, insecure parts of yourself. Instead of saying “I can always be better,” imagine thinking, “I am good enough.”

Seriously. Stop and take a breath. Reflect on a quality you are particularly hard on yourself about. Now take another breath and say to that quality, “You are enough.” And say to yourself, “I am good enough. Inside this body, this heart, this mind, this community, this culture, this world, I am good enough.”

The very concept of “enough” puts the kibosh on the idea that we need to always be better, to be more, to keep growing without end. It disrupts the system from the inside out.

What is a “Good Enough” drawing?

Perfectionism plays out, well, perfectly on the drawing table. The drawing table is like a lab for addressing these issues, playing with them, and seeing if we can let go of them.

What stops us from drawing? What keeps us going when things get rough? What makes us start again after time away? What is a “good enough” drawing? What is a “good enough” artist??

We think a “good enough” drawing is one made with the focus on the experience of drawing, instead of the outcome. The experience we have making a drawing—the unexpected moves and mistakes and surprise gifts—leads us to this image that appears on the page. With every breath we’ve taken, every decision we’ve made, every person we’ve loved and let love us—all of these have taken us to this moment right now, to this drawing. It is not perfect. But my god, with all our hearts, we tried.

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The practice of making “Good Enough” drawings

As you know by now, we here at the GUT believe we learn things by doing them with our bodies, with PRACTICE—not just reading and thinking about them. So this week, we’re offering the opportunity to deliberately create GOOD ENOUGH DRAWINGS. We will see how they feel to make. And how we feel about what we’re left with. And how we feel about ourselves when we make them.

If they prove helpful, perhaps they will shift our perfectionism a little at a time, away from “I can always be better” to “I am good enough.”

Without further ado, here is our Good Enough practice for the week…

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First, a huge thank you to the excellent DrawTogether Grown-Ups Table crew for keeping the creative fires burning with the GUT Permanent Collection lessons and exercises while I’m away at an artists residency working on a book. I feel so deeply fortunate to be able to carve out this time for deep, focused work, the likes of which I can’t remember doing since…since the internet? I’m grateful to the people of MacDowell, this incredible residency, for the opportunity and gift of this time, and everyone at home who made this time possible.

Suffice to say I’ve learned a tremendous amount about myself and my art practice—about the conditions I need to create for myself to do the kind of art and drawing I want to do into the future. I was shocked by what I discovered.

I will share more in the weeks and months ahead, but for now I am jumping in to say hello, and to share a practice I’ve been doing while away—one I look forward to bringing home with me.

My studio at MacDowell is deep in the woods with no internet and very little cell service. This means that my entire routine was out the window, and I had to rethink how I start my day.

The second day in my studio, I started drawing the view from my window while drinking coffee. I continued to do it every day (except for one—I can’t remember why). It became a ritual and routine that calmed and focused me as I moved into the rest of my day. It also provided a sense of accomplishment when my other work ended up amounting to crap. Which happens, and not infrequently.

When I started, I had no idea I would end up witnessing the seasons change. Nor that I would end up trying so many different mediums and styles. It was an unfolding mini-adventure every morning.

It taught me to begin each morning by slowing down instead of speeding up. That really changed how I approached the rest of the day, and my work.

The dailiness of it meant that I knew I’d do it again the next day, and it took pressure off whatever I was working on right then. Nothing was final. It was all part of an ongoing conversation and observation I was having with the woods. The trees. The melting snow. The sticks and leaves and stones.

Starting without the internet every morning—just analog tools, my eyes, and my hands—kept my nervous system calm and my breathing deep. There was no rush. There was time. Of course that will change when I’m back home. But still, starting my mornings like this will be grounding, even as I slide into a more fast-paced day, and life.

Alright, I’m going to save the rest for another time. While I can’t share exactly what I’m doing with this book, I wanted to share a little of what I’m doing with my drawing.

And I want to offer this idea: It’s not something that requires disappearing into the woods or being off the internet. Much like we do in our 30 Days of Drawing—a daily ritual of slowing down, looking, breathing, and reconnecting with our senses and the world—this is something we can return to every day.

Even just 10 minutes changes how we move through the rest of the 23 hours and 50 minutes that follow.

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Over the last week, we asked how our homes can spark our creativity, and we tried leaving our art supplies in places where they’d catch our eyes. We were blown away by how many of you already do this. So great to see what your materials inspired you to draw!

Long-time readers will know that practicing gratitude has been a big part of the GUT. Our path to gratitude this week starts with one of the best letters EVER from one artist to another.

Sol LeWitt and Eva Hesse

Before becoming known for his contributions to minimalism and conceptual art, Sol LeWitt was part of a vibrant New York artists’ circle in the 1960s. Through that circle, he met fellow artist Eva Hesse. They became close friends and corresponded as she moved to Germany for her then-husband’s artist residency in 1964.

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Germany was hard for Eva. Born there in 1936, she and her Jewish family had fled the Holocaust when she was a girl. Now, feeling creatively blocked, she reached out to Sol. He wrote back with this incredible letter:

Here’s a transcription of the first page:

Dear Eva,

It will be almost a month since you wrote to me and you have possibly forgotten your state of mind (I doubt it though). You seem the same as always, and being you, hate every minute of it. Don’t! Learn to say “Fuck You” to the world once in a while. You have every right to. Just stop thinking, worrying, looking over your shoulder, wondering, doubting, fearing, hurting, hoping for some easy way out, struggling, grasping, confusing, itching, scratching, mumbling, bumbling, grumbling, humbling, stumbling, numbling, rambling, gambling, tumbling, scumbling, scrambling, hitching, hatching, bitching, moaning, groaning, honing, boning, horse-shitting, hair-splitting, nit-picking, piss-trickling, nose sticking, ass-gouging, eyeball-poking, finger-pointing, alleyway-sneaking, long waiting, small stepping, evil-eyeing, back-scratching, searching, perching, besmirching, grinding, grinding, grinding away at yourself. Stop it and just DO.

Wow, right?! It’s worth reading the whole thing on The Marginalian (thanks Maria!). And here is a video of Benedict Cumberbatch reading it aloud.

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The only way to do it is to DO it.

The very next year, Eva had a creative breakthrough and started making the sculptural work she is most remembered for. Sol came to help her install a piece, Metronomic Irregularity II, when she was back in New York for a show.

People often talk about Sol’s influence on Eva’s work. But this piece of hers—which changed in each installation, depending on the person threading the wires—helped spark Sol’s ideas for his now-famous wall drawings. Rather than draw them himself, they were sets of directions to carry out a drawing. He had come to believe that the concept was the art—he compared himself to a composer whose work is performed by an orchestra.

In 1970, Sol was putting a show together when he received some devastating news: Eva, just 34 years old, had died of a brain tumor. In just a couple days, he created a new wall drawing dedicated to her. He broke away from the precise geometries of his prior work and called for “not straight” lines next to each other. The tribute was one final reminder, perhaps, to “just DO.”

So what the heck does this have to do with gratitude?

How does Sol’s “just DO” advice relate to gratitude?

To become a more grateful person (and let go of our scarcity mindset and grow a more abundant outlook on life), we have to PRACTICE gratitude. We have to DO it. And it’s not something we’re born knowing how to do.

Drawing and gratitude(ing!) are both verbs. Okay, one of them SHOULD be a verb. The only way to learn them is to do them. So let’s get on with it!

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The color palettes you’ve shared over the last week have taken us on all kinds of journeys, from childhood homes to international destinations. Some of you shared triumphs and others shared tender moments, but all of your stories came through vividly in your palettes. Several members shared how strongly they associated different memories or people with different colors—how wonderfully vermilion of you!

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Our homes can also be powerful when it comes to inspiring creativity. As Wendy has written:

I’ve long wondered what it means to create an artistically inspiring home. As artists, how can we create a space that inspires us to make things? Does it just come naturally, or are there deliberate choices we can make to nurture our art (and the creativity of others in the home as well)?

When we think of inspiring homes, two artists immediately come to mind: Frida Kahlo and Ruth Asawa. This week, we’ll peek into their homes and explore how they designed their spaces to support their creativity.

At home with Frida Kahlo

Casa Azul, Frida’s cobalt blue-painted family home, is well worth a pilgrimage to Mexico City. Born Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón (what a name!), Frida’s father was of German descent, and her mother Native American and Spanish. Frida was born in 1907 in Mexico, and had a uniquely challenging life, which she channeled into terrifically prolific form of creativity.

Disabled by polio as a child, Frida was always drawing and painting alongside her father. Over time she grew interested in becoming a doctor and maybe even a medical illustrator. Then, at 18, a terrible bus accident left her with severe injuries: a fractured pelvic bone, collarbone, leg, and spine, as well as a punctured abdomen and uterus.

Bedridden for months in a full-torso cast, Frida had an easel set up in bed so she could paint. She also had a mirror installed overhead so she could see herself in bed; this is when she began painting some of her most well-known self-portraits.

It was here, in this blue house, that Frida fell in love with muralist Diego Rivera. Here they lived and worked, here she grew as an activist, here she hosted guests from around the world, before her death in 1954. She was 47.

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At home with Ruth Asawa

It’s no secret that we here at the GUT are Ruth Asawa megafans. And as much as we love her work on its own, we also love how it reflects the life, community, and home that she built.

At a recent SFMOMA exhibition on Ruth’s life and work, one installation in particular gave a sense of that home. A huge image of her home’s interior hangs on the wall like a window into the past, and the living room experience she and her family created makes you feel like you were there. Several of her wire sculptures hang from the ceiling of the museum, just as they did in her house.

Ruth and her husband Albert Lanier lived in their house, in San Francisco’s Noe Valley, for most of their lives. Between 1950 and 1959, Ruth gave birth to six children; her art practice merely adapted along the way. Having six kids changed not just her daily life, but her subject matter.

In lieu of big gatherings, Ruth had friends and artists like Buckminster Fuller over for visits. Kids were always running around. At the same time, Ruth kept a daily, consistent, and grounding solitary drawing practice. She would draw while watching television—often drawing the very people she saw on TV. She’d draw after the kids went to bed. Her husband would leave her flowers on the giant kitchen table, and she’d find moments to draw the bouquet.

Ruth’s husband Albert designed and built the huge family table. There were always materials and subject matter laying around, and at any time a member of the family could pause, sit down, pick up a pencil, and draw. The kitchen table was about art as much as eating.

A few years ago, Wendy spoke with Ruth’s son Paul Lanier about how he grew up, and how parents can cultivate creativity in kids through the home environment. Here’s what he said:

In our family house there are tables in every room. A 10’ table in the kitchen, a huge butcher block in the living room. Round table in another room with great light, so you can go there if you need light for a project… It’s good to have a creative place. But it doesn’t have to be a big studio. You need a “spiritual studio.” A table that doesn’t matter if it gets wrecked. One that’s scratched already. So if you nick it, it doesn’t matter. Whatever happens to it gives it character.

How can a home inspire creativity?

What role did the home play in the artwork that Frida Kahlo and Ruth Asawa made? What made their homes inspire such abundant, relentless creativity?

These two artists made very different art, so it’s no surprise that they had very different homes. Color was at the heart of Frida’s dazzling Casa Azul. For Ruth, a key part of her art-making was how she valued her family and wanted her studio to be at home, so she could be there with her kids.

As different as they are, both homes beg for you to plop down, grab something—a book, some paints, a pot or pan—and join right in. Their houses tempt you to pick up a brush or some wire and MAKE SOMETHING.

Materials at the ready

Not everyone has a full-blown studio in their home. But lots of us have spaces in our homes we use as studios: kitchen tables, desks, drawing boards while sitting on a sofa. Wherever we create, having art supplies readily accessible is key to consistent creation. Maybe cover the kitchen table in paper to inspire dinner doodling. Or keep a cup of colorful pens next to the computer for future Zoom calls, or a sketchbook and pen in front of the TV. Nothing should come between us and our materials!

How does that jive with your experience? We’d love to hear what you think makes for a creative, art-inducing space. Leave a comment below and let’s see if we can find more common threads.

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Such fantastic faces you’ve all been drawing! We know the painful desire to “get it right” when it comes to faces, so it was all the more wonderful to see how you played with the assignments. Turns out we weren’t just working on drawing techniques—we were also letting go of unnecessary creative blocks!

All right, let’s dig into this week’s topic: COLOR! We’ll first hear from Wendy about her own up-and-down relationship with color. Then we’ll look at two artists who use color in bold, exciting ways.

Making a personal color palette

From Wendy:

You’ve heard me say it before: I struggle with color. It took me months to decide what color to paint my bedroom. After countless nights comparing color swatches and scrolling through Pinterest, I took the leap and ordered a glowing peach color called “Champagne Bonfire.”1 After a weekend of taping, priming and painting the walls, ceiling, and trim, that glowing peach color ended up looking more like the flesh of an electrified fish. I slept inside a champagne bonfire barf tank for weeks.

So yeah, I struggle with color. Ask me what goes well with a light blue and I am lost. But when I’m working on my own drawings and paintings, somehow I have color confidence. Why??

Unlike when I’m selecting a bedroom wall color, when I draw I never choose colors out of thin air.

Let's build color confidence together!

Where does color inspiration come from?

Sure, there’s a field of study called “Color Theory” and gorgeous books filled with blocks of color. They explain, essentially, that color is not static, all color is relative, and we all see color differently. It’s fascinating! Does it help you choose “brick red” over “deep magenta,” though? Nope.

But what happens when you start with a moment or a memory? Or a feeling or an idea? Now you’ve got a foundation to build on! The colors Wendy uses in her drawings are always inspired by something she’s seen, often in daily life.

Sometimes it’s not that literal. When making the flavor wheels for Salt Fat Acid Heat, Wendy was inspired by the colors in Old Masters’ paintings that feature food connected to the chart’s subject. Specifically, for the “World of Acid,” she referenced Caravaggio’s Basket of Fruit.

Nerdy but true. Much like last week, when we talked about drawing faces, we’re not saying this is the right way to use colors. But it gives us one way to approach it.

Here are two more approaches from artists with colorful work!

Alma Thomas

“Man’s highest inspirations come from nature. A world without color would seem dead. Color is life. Light is the mother of color. Light reveals to us the spirit and living soul of the world through colors.”  - Alma Thomas

Painter and lifelong art teacher Alma Thomas’s work focused on color. Her color choices were inspired by the two things that excited her most: nature and the cosmos. The titles of the pieces below speak to her color choices. The colors speak to the feeling of her subjects.

Click here to listen to the DrawTogether podcast episode about Alma Thomas’s remarkable life and work.

You're looking awfully artistic today!

Bisa Butler

“If I’m doing [a portrait of] somebody who is considered powerful or a leader, I might use a base of red [wool], and then all the colors that go on top of that are interacting with that red.” - Bisa Butler

The colors in artist Bisa Butler’s life-sized quilt portraits of African Americans are strong, bold, and vibrant. She often works with bright, patterned fabrics popular in West Africa, and uses symbolism when she selects color, too.

Click here to listen to the DrawTogether podcast episode about Bisa Butler’s work.

Both these artists pull from a mixture of reality, imagination, and reference to create an emotionally charged field of color. Their personal interests and experiences form unique color palettes that convey their feelings of joy, celebration, power, and reverence.

Now let’s create our own personal vocabulary of color.

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We could build quite the neighborhood with your doodles of perpendicular buildings from last week—zoning laws be damned. The wide variety of doodles we saw really drove home the point: a single prompt can lead to such wonderfully different drawings. As always, thanks for sharing them with us. Much joy sparked.

This week we’re tackling something many people find challenging: drawing faces! There’s a reason art schools dedicate multiple semesters to the figure and the face. Even then, many artists find faces the hardest thing to get “right.” Luckily, we don’t give a hoot about “right.”

That said, there's something satisfying about picking up a basic skill and then deciding whether to use it or gleefully ignore it. There are some simple, fun ways to start training your mind’s eye. Once you get a feel for head shape and rough proportion, you can make any face you want—for real!

Way cheaper than art school!

You can also ignore all this and make a smiley face on a stick figure. NO RULES IN ART. But for folks wanting to learn the basics, we’ve tried to make it easy and fun and comprehensible.

Drawing faces!

Shape and position

Faces come in many shapes and sizes, but we’re going to start simple and introduce our model for the day:

First, let’s turn this egg into a basic face egg.

It’s a head! See that? (We know it seems like the eyes are too low, but trust us.) We can see which direction it is facing. The egg head above is facing forward. And when we turn it…

We can see how it looks when it turns, and begin to imagine how the face might look when we add on features, right? Here, this’ll make it a little easier:

Egg-sactly. Notice how you only see PARTS of the face, depending on where it’s facing. Sometimes you can’t see any parts of the face at all. Of course, this is a super flat face….So let’s see how it looks when we add a nose shape.

Getting there! Drawing a hyperrealistic face involves some complex steps, but understanding how the face works is the first step.

Proportion

Maybe you’ve seen these “general face guidelines” at some point. While they may be generally accurate, they are in NO way a rule or an “ideal.” These ideals were based on able-bodied, old white guys’ ideas of facial perfection (namely: young white guys) and have been used to oppress people. These rules, like all art rules, are a bunch of B.S. And at the same time, it’s useful to have a generalized foundation to push against. So Wendy drew us a new one:

Again, these are general guides, and not rules or ideals. But they are helpful to keep in mind, so when you are drawing a face from observation or imagination, you can ask yourself, “How does this person vary from the general guide?” That might help you decide how to place and adjust features.

Okay, it’s your turn! Let’s draw some faces.

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Last week’s assignment—to find the beauty in our messes—resulted in some fabulous drawings. Besides giving a peek into your homes and lives, you shared about the meaningful objects that surround you and the emotional side of the cleaning process. We always love seeing how you support each other in the chat, and this week was no exception. Three cheers for this (supremely messy) community!

Now onto this week’s VERY SERIOUS ART TOPIC…

The doodle.

Yes, the doodle. Let’s start with some words from our head doodler, WendyMac:

I’ve always doodled. I got in trouble in high school for doodling during class. I doodle while talking on the phone and during meetings. I make doodley grocery lists, to do doodle lists, electric bill doodles. Doodles everywhere. And I kind of just assumed everyone who draws doodles, too. But recently someone who draws told me he doesn’t doodle. WHAT?? He said he doesn't know how. My heart broke a little.

I thought doodling was hard baked into every visual person. Don’t we all mindlessly cover every surface with flowers and stars? Don’t we all relax by letting our pens flow into unexpected shapes and designs?? Maybe not after all.

This made me wonder: What is a doodle? And what makes a doodler doodle? Why doodle at all? Can a non-doodler become a doodler? And what do doodles DOOOO?

With that, let’s explore…The Doodle.

Doodling is more fun together!

Famous doodlers.

First, let’s look at some doodles by some folks who are not known for their drawing, but are impressive doodlers nonetheless.

Obama got in on the act, too, confessing in a 2012 interview to being “a pretty good doodler.” What does he doodle? “All kinds of things. Faces, people. So sometimes when I'm in a big important international meeting and you see me writing stuff down, it might be that I’m just drawing some, drawing some folks.”

Some might think that means the president wasn’t paying attention. But studies show the opposite—that doodling actually improves memory. (We’ll get to that in a minute.)

Doodle vs. drawing

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the doodle as “An aimless scrawl made by a person while his mind is more or less otherwise applied.”

Judging by the variety of styles in the images above, there are many different kinds of doodles: abstract, figurative, illustrative, you name it. What do they all have in common? They are loose. Like the OED states, you can see that the doodler didn’t set out with an idea of what they wanted their doodle to look like. It emerged organically through the doodling.

That’s one big difference between doodling and drawing. When we doodle we are concentrating on something and processing it by moving our pens around a page without thought or a goal. When we draw, we do it with intention. Even if it’s abstract and we don’t know how it is going to turn out, we are working towards the goal of making a complete drawing. (What do you think? We can debate this in the chat.)

What good does doodling do?

Oh my gosh, so much.

Let’s start with memory.

From Harvard Health Publishing:

In 2009, psychologist Jackie Andrade asked 40 people to monitor a 2 ½ minute dull and rambling voice mail message. Half of the group doodled while they did this (they shaded in a shape), and the other half did not. They were not aware that their memories would be tested after the call. Surprisingly, when both groups were asked to recall details from the call, those that doodled were better at paying attention to the message and recalling the details. They recalled 29% more information.

29% more information! Why? The researchers believe doodling helped people stay alert and engaged, brains focused just enough to avoid boredom.

Former teachers of ours: We were paying attention after all! We were downright presidential, come to think of it.

Does doodling reduce stress and anxiety?

Absolutely.

These researchers were measuring doodling’s impact on stress as far back as 1938! And this fascinating paper on doodling noted that “providing pencil and paper to the anxious, the distressed, and the disturbed might even have unexpected therapeutic benefits.”

Carol Edmonston, author of The Healing Power Of Doodling: Mindfulness Therapy To Deal With Stress, Fear & Life Challenges, says “doodling can actually help calm the racing mind and bring it back to a more quiet, restful space, not unlike meditation.”

But why???

Drawing and doodling are both physical experiences. They calm us down, lower our heart rate, deepen our breathing, and bring us into the present. And for those of us with jumpy or judgy minds, it’s medicine. There’s also surely magic in there, too—that specific mysterious thing that happens in our brains and hearts, when we keep our hands moving and breath flowing as we create something out of nothing, without fear of judgement.

Gift subscription=best gift ever!!

Alright, enough blah blah blah. Let’s make something!

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We were wowed by how you were all inspired by different songs last week. The contrasts that emerged as you switched between pieces were so cool! We were also glad to see you incorporate your own musical tastes into the process, and we will be working some of your recommendations into our own playlists for sure.

Here at the GUT, we are soooo excited for it to be spring! (Happy fall to our southern hemisphere folks!) But we have more complicated, maybe even rebellious, feelings about the annual rite of spring cleaning. Sure, we get it—nature gets a fresh start and so should our homes. And we’re not saying to leave your messes everywhere. But what if there were other ways to look at our clutter? Let’s get to it…

The beauty of clutter

In time for your possible spring cleaning urges, we want to revisit this dispatch from Wendy:

I have a confession.

Did you know that I, a creative person with one hundred various interests, can, from time to time, leave my space a bit messy? A tad cluttered? A wee bit “did a goddamn tornado touch down in here?”

Shocking, I know. Ask my neatnik parents, I’ve been this way since I was little. These days, I’ve confined my mess to “creative spaces” (read: Studio, Kitchen Table, Sofa, Everywhere, etc), but I still have a lot of stuff. Like many artists, I collect. Sometimes, those collections pile up and spread out. But I still know exactly where everything is. I swear, there is order in my chaos.

A mess is evidence of what’s happened before and a map of what might happen next. Now, if a space is unconsidered, left to build up over time, well that’s just careless. That’s when other people start to worry. But when someone is thoughtful about their spaces, they care about each object, label, and sort and arrange them just so… consider where they go and why, the meaning behind it all... it shows. That kind of clutter is a thing of beauty.

Today, we’re gonna explore the visual feast that is mundane clutter. Because if you can find beauty in the mess, you can see beauty anywhere.

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To get started, we’ll share a few of Wendy’s own mess-inspired drawings, and then we’ll invite you to embrace the clutter and create your own.

Ready? Great. Let’s get messy.

Wendy’s “messes”

Electrical wires

Walking around Kyoto’s Gion district with its cobblestone streets and women in full geisha attire is like stepping back in time. Until you look up. Above the building lives a thick rubber rainforest of modern electrical wires, criss-crossing, twisting, winding their way down the streets and alleys.

From Wendy:

Of all the typically beautiful things I could have drawn on that street, the wire web called my attention. Why? Maybe because its lines looked like a drawing against the sky? Or maybe because the wires told a story? After all, each wire connected to a home, a business, a shrine, a cable TV. Drawing the wires felt like examining the city’s insides, its exposed guts. Beautiful.

Garbage stories

In 2012, a developer hired Wendy to research and create a drawn story about the history of Pier 70, a historic and underutilized area of San Francisco. The developer wanted to learn about the neighborhood’s backstory, who was living and working there now, what people valued about it, and the cultures it contained.

What does this have to do with messes? Wendy learned about the neighborhood, in part, by walking the streets, looking down, and documenting the trash and detritus on each corner.

Documenting each corner’s detritus offered a new approach to portraiture, and a fresh perspective on the neighborhood. Sometimes, our garbage paints a clearer picture of who we really are than the objects we display on our mantels.

That’s beautiful!

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Garbage sale. Ahem, garage sale.

There are many ways to document a mess. It can be representational, like above. It can also be conceptual, abstract, text-based, or a map….

In 2012, the artist Martha Rosler held a Meta-Monumental Garage Sale in an atrium of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The sale included objects donated by museum staff, the artist, and the public. Martha was on hand to haggle over higher-priced garbage gold. The garage sale/exhibition also included a newspaper designed by the brilliant designer/artist Kelli Anderson. She asked Wendy to create a “Conceptual Map” of a prototypical garage sale for the paper:

Wendy included not only the actual objects, but the emotional experience of a garage sale, with categories like “all the things we want to forget.” And “clothes we will fit in one day” next to “exercise bike.” And “Guilt (parents’ things).”

If you drew a map of your mess, what would you include? What would be too embarrassing to draw??

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Alright. With that inspiration, let’s turn our attention toward our own messes….

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We had a great time with Caroline Paul last week. We spent time gazing at the sky, experiencing awe, and (of course) drawing! How amazing to see all the pictures in the chat showing the sky’s changes through your eyes. Just beautiful! And FYI the winner of our Why Fly giveaway is at the bottom of this dispatch.

Now, onwards to our next adventure…

We might imagine Serious Artists (capital letters a must!) as people working in total, absolute silence, all the better to concentrate on their Serious Art (again with the caps, maybe even italics?). Meanwhile, we are over here, shamefully playing music or, gasp, even a movie in the background while we draw and paint.

But turns out all kinds of people (even Serious ones!) fill their ears while they make visual work. So this week, we are trying an experiment…

We are going to share about two artists we love and the music they listen to while they work. Then we will turn the tables and hear from the GUT’s own Chris Colin who, in addition to being an incredible writer, also makes music for people to draw to. Finally, YOU are going to draw while you listen to music, and we’ll see how music does/doesn’t inspire our drawing. Fun? Fun! Let’s do it.

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Jenny Saville

Jenny Saville is a phenomenal painter who combines classical training and influence with modern-day subjects and references, focusing on the representation of female bodies. She works at a GIANT scale, and often plays music while she draws and paints:

I’m pretty ruthless with music. I use music as a way to get in the right mood for what I want. I listen to things on repeat. So it's very annoying; if anybody were in my studio, they would just be going completely crazy, because I can listen to one single piece of music for the whole duration of an artwork, or even for a show.

While Jenny worked on her Mother and Child series (artwork above and below), she played "Weird Fishes” by Radiohead on repeat. “The repetitions of sounds and the layerings were a good companion for me at that time. And there's an urgency in the music that I liked,” she says.

Hit the play button below and listen to it yourself. While doing so, look at the drawing below and see if you feel a connection of influence, or if the music takes you deeper into the drawing at all.

Rashid Johnson

Rashid Johnson is one of the most exciting, respected artists working today. His career launched with a solo show in a prominent NY gallery at the age of 19. Shortly after, he was included in a pivotal show of emerging Black artists at The Studio Museum in Harlem, called Freestyle, curated by the fabulous Thelma Golden. Starting with photography and moving into multimedia sculpture and video, his body of work addresses history, art history, society, and self. While much of his work explores identity, he says, “My black-ness…[has] a strong effect on how my work is born and around the conversation that inevitably will happen, but I don’t think that it’s really the sum of all what my work is. And I think formally I’m trying to approach art-making in a way that is part of the bigger history of art.”

Turns out Rashid has a thing for jazz:

I’ve always had a real interest in improvisation and avant-garde jazz. So you'll hear a lot of Cecil Taylor in my studio, you’ll hear a lot of Ornette Coleman, you'll hear a lot of Art Ensemble of Chicago, some stuff that people would imagine as noise, some music that people may even be quite frustrated by.

Listen to “Lonely Woman” by Ornette Coleman below, and spend a few minutes looking closely at the artwork under it, by Rashid. See if you feel that connection or influence, or if the music pulls you deeper into the art.

It’s fascinating to see that both Jenny and Rashid think their listening habits would drive others away! But it’s what works for them. Like Jenny, Wendy finds that musical repetition plays a big role in her creative process as well: “When I’m really into a painting, I often loop the same song over and over as I paint. As a result, I forever associate the song with that art, book, or body of work. The song ‘Chickens’ by Junip will always remind me of Salt Fat Acid Heat, and ‘Business’ by Tune-Yards is the 6th street story in Meanwhile in San Francisco.”

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Now let’s change perspectives and hear from the other side: a music-maker for artists!

Chris Colin

When Chris isn’t pitching in with the GUT, he is busy writing fascinating magazine stories—and coming not-very-soonish, his next book. But music was always his favorite art form, starting at 16. What started as a liability—he swears he can’t sing—became oddly useful, when he realized word-free music was perfect for soundtracks, odd art projects, and drawing.

We asked Chris to share more about the role of music in his line of work and also how he thinks about what others might want to listen to while making art:

As a writer, I often like a little background music when I work, but not to put me in a certain mood, or to spark ideas, or anything like that. It’s purely to nudge me into a kind of trance—that hazy dimension where the kitchen table melts away, the inner critic melts away, and I’m stripped down to more foundational thoughts.

When I’m making music, particularly for drawing, I aim for a similar dimension: tones and melodies that are interesting enough, but don’t clobber you into focusing on them instead of that pileated woodpecker you’re painting. (Yes I can see what you’re painting.) Pulling some guitar or a bass line or some keyboard out of a composition is often more important than whatever I initially add.

Then I just repeat it over and over like a maniac. I once read a great quote from John Lennon about the holy power of repetition in music. I have no idea what it said. But it was so persuasive that I remember the sheer fact of it. Anyway, lotta repetition involved when I’m making this kind of music, and if it has some kind of hypno-amniotic effect beneath the surface, hell yeah.

Thanks, Chris! It’s so neat to see how the role of repetition keeps coming up in folks’ processes! We’re delighted to have you with us on this journey, and to have some of your music to share with our members!

And now it’s your turn!

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We’re so glad you’re here. The series of symbols you all drew were powerful! We saw folks grappling with global and personal events, commenting on corporate brands, and advocating for peace. You all were so inspiring in your messages and so creative in how you adapted familiar icons to your own purposes. Bravo!

This week we’re spending some time up in the clouds, with author Caroline Paul. You may know her better as Art Assistant Caroline if you were here for DrawTogether’s early years. She is also Wendy’s lovely ex, whose last visit with the GUT was to talk about her book, Tough Broad.

Caroline has a brand new book, Why Fly, that just came out a couple weeks ago! From Wendy: “Why Fly is a book about two kinds of flight: the kind we do in the sky and the kind we do in our hearts. And all the lifts and lights and dips and drops both entail.”

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We’re excited to have her here with us today for a Q&A!

Q&A with Caroline Paul, author of Why Fly

The GUT: This book is about flight, and also about relationships. Tell us about the connection between the two and why you wrote it at this time in your life.

Caroline: I have been flying since I was twenty. I loved flying. But I wasn’t obsessed until, at 58, I began to fly a gyrocopter. It looks like a tiny helicopter, or maybe like a lawn mower dangling under a rotor blade. My newfound ardor was no surprise: I began my ascent in gyros during the descent of my marriage with Wendy.

We reach for control in difficult times, and what better thing to control than a funny-looking aircraft that soars me high above my troubles. As I say in the book, “It’s easier to learn a landing than a human heart.”

I didn’t want to write about my personal life, but I did want to write about flight, and the two had become inextricable. That said, writers are in control of the story. There is a world in which I could have excluded my relationship with Wendy from the book. But that book would have been inauthentic, and readers would have felt the gap. Inauthenticity, as GUT readers know, is a death knell to good work.

The GUT: What do you get from being in the sky that you don’t get down here?

Caroline: Flying small, lightweight, open-cockpit aircraft is an all-body kinetic experience. Mentally, you are totally absorbed in all the requirements of flight—staying straight and level, looking for other planes in the sky, watching the terrain. Physically, you feel the wind, you feel the temperature changes, you feel the turbulence. Emotionally, you can’t help but be awed at the view below your feet, which changes constantly as you gain or lose altitude. From the pilot seat it looks as if some cosmic sculptor has been languidly chipping and chiseling; it really is an artistic experience.

This total absorption while in open cockpit flight is hard to match on the ground, except maybe when it comes to love. In the book I compare the two: Both are governed by tangibles—the laws of physics, and oxytocin, respectively—but both feel like magic when you’re in it.

Feeling inspired? Join us!

The GUT: How might our GUTsters capture some of what you get from flying (even if they can’t do it themselves)?

Caroline: The sky is mesmerizing from all angles. Even from the ground, it is like seeing a new painting every few minutes. There, a bird circling, now gone. Here, shifting cloud shapes. Over the course of the day the sky shades into the most amazing hues—it’s the richest color palette around. My favorite time is the half hour after sunset (also known by pilots as “civil twilight”) when the orange and yellows fade and only the deepest purples remain. Even at night, the constellations—those connections between stars that paint a picture and a story—represent the vivid imaginations of our ancestors. As an artist of any kind, you can’t help but be inspired by the sky.

My advice is to take the window seat next time you fly commercially. Let yourself be awed by the beauty and the strangeness of being so high in the air; as I say in my Tough Broad interview with the GUT, awe is vital for our creativity. Now look at the geometries below—it’s like an abstract painting. Let that view spark what you create next. This is what Georgia O’Keefe, that master of the landscape, did when she began to fly in passenger planes in the 1970s. She was gobsmacked by the birds-eye view. She soon began her famous cloud paintings. Her first in the series featured an island from above, but quickly she abandoned the landscape altogether and just painted clouds and sky, so taken was she by this new vantage point.

Thanks, Caroline! We have a giveaway of her book for GUT members in the assignment below, and we’re taking inspiration from Caroline’s time in the sky.

Let’s do this.

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Last week we kicked off the GUT Permanent Collection with an assignment inspired by the collages of Romare Bearden. So many of you mentioned enjoying the tactile aspect of collaging—the feeling of handling old magazines, letters, and scraps from your own histories and finding new ways to place them together. The chat was filled with tender memories of childhood and your hometowns. Some folks honored family members while others captured more of a feeling of their past selves. We loved seeing them all — thank you for sharing your stories with us.

Recent events have us thinking about the power of symbols. A couple weeks ago, the National Park Service took down the Pride flag at Stonewall National Monument—the Trump Administration had sent a memo about only flying authorized flags at park sites. This monument encompasses the area around the Stonewall Inn, which has enormous historical importance in the movement for gay rights; it’s the site of protests and riots against a 1969 police raid targeting its LGBTQIA+ patrons.

Community outcry over the flag’s removal was immediate, and within a couple days, city officials re-raised the flag during a public rally. Stacy Lentz, an owner of the Stonewall Inn, reflected on the Pride flag’s meaning, saying, “The flag is not just an abstract symbol; it tells L.G.B.T.Q. people, especially younger ones, that their history will not be sidelined again.”

These events, and the conversation over the power of symbols, reminded us of this dispatch from our permanent collection.

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Visual symbols

Let’s start off with the Pride Flag and a few other well-known visual symbols, and consider their context.

The Pride flag: Gilbert Baker (1955-2017) designed the original Pride flag in 1978. In his memoir, Rainbow Warrior, Gilbert discusses how he chose the rainbow:

A Rainbow Flag was a conscious choice, natural and necessary. The rainbow came from earliest recorded history as a symbol of hope. In the Book of Genesis, it appeared as proof of a covenant between God and all living creatures. It was also found in Chinese, Egyptian, and Native American history. A Rainbow Flag would be our modern alternative to the pink triangle. Now the rioters who claimed their freedom at the Stonewall Bar in 1969 would have their own symbol of liberation.

As the queer community evolves and its embrace of a wider range of gender and sexual identities and expressions grows, the flag evolves as well. The latest Pride flag, featured above with the circle, now includes people historically excluded from the fight for gay rights, including trans and non-binary people, people of color, and intersex folks. The Pride flag is a great example of how strong symbols can grow and change—not to mention some of the branding challenges that community activism faces. There’s a great book about this1 if you’re interested in reading more.

Raised fist/Black Power salute: A closed, raised fist is a universal symbol that represents power and resistance. In the ‘60s it was used by the Black Panthers and other civil rights groups and became known as The Black Power salute: a statement of defiance against oppression of Black people in the US.

It was later adopted by the Black Lives Matter movement. Groups around the world have used it as a symbol to represent the individual and collective struggle against systemic oppression.

Colorful balaclavas: Pussy Riot made these colorful face masks popular worldwide in the early 2010s, and they continue to represent a big middle finger from women and queer folks to oppressive regimes around the world. Pussy Riot is a Russian feminist protest and performance art group based in Moscow. Their act is loud, hard, and fearless, promoting feminism, LGBTQ rights, and opposition to Putin and the Orthodox Church when it’s illegal to do so. Members perform in public wearing colorful balaclavas to avoid arrest. While several of the original members have left the band, Pussy Riot continues to exist with an “open invitation” for anyone to join.

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Using symbols for subversion

Symbols are easy to draw, and are universally read. This is part of their power: They can be reproduced and spread by anyone. And while symbols are simple in design, their meanings carry power. And…that power can be subverted, turned against itself.

Here are two takes on the American flag:

Winston Tseng is an artist and designer keeping this subversive tradition alive. Winston creates posters that use the advertising aesthetics of recognizable brands and simple straightforward language to make a statement.

Above is a campaign where he mixed Coke’s and Pepsi’s recognizable branding to comment on their contribution to plastic pollution. In 2024, he made a fake announcement that the Philadelphia Eagles had endorsed Kamala Harris for president! This caused a lot of confusion, leaving news sources scrambling to find out the story behind it. Winston eventually took credit for creating it, but said he had no idea how the posters ended up around town. ;)

Assignment: symbols & subversion

Alright, our turn to put this into practice. Ready?

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We’reeee baaaaccckkkk!

I missed you. Our 2026 30 Days of Drawing was EPIC, and we heard from a lot of you saying it was our best year yet. So happy to hear it. Also, we really needed that break afterwards to catch up on rest and life. Maybe you did, too.

I’ve been lurking in the chat and it’s been great to see members continue to share artwork, and in-person DrawTogether groups start to meet up! Remember, if you are interested in drawing IRL with GUT members, here is the thread to connect.

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Big News Alert:

Alright, I have some super exciting news to share with JUST folks here at DrawTogether/The GUT. I am not posting this on social media. No press announcement. No skywriting. This is exclusively for you because this announcement is deeply connected to what we do together at the GUT: I AM WORKING ON A BIG BOOK. 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉

This book is the most meaningful, challenging, fun, exciting, and daunting thing I’ve ever made. Ever. And YOU are a part of it. WE are a part of it. You’ll see. My wonderful editor won’t let me say more, but I promise you it will be well worth the wait.

Got questions? Comments? (Be kind, please. A book is hard!) You know what to do:

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Also, it turns out the writing and drawing of a book is a total commitment. (Yup, I’m doing both.) It requires a kind of singular focus I’ve never had to summon before. In order to do it, I’m heading off into the woods (quite literally, Thoreau-style) to give it my all for a little while. In the meantime, we will share some of our favorite DT/GUT drawing lessons and assignments in a special series we are calling “Selections from The GUT Permanent Collection.” It’s a great chance to practice some of my favorite lessons and drawing practices from the past six (!) years, with a few bonus twists and tricks to keep you on your toes.

I promise to do my very best to return with a book worthy of your time and attention. And I promise you will see YOURSELF in its pages. Our community has taught me so much, and together we have a lot to teach the world. So stick with me, folks. Soon, the world will be Drawing Together. :)

Sound good? Before I kick us off, a quick reminder: This is the last week to access the posts and assignments from this year’s 30 Days of Drawing! They will be archived on Saturday, February 28. If you missed the celebratory closing Zoom, you can watch the recording here.

And so, without further ado, my dear GUT peeps, may I introduce…

Let’s do this.

With February being Black History Month, we wanted to bring back a favorite dispatch of mine: a collaboration between the GUT and the National Gallery of Art, celebrating the life and work of Romare Bearden. An artist and activist, Bearden is best known for his collages depicting the lives and experiences of Black Americans.

Who was Romare Bearden? 

Born September 2, 1911, in Charlotte, North Carolina, Romare Bearden was of Cherokee, Italian, and African descent. He was the only child of college-educated, middle-class parents. But even for Black families who’d attained a measure of stability and status, life in the Jim Crow South was limiting, oppressive, and often violent.

When Bearden was three, his family joined the Great Migration—the journey taken by some 6 million Black Americans out of the constrictions of the South. Bearden’s family made their way to New York, eventually settling in Harlem.

In 1920, Harlem was an epicenter of music, art, and culture—and Bearden’s family was in the thick of it. A newspaper columnist and civic and political activist, his mother was a local powerhouse. She and her husband hosted cultural icons, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Duke Ellington, and Langston Hughes.

After impromptu art lessons from a neighbor at age 14, Bearden began studying painting and drawing seriously. He attended New York University, where he met Elmer Simms Campbell, the first Black cartoonist for publications like the Saturday Evening Post and the New Yorker. It was a life-changing friendship. Bearden began making cartoons and illustrations for publications such as the NAACP’s magazine The Crisis.

After graduating from NYU in 1935, he continued taking classes at the Art Students League of New York. To support himself, he became a (drum roll….) case worker for the city’s department of social services! That’s right: He served the city as a social worker for almost three decades. A little aside: If you’re familiar with our fearless leader, Wendy, you probably know she’s also a trained social worker!

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Bearden continued his case work until just two years before his solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1971! And he was only the second Black artist to have a solo show at MoMA.

How did Bearden begin collaging?

Fun fact: Bearden didn’t start working with collage until he was 53 years old. The word collage comes for the French word “coller,” meaning “to glue.” Collaging is the practice of assembling, arranging, and adhering smaller pieces together to create a larger whole.

Until the mid-1960s, Bearden focused almost exclusively on painting and drawing. That all changed after he began gathering with other Black artists, including Ernest Crichlow, Norman Lewis, and Richard Mayhew, to discuss how they, as artists, could support the civil rights movement. They formed Spiral, an artists’ collective, and Bearden suggested the group collaborate on a piece, offering collage as a medium. While Spiral did not take up that project, the conversation sparked Bearden’s interest in experimenting with collage himself.

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Bearden went straight to work in his studio and produced a series of small, vibrant collages. Pulling from many different sources and using colorful, patterned papers, he focused these works on the vibrant Black life at the time. Those collages launched the huge body of work he is known for today.

What a great reminder that failure only happens when we stop trying. We never know what we are going to make next, as long as we keep creating. Romare’s idea for a group project was rejected, but it opened the door for a lifetime of his own artwork. Challenges = creative opportunities.

Bearden passed away in 1988 at the age of 76, in Harlem. He was making art until the day he died.

Tomorrow I May Be Far Away

One of Bearden’s most famous collages, Tomorrow I May Be Far Away, is in the National Gallery’s collection. And it is a giant. Measuring 46 by 56 inches, it’s made with various papers, charcoal, graphite, and paint on paper mounted to canvas. You can get a sense of it in the image below, but you really have to see it up close to appreciate the intricacy and complexity. It’s clear how much time and care Bearden took.

Bearden’s influences were deep and wide, often tied to his own memories. Take a look at the patterned paper all around the main figure in the piece. Bearden used cutouts to create a shingled building, typical in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, where he was born. Even after settling in Harlem, Bearden often visited family in the South.

He also looked to art history—both European and African—and Black culture, literature, and music like jazz and the blues. The work’s title, Tomorrow I May Be Far Away, is a lyric from the song “Good Chib Blues,” recorded in 1929 by Edith Johnson. Take a listen below. You can imagine Bearden hearing this music while piecing together this collage in his studio. Using the lyrics as his title makes music a medium in the work. Truly multi-media.

This piece summons the memories, textures, and half-remembered fragments we carry with us—the ones that quietly shape who we are. It calls us back to family, to community, to the particular feeling of childhood that still lives somewhere inside us.

How about you?

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With that dose of inspiration, let’s pick up our papers, newspapers, magazines, catalogs, wrapping paper, and painted bits and bobs—and draw with our scissors…

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Alright, let’s get into it. Cartooning New Yorker style with Asher Perlman last week was a hoot. Asher recently joined Substack, so now you can get his anti-depressants delivered directly to your inbox.

Special sale for the 30 Days of Drawing.

If you are a free subscriber and want to do the 30 Days of Drawing with me in January (YES YOU DO!) then we have a special access sale starting now. For a limited time, we are lowering the price of our annual subscription to $50/year. BOOM. For folks who want to subscribe to January only, we are upping the price for the monthly subscription only from January and February. This will help support the huge extra effort on our end, the cost and crew. I recommend grabbing the discounted annual while it’s still there. Because honestly, you’re going to want to keep drawing, keep getting the assignments, and stay involved with the supportive GUT community after you’ve rocked the 30 days. (For those of you who are already subscribers, don’t worry, your monthly will not go up.) So get those pencils sharpened…

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Alright, let’s dive into this week.

To grow in the direction we want to, it’s healthy to look back to see how far we’ve come. For the next two weeks, we’re reflecting on a big year of change and creativity. Starting with YOUR favorite DrawTogether GUT drawing lessons and assignments.

Looking Back at 2025

We started with an incredible 30 days of drawing, celebrated our 5-year anniversary with a big retrospective, and built a real life physical STUDIO space to support local artists and give affordable opportunities for people to connect with one another in person through creative practice.

The GUT reached the milestone of having over 100,000 community members, and partnered with the de Young Museum, and with SFMOMA, and the Ruth Asawa estate to host in person events so we could gather in person and Draw Together. We engaged with current events via a series on Creative Action beyond protest posters, and played with some Overlooked Art Supplies. Our team at the GUT expanded by adding an editor, Candace (yay, Candace!) Our incredible line-up of guest artists included: taking care of our creative bodies with Bonnie Tsui, exploring watercolor with Jessie Kanelos Weiner, visual storytelling with Debbie Millman, breathing and drawing with Carissa Potter, weaving social justice into our everyday practice with coach Beth Pickens, list making to with Ali Liebegott, noticing with Tucker Nichols, getting inspired by ballpoint queen Jacqueline Suowari and tape muralist/illustrator Brian Rea, and cartooning with Asher Perlman. Along the way we built skills working with a variety of materials and in understanding value, and we had great conversations with Courtney Martin and W. Kamau Bell!

All of this is possible because of those of you who support DrawTogether with a subscription. THANK YOU. For supporting this vision, this community, the world we are creating, and just for being you.

Subscribing = Supporting

Top 5 Lessons of the Year

While we’re not that into rankings and hierarchy around here, we love seeing which lessons really struck a chord with our members, so we’re featuring the 5 most popular lessons of the year!

Drawing in the Round

We celebrated the art of Betty Blayton-Taylor, a Black artist, educator, and activist, whose life and incredible work in the round deeply inspired me AND many of you to create your own amazing round drawings and paintings.

All the Wrong Colors

Have you ever seen a painting where the colors weren’t real to life, but still worked somehow?! That’s value at work! In this lesson, we played around with using colors based not on hue, but on their value — their lightness or darkness. This one was a bit of a mind-bender, and I was delighted that so many of you leaned into the challenge of using the “wrong” colors!

Ruth Asawa’s Flowers (no paywall!)

If you’ve been with us a while, you know that Ruth Asawa has been such a huge inspiration to me throughout my life, not just as an artist but as a human being. I was gobsmacked by the incredible retrospective of Ruth Asawa’s work at SFMOMA (now at MoMA in NYC). In this first post for our three-part series on Ruth’s life and work, we focused on her amazing flower drawings. As I said then, when we look at Ruth’s flower drawings, we don’t just see a flower, we see the time, care, and attention Ruth put into it. We feel it.

Making Art During Fascism (no paywall!)

We find ourselves in hard times for free and creative expression, but artists are still standing up with courage and conscience. We applauded artist Amy Sherald for her bravery and integrity in pulling her show from the National Portrait Gallery after the Smithsonian proposed including “anti-trans” views as part of the presentation of her painting Trans Forming Liberty.

For all of us asking “what can we do?”, I turned to my friend Beth Pickens who wrote a pamphlet called “Making Art During Fascism” after Trump’s 2016 election: “Historically, during oppressive regimes and fascist governments, it is the brave and creative ones who lead, who solve problems, incite, inspire, organize, comfort, satirize, and reflect. Your work will be more important than ever. You have no idea who needs the art you are making.”

Let *us* eat Cake!

I’m going to go back to what I said in the post:

When times are tough and injustice is rampant at the highest levels, we must speak up, resist, and fight. And, at the same time, it’s also important to remind ourselves of what we are fighting for. If we lose track of the joy and love we want to see in the world, then what is the point of the struggle? Enter cake.…

Experiencing moments of joy, beauty, and pleasure together reminds us of the direction we want to grow in, and what want to experience more of in our lives.

The Assignment: Draw with Fresh Eyes

If you’ve done these drawing assignments before, GREAT. In art school, the professors have you draw the same things twenty times. The reason: every time we use a familiar subject or assignment to create a new drawing it offers a new experience. New experience equals new result.

Our assignment this weeks offers us an opportunity to revisit not only an assignment, but an approach. Choose one of the assignments above that speaks to you. This week, draw it again, but with all the learning and experience you’ve had since we first shared it. As you draw, consider how your new drawing reflects how you’ve grown and changed since your earlier attempt. After you’re finished, members, the chat is open to share your drawings and some reflection on the process.If you want to include your old and new drawing next to each other in the chat, awesome — love to see and hear how you have grown and changed.

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The drawings that came from last week’s lesson — Draw the Tough Stuff — were beautiful and profound. My hat is off to all of you GUT members who bravely shared your work in the GUT Group Chat. And, as they say, comedy = tragedy + time. So it only makes sense that this week we make a hard pivot towards some hilarity. That’s life: up and down and up again. First, though…

The 30 Days of Drawing is coming soon!!

QUICK UPDATE: The 30 DAYS OF DRAWING begins January 1. We will share more details soon, but I wanted to give you the heads up so you can start planning. Soon we will share some LIVE ZOOM dates (!) to put on your calendar, and introduce a few changes we’re excited about that will make this year even more fun and accessible to all, including gifts and accountability groups. Start thinking about who you want to start off your 2026 with… We’ll share more details next Sunday and in the weeks to come. Feel free to start asking questions in the comments. Art Auntie Kathleen and I will answer!

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Alright, as we kick off the last month of 2025, let’s take some time to reflect on this year — the ups and downs, the silly and the bittersweet. This week we have a great conversation and assignment for you: a visit with a dream guest artist, New Yorker cartoonist Asher Perlman. I can’t think of a better way to practice keeping a positive, light-hearted perspective on times like these than thinking like a NYer cartoonist. So it’s an honor to introduce you to one of the funniest writers/drawers working today — and get his tips on cartooning. So without further ado, here’s….

Guest Cartoonist Asher Perlman

Asher Perlman has two absolute dream jobs: Emmy-nominated staff writer on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (!!) AND cartoonist for the New Yorker. There’s no denying he is a funny, funny man (who is also a performing comedian!), but he is clearly also a hard-working and persistent person. It takes a lot more than filling out an application to get those two jobs.

Asher’s cartoons capture what I love most about comics: they pack in the most story into the barest amount of information. And as you get to know him and his work, his cartoons are so definitely his voice and his style.

Draw with us, develop YOUR voice

As he started drawing more and more, he basically got the same advice that Josef Albers gave to our beloved Ruth Asawa about drawing flowers — but about cartoons. Asher says that a friend told him, “It looks like you’re trying to make a New Yorker cartoon, and they already have those. Make an ‘Asher cartoon’ that could be in The New Yorker.”

In addition to his cartoons for the New Yorker, he has two books out, Well, This is Me and his latest hilarious collection, Hi, It’s Me Again. (Highly recommend!)

We are so glad he has joined us for a Q&A! Please welcome Asher!

Q&A with Asher Perlman

Wendy: Congrats on the new book — can you tell us a little about it? What is your favorite cartoon in the book?

Asher: Thank you! It’s a pretty straightforward collection of my cartoons. Most of the toons in the book are brand new and can’t be found anywhere else, and the rest are plucked from The New Yorker and my Instagram. It also has a narrative through line, which is something I did for my first book, too, where I give a peek into my creative process.

As far as a favorite goes, I really couldn’t say. I love all of my children equally.

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Wendy: Could you tell us more about how you started drawing cartoons?

Asher: It was a pandemic hobby that I somehow turned into a career. I drew a lot as a kid and I always wanted to try my hand at cartooning, but it was one of those passions that I kept moving to the back burner as I prioritized other things, like writing and acting. Then, in 2020, when we went into lockdown, all the comedy theaters I was performing at closed down and my job at The Late Show went remote, so I suddenly had all this free time and had to fill it somehow. Enter: cartooning. I started drawing every day and submitting 5-10 cartoons to The New Yorker every week. I haven’t missed a week since.

Wendy: I read that you draw every day. What do you get out of it, and how has that changed you?

Asher: I do! Right after I wake up, I always sit at my desk and complete three pages of free writing. Then I move into drawing. I’m not totally sure how it’s changed me, but I find the whole routine quite calming, and I love being creative first thing in the morning rather than having it loom over me all day.

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Wendy: I heard your dad is an artist. What does he think of cartoons?? (I ask because I went to art school and there was such a stupid snobby bias against comics at the time. I think that’s died off, thankfully, but still, I wonder if your dad’s artwork had any influence on you.)

Asher: Actually, my dad loves cartoons. When I was growing up, he exposed me to a wide range of comics, from Mad Magazine to R. Crumb. So, luckily, no snobbery in the Perlman household.

Wendy: Do you have any tips for people who want to get better at drawing cartoons?

Asher: My main tip is to do it every day. Admittedly, that’s my tip for all creative pursuits, but I really do think that it’s key. If you do something every day, even if you don’t feel like it, you inevitably get better. When I was younger, I used to wait for inspiration to strike before I’d get started on something. I feel like that’s the worst strategy because it takes the process completely out of your control.

Are you ready to get started drawing?

Thanks so much, Asher! Be sure to pick up a copy of Asher’s hilarious new book Hi, It’s Me Again. Seriously. The tin man?? COME ON. LOLOLOLOLOL.

Alright, for GUT members we have tips on making a great cartoon from Asher, plus our week’s assignment. Sharpen your pencils….

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How did we all do?? Everyone survive? Thrive even? Get enough to eat? Help others get enough to eat?? I hope everyone is feeling at peace post-complicated-holiday, and enjoying some well-deserved rest.

This week, I want us to continue using our creativity to cultivate gratitude, but from a different angle. Instead of focusing on the immediate, obvious things we appreciate around us, we’re going to explore developing gratitude when life feels hard. Maybe even gratitude for life being hard.

It feels like the right moment to bring this lesson back from the archives (especially after last week’s return to another favorite: the 5 senses gratitude practice). There is so much to be grateful for. And at the same time, so much is hard right now, personally and politically, locally and globally. How we perceive and respond to what’s happening in our lives and in the world matters. We may not get to choose what happens, but we can choose how we respond.

This week, we’ll use drawing to strengthen our gratitude muscle so it’s there for us when we need it most.

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Practicing Gratitude in Hard Times

Anyone lucky enough to live through their 20s will agree: we learn the most from our mistakes and tough times. But when we’re in the midst them… whew. Hard times feel like forever, like things will never change. But then… time goes on. And things change. A little at first. Or all at once. And later, when we look back, the experience looks different. It still sucks. But we can also see what came before and what came after. If we are lucky (and work at it) we find things to be grateful for. We can be grateful for who it helped us become.

All this makes me think of a quote I shared earlier from author and monk David Steindl-Rast, known at the “Grandfather of Gratitude.”

So yeah, finding gratitude — even joy — in hard times. That’s what we’re doing today: getting grateful for the tough stuff.

But first, a poem.

This poem is by the US’s former poet laureate Ada Limón. It’s called “Instructions on Not Giving Up”.

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

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What I love about his poem is how Ada brings us into a present moment of explosive joy and beauty by painting so vividly with her words (much like how you called on your senses to draw last week’s assignments.) And then come the other seasons, when the tree loses its hues (you can imagine it brittle and barren) and then becomes a green tree again. “A return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess in us, the hurt, the empty.” This is a poem about resilience. About life’s different seasons. And how if we keep our eyes open and pay attention, we learn so much from each of them.1

Okay, now onto our drawing prompt for the day. I can’t wait to see what you all create and share, and how much we all learn from our hard experiences. <3

Assignment: Gratitude for the Tough Stuff

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So, so happy you’re here.

Quick announcement for anyone interested in exploring a fully-funded residency: Applications are open for North Coast Project, a fully-funded, environmentally-focused residency for artists and writers. Deadline to apply is December 15! Check it out.

Last week, we learned about the work of three Indigenous artists I deeply admire: Wendy Red Star, Jeffrey Gibson, and Dyani White Hawk. All three artists incorporate elements of their ancestry into their art, which led to our assignment to draw in collaboration with your ancestors. You created so many moving, beautiful tributes to those who made you who you are. One drawing that really moved me: GUT member Heather shared her experience of being an orphan and choosing the moon as their ancestor since their family was “Somewhere Out There.” Thank you for trusting us with your stories and for the support you give each other. Love you, GUT members, my chosen creative family. ❤️

Maybe it’s turning 50, but I have been feeling extra grateful lately. For the next two weeks, we’ll return to some earlier gratitude-focused drawing lessons, and use our hands to open up our hearts.

As I’ve said here pretty much every year, I have mixed feelings about the holiday. Its origins are in the genocide of the Native American people. At the same time, it’s become an annual celebration of family, community, and care (and food!). It can be hard for us humans (me!) to hold two disparate truths at once as we move forward. But it’s so important that we do. So HOW can we build that non-binary muscle?

One way we can start to hold multiple truths at once is by cultivating an “abundance mindset.” A person with an abundant mindset believes there are enough resources for you AND me to accomplish BOTH our goals. My experience doesn’t threaten yours, and yours doesn’t threaten mine. There is space for us both. We can also call this a “Both/And” world view, instead of an “Either/Or” outlook (also known as a deficit mindset.)

Truth be known, as an only child with a tendency towards “black or white” thinking, I struggle to let go of an “Either/Or” deficit mindset. I have to really practice “Both/And”-ing my way through the world. But I’m finding it’s so worth the effort. With it comes a far a more abundant, curious, hopeful, joyful, and relaxed experience in day-to-day life and relationships. It opens things up instead of closing them down.

One of the best ways to build an abundance mindset is to practice gratitude. Studies show that in addition to combating depression and burnout, practicing gratitude helps cultivate that abundant “Both/And” outlook.

Two important note about gratitude:

1. If we don’t or can’t muster up gratitude in the moment, that’s okay. Take a breath. Beating ourselves up about not feeling more grateful sure doesn’t help. First and foremost, be kind and gentle with your tender self. Meet yourself where you’re at. Be grateful for being here.

2. Being grateful on the inside does not preclude us from being engaged with the world on the outside. Gratitude is essential to connect with the world in a generative, just and impactful way. When we don’t practice gratitude, it is easy to take things for granted and shift into a deficit mentality. Gratitude helps us tap into our deeper selves and create space. Be present with one another. Stay connected. And take action in ways that move us all towards a more equitable and just future.

Powerful, right? And drawing can help us build it?? Yes it can.

Let’s get into it.

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What is gratitude?

In an essay for Greater Good Magazine, leading gratitude researcher Robert Emmons writes:

First, [gratitude] is an affirmation of goodness. We affirm that there are good things in the world, gifts and benefits we’ve received… Second, we recognize that the sources of this goodness are outside of ourselves. … We acknowledge that other people—or even higher powers, if you’re of a spiritual mindset—gave us many gifts, big and small, to help us achieve the goodness in our lives.1

Often we put our attention on things we have not done, and do not have. All we see is lack. An ungrateful person asks “What don’t I have? What’s next?” That leaves us feeling competitive, anxious, and isolated.

Conversely, a grateful person asks themselves “What do I have? What is now?” That mindset keeps us focused on the present, appreciating the good things around us, recognizing abundance, and reframing challenging moments into positive experiences. You know that old adage “Where we place our attention grows”? Placing our attention on gratitude helps us grow towards abundance for us, and others.

The documented benefits of practicing gratitude are profound.2 On a personal level, it makes us feel happier.

It also helps us live longer. From a study out of UC Berkeley:

Focusing on the positive and feeling grateful can improve your sleep quality and reduce feelings of anxiety and depression. Furthermore, levels of gratitude correlate to better moods and less fatigue and inflammation, reducing the risk of heart failure, even for those who are susceptible.3

Zoom out a little, and gratitude sets a course for our day-to-day decisions. How grateful we are can determine how we show up for others in our families, community, and the greater world.

Again, cultivating a grateful mindset is not an excuse to turn away from hardship. Quite the opposite. In the most challenging moments, we need to cultivate that Both/And abundance mentality to move forward in a more equitable and just direction, together. In our families, communities and in the larger world.

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Getting Grateful Through Our Senses

When we are experiencing anxiety or stress, one of the best ways to bring ourselves into the moment is to pay attention to our senses. When our feelings are not serving us, paying attention to our senses can also help us focus on what IS around us instead of what is NOT. Focusing on our senses can help us see the world through a gratitude lens.

Some time ago, author Gretchen Rubin joined the Grown-Ups table and taught us about her Five Senses Portrait, and we created one in collaboration with her, GUT style. (Members can access that assignment here.)

Today I’m giving you gratitude-focused twist on that powerful assignment.

(Personally, I found this simple exercise super fun and meditative and helpful. My drawing is below. I’d love to hear what you think of it, too.)

Let’s do this.

Assignment: Drawing Gratitude

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Last week, we wrapped up our series on Overlooked Art Supplies. Our last material: the tiny yet triumphant Post-it! You responded (as usual) with amazing 3x3 work of your own - from animation to bookmaking to mapping - this low-stakes assignment encouraged everyone to take a risk and try a approach. I LOVE to see it it. Members can view and participate in the GUT Gallery - check it out here.

ICYMI, be sure to check out all our overlooked art supply lessons, including the wonders of ballpoint pens, and the underappreciated masking tape. These are great for educators and classrooms, too. Speaking of underappreciation and learning…

It’s Native American Heritage Month here in the United States, and DrawTogether is focusing on Indigenous artists in both the Grown-Ups Table, and over in our educational non-profit, DrawTogether Classrooms. If you are an educator of any sort and would like to bring more art and social emotional learning into your community FOR FREE, join us.

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Alright, let’s dive in.

Native American Heritage

While a month is certainly not enough time to do justice to the infinite contributions of Native Americans, it’s a good reminder to pause and look closely at Indigenous narratives, and how often Native Americans’ stories are overlooked or silenced in the US. It’s also important to emphasize that Indigenous people are still here, still a huge part of our country and culture, and are making incredible, powerful art. This is something I want to learn a lot more about. Maybe you do, too. So let’s use this opportunity to explore the work of three contemporary Native artists whose art engages deeply with their heritage while also speaking to our present and future.

Let’s start with the artist Wendy Red Star.

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Wendy Red Star, Apsáalooke (Crow)

Multidisciplinary artist Wendy Red Star was an imaginative and curious child. Growing up on the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana, she was always asking questions and loved to draw. But when she went to high school off the reservation, she had that common experience: she was told there is only “right way” to draw. It had to be representational and realistic or it wasn’t art. Wendy promptly stopped drawing and pivoted to graphic design, which she majored in along with Native American Studies.

When Wendy returned to making art, she realized how much she’d already learned years ago from her grandmother who she watched sew and make traditional clothing. As Wendy traced her own heritage and ancestry, she began to make art her own way — less from scratch, and more like a collaboration or conversation with her ancestors.

She first gained renown with work she made in graduate school, Four Seasons. She posed in colorful garments next to inflatable animals and fake backdrops in a cheeky critique of stereotypes and museum dioramas portraying Native people. By placing herself in the image, she called attention to history’s focus on men — warriors and chiefs (that is, if American history features Native people at all) — and demanded a greater focus on women.

Intrigued by historical photographs of a Crow delegation that traveled to Washington, DC, in 1880, she noticed how the images were shaped by a white gaze — yet still held the beauty of Crow clothing and culture. She began tracing and annotating the photos, reclaiming them by pointing out details and restoring their context.

Curiosity > Attention > Care

Jeffrey Gibson, Mississippi Band of Choctaw and Cherokee

You may remember we looked at the work of Jeffrey Gibson earlier this summer in our Beyond Protest Posters lesson. Since his work deserves a thousand (million!) revisits, let’s take another look.

Jeffrey Gibson draws upon his Indigenous heritage, Queer identity, American and global history, as well as pop culture, to create vibrant paintings, sculptures, and videos. Even as he addresses painful histories of oppression, there is a pride and joy that emanates from his colorful work — an insistence on recognizing the resourcefulness and resilience of Indigenous and other marginalized peoples. In 2024, Jeffrey was the first Indigenous artist to represent the United States with a solo show at the Venice Biennale, and those works were recently on view at the Broad in Los Angeles. In the room above, ancestral figures with beaded text referring to Reconstruction and legislation affecting the civil rights of Black and Indigenous Americans flanked a quotation from Martin Luther King, Jr., advocating for us to see ourselves in relation to history and our own agency.

Throughout his career, Jeffrey has incorporated history into his work. Both of his parents were put into boarding schools where horrific abuses occurred as white reformers sought to strip students’ heritage and culture away. The first step was often cutting their hair. His Biennale show included a series of pieces related to that history: a painting with a quote from the Commissioner of Indian Affairs and a series of busts with glorious hair and intricate beadwork. The way the pain in that quotation is met by the joy and defiance of its colors and the nearby busts? Wow.

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Dyani White Hawk, Sičáŋǧu Lakota

Like Red Hawk and Gibson, Dyani White Hawk is best known for her abstraction. (What is abstraction? That means that the art is not representational but simplifies or abstracts images through color, line and form.) Much of her work is grounded in her Lakota heritage, but she also cites postwar artists like Agnes Martin and Mark Rothko as influences. (Both big abstractors that we’ve talked about a lot in the GUT.) Yet she points out that abstract art is not a recent European invention, and has been present in Indigenous communities for centuries.

Here’s a video on Dyani’s work from the wonderful PBS series Art 21:

White Hawk currently has an exhibition of her work up at the Walker Art Center, in her hometown of Minneapolis. The centerpiece is a sound and video installation titled Listen. She worked with filmmaker Razelle Benally and travelled across America gathering recordings of Native women speaking in their languages. White Hawk points out that even if we aren’t fluent in a language, we can often identify what that language is when it’s Spanish or German… but how many Indigenous languages could you identify by sound? (Such a pointed, humbling question. I remember when I was driving in Arizona and was surprised to come across the Navajo language radio channel. And then shocked at myself — and the US in general — that I’d never heard that before!)

Such a powerful quote. Thanks, Dyani.

🚨EXHIBITION ALERT🚨Indigenous Identities

If you are in New Jersey in the coming months, there is a major exhibition of Indigenous art right now at the Zimmerli Art Museum. “Indigenous Identities features 97 living artists that represent over 74 Indigenous nations and communities from across North America and includes painting, works on paper, photography, ceramics, beadwork, weaving, sculpture, installation, and video.” Here’s a great review of the show in the online art publication Hyperallergic. I hope to make it out there. If you do, please share your experience with the GUT crew in the chat.

And with that, let’s learn from these indigenous artists above and explore our own heritage a little.

The Assignment: Honoring our Past

A quick note on Honoring vs. Appropriating

Several years ago, I did a piece for the New York Times about the sharp increase in popularity of white sage as the Native practice of smudging became more widely practiced, especially by white people. I was interested in how Native folks felt about it, so I reached out to Adrienne Keene, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, visual artist, and former professor at Brown University, to ask her take. This was her valuable response:

She went onto suggest that people look into their own cultural lineages and find traditions to pull from there.

As I thought about what we’d draw this week, I asked myself: if we are non-native people, how can we be respectful appreciators and take inspiration from indigenous artists, but not appropriate their approach?

I was taken with Wendy Red Star’s idea of “collaborating with your ancestors” and intergenerational collaboration more broadly: Wendy Red Star has collaborated with her daughter on a number of pieces, and Dyani White Hawk also has generations of her family working with her on beading her pieces. What does it meant to collaborate with our own families, present and past?

Here’s where I landed, and an assignment for you to explore that, too:

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So happy you’re here.

Last week we talked with artist Tucker Nichols about noticing, unexpected aesthetics, and discovering art materials (and art!) in the most unlikely places.

Close looking and paying attention are core tenets of the DrawTogether ethos. Which, to be transparent, is another way of saying my ethos. I thought it would be a good idea to continue down this noticing/creativity/unexpected art supply path we kicked off with Tucker. He told us a story about finding an art medium in a livestock supply store. That made me wonder: what other unexpected art materials are hiding in plain sight? What overlooked art supplies are floating around our homes, waiting to be unleashed on the paper, canvas, or wall?? I’ll tell you friends: A LOT.

This week we kick off a series we’re calling….

Overlooked Art Supplies: The Series

In this series, we’re going to look at THREE ordinary materials that can be used as extraordinary art supplies. We are going to teach you a bit about an overlooked art supply — how it works, what other artists have done with it, and give you a primer on how to use it. Then we’ll speak with an artist who uses it as a primary medium, and get inspiration to make our own work using the medium. Sound good?

Great. Let’s do this. The first one is the ubiquitous mark maker…

Part 1: The Ballpoint Pen

Love them or hate them, I know you have a few hiding in your home, office, backpack, car, everywhere. If you’re like me, you often “unintentionally” pocket them at restaurants and doctors offices, only to toss them into a junk drawer back home. So rude. To the pen and the purveyor. And also a serious missed opportunity. While most of us associate ballpoints with the administration of daily life or branded corporate giveaways, I have news for you: this humble mark maker is capable of so much more.

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What exactly is a ballpoint pen?

I’ve developed a renewed appreciation for the ballpoint as artists have shown what you can really do with it. And the pen itself is a noteworthy design — the Bic Cristal is even in the collection of the MoMA!1

The modern ballpoint pen works by incorporating three key innovations:

1. a tiny ball bearing inside the pen’s tip — it rotates as you draw the pen across the paper

2. a viscous quick-drying ink which gets pulled by the rotating ball from the cartridge to the paper — even though they’re called ballpoint pens, it’s really the ink that was the critical development to making them work well!

3. plastic parts which could be produced more cheaply than those of previous metal pens and made the ballpoint affordable to the masses. (This part of the pen’s design is perhaps too successful as the United Nations estimates 9 billion plastic pens are thrown away every year.)

Masters of the Ballpoint Pen

One great thing about the ballpoint is how receptive it is to pressure. Unlike a rollerball pen like the Uniball Visions I tend to favor when drawing, ballpoints can create different values — light and dark — depending on how much pressure you exert. And because of that, you can layer colors, like blending red into blue. In that way, it’s more like a pencil than most pens.

Once you start playing around with them, you’ll be surprised to see how delicate a line you can get, and what detailed work you can create. Don’t take my word for it, tho. Let’s take a look at a few artists who create jaw-dropping representational and abstract artwork using just the humble ballpoint pen.

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Nicolas V. Sanchez

Nicholas V. Sanchez started sketching in ballpoint on his subway commute and then began incorporating ballpoint more into his studio practice. He says, “The inability to erase… is both the beauty and challenge of drawing in ink.” I’ve featured him before in my lesson on sketchbooks. Prepare to pop your eyes back into your head!

Guno Park

Guno Park also finds drawing inspiration on the New York subways, but he is probably best known for his drawings of animals (and in fact has been an instructor for animal drawing at New York Academy of Art for over a decade).

Here’s a time-lapse of Guno Park drawing an ape:

Elke Kunneman

Although she works with ballpoint pens, Elke Kunneman describes her work as being driven by her interest in light and time. As she layers ink on the page with scribbles and signatures, she says, “The light arises naturally. … I really enjoy discovering that context is necessary to see light. If you look purely at light and you don’t have context, you probably won’t see light.” The contrast between the ink and the paper make the emptier spaces seem to glow. So cool!

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Il Lee

Il Lee is one of the best-known artists to use ballpoint as the basis for his art. While attending the Pratt Institute for graduate school, he focused on printmaking and etching. His interest in the sharp line created by a needle transitioned over to his ballpoint works.

In an interview, he laughed as he recalled a critic saying something like, “You know, that Il Lee, he’s a Korean artist in New York – Jackson Pollock was a fighter with paint and a bucket – and Il fights with his thin ballpoint pen!”

Carine Brancowitz

Carine Brancowitz takes a more illustrative approach to her ballpoint drawing. While she does not work exclusively in ballpoint, the pen is central to her work. What I love is how she manages to combine such clean lines with incredible textures.

Emil Ferris

Emil Ferris wrote and illustrated an entire graphic novel titled My Favorite Thing Is Monsters with mainly ballpoint pens! The main character in her novel My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is a young girl who believes she is a werewolf and is trying to solve the murder of her upstairs neighbor. The novel appears as her sketchbook and diary and all the illustrations take place on notebook paper.

She has received wide acclaim both for her storytelling and her intricate drawings, and her personal story is just as compelling. In 2002, she found herself paralyzed after contracting the West Nile Virus, and as an artist, she was devastated to find this also affected her drawing hand. However, she was determined to regain her mobility — she worked with her daughter to duct tape a quill pen to her hand to make her first illustration after being hospitalized and slowly began to recover her drawing abilities despite chronic pain.

All hail the humble ballpoint pen.

Now that we’ve seen what can be done with it, let’s learn a little about how to draw with it ourselves.

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Ballpoint Pen Basics

In some ways, the ballpoint pen is more like a pencil than other pens are: you can control the amount of ink that comes out of the pen with pressure. Less pressure = lighter line. More pressure = darker line.

You can also build value by layering, like we do with other pens. Remember this lesson on building value with graphite pencils?

We can apply it to the ballpoint pen, too. You can layer marks to build value, including hatch marks (in any direction, parallel, cross, or contour, stippling (dots) and scumbling (scribbling). Smudging? Not so much, but hey, give it a try and report back!

If you want to learn by watching, check out this phenomenal introduction to all this from Guno Park over on the Artists’ Network.

Also, COLOR. Using the techniques above, you can layer colors to create a blended effect. (See Nicolas’s work above!)

And that, my friends, is your intro to what the humble ballpoint pen can do. Now it’s OUR TURN to try.

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Assignment

I have a hunch you know what this week’s assignment might be. There’s really only one way to learn to do something new, and that’s…

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Hellooooo DrawTogether GUT crew, old and new.

I’m delighted to report that I’m writing to you from my studio!

After four weeks of near-zilch mobility, I’m slowly regaining my strength and starting to feel the itch to get back out into the world. To “put on my art eyes” as we say in DrawTogether videos. To see all the weird, wonderful, magical moments occurring around us all the time. Not being able to walk without pain for nearly 3 years contracted my art practice. It wasn’t bad. I’m grateful for all the lessons I’ve learned from my kitchen table. But I am also over it. I miss the world, talking to strangers, paying attention. Looking through drawing. I’m ready to get out there and LOOK again. I can’t wait to see what — and who — is out there today.

On that note, this week I was thrilled to spend some time chatting with one of my favorite artists: Tucker Nichols. Tucker is a prolific artist who works in every medium imaginable (pencil! paint! wire! earplugs! thumbtacks!) to create drawings, paintings, sculptures, illustrations, you name it. I’ve shared his work with you before — specifically his generous project “Flowers for…” when Tucker started painting flowers and sending them to people during the pandemic as a way of connecting through illness and hard times. I love everything about his work, his eye, his heart. And his humor.

I wanted to point us back to Tucker’s work this week for two reasons:

1. He uses oil pastels. I thought it would be cool to see how someone uses this medium in a very fun, lighthearted way AFTER last week’s oil pastel lesson.

2. Noticing is on my mind. Tucker is one of my favorite noticers. His keen eye for unexpected aesthetic delight is on full display in his new book Mostly Everything. I love this book so much I wanted an excuse to spend some time with it, and share it with you. So I called him up…

Tucker and I had a lovely chat about unexpected art materials and oil pastels and looking and noticing. Below are some highlights of our chat, some images to inspire, and an assignment to help fire up our noticing muscles. I’m sure you’ll find it as interesting and inspiring as I did, and I can’t wait to see what you find, and share.

The chat is where it's at! Join us!

Without further ado, here’s Tucker (part two!)

Tucker Nichols on Oil Pastels & Farm Animal “Paintstiks”

Tucker and I covered a lot of ground, but we started off talking oil pastels. When I mentioned the use of the medium in art therapy (and research to back it up), he wasn’t surprised. Tucker compared his own experience drawing with oil pastels to finger painting, describing the feeling of pulling the stick across the surface as “[cutting] deeper into the sternum” than other mediums. He said, “Oil pastels say something you can’t describe. The expression moves more through the body, and less through the brain.” (Yes, exactly!)

Even though he says there are a thousand reasons not to use them — they’re messy, not practical, stick together, etc — he still loves to use oil pastels in his paintings, often layering them over other media.

Tucker also introduced me to something I had never heard of: livestock markers. While at a residency in Wyoming 20 years ago, he visited a store with supplies for roping cattle and found these All Weather Paintstik Livestock Markers. They come in five vibrant colors: blue, green, orange, red, yellow. People use them to mark animal skin, fur, and feathers, and the mark will last through all kinds of weather. (Please always ask permission before drawing on animals!)

It’s a good reminder that anything can be an art medium: house paint, duct tape, red wine, you name it. If it makes a mark, it makes art.

Membership is also art.

Here are some inspiring oil-pastel inclusive drawings by Tucker. They make me smile.

Tucker’s Noticing Practice

I love (LOVE!) that Tucker wanders into a cattle roping supply store and sees untapped potential for art-making. It’s a perfect example of one thing that makes Tucker the artist that he is: he notices things. He looks closely at the world and sees things that others don’t, and uses them to make art. He pays attention. And then shares what he sees. Reminds me of this wonderful snippet of a Mary Oliver poem:

Tucker’s attention is on full display in his amazing new book from McSweeney’s, Mostly Everything: The Art of Tucker Nichols, which came out this summer.

Unlike most other monographs, this one includes no text, no captions, no essays in this book. When I asked him why, he said, “Why include a bunch of essays nobody is going to read?” Funny. Sad. Probably true. (Side note: for the new art-people joining us, a monograph is a book that presents a survey of the work of one artist.)

Tucker worked on this book for two years with McSweeney’s incredible art director Sunra Thompson. The book is an art piece itself, organized into sections like “Diagrams” and “Creatures,” similar to the piles he showed us in a tour of his studio back when he was a guest artist.

My favorite works of Tucker’s remind us of the value of paying attention to the beauty around us. Yes to flowers of all kinds and for all sorts of people. His sculptures feature found objects, objects most people would overlook. He makes compositions that get us to look at these objects in new ways. Sometimes his work is silly or absurd. Thank goodness for art that makes us smile. But more, looking at his work sparks my brain to reconsider what is beautiful, and why. To make meaning of the everyday. He urges us to look again at an earplug or jar lid and imagine it anew. What a few earplugs can do!

When I asked him how he keeps his eyes sharp, he said by using them. As I’ve said before, the more you look, the more you’ll see.

Tucker’s work never fails to inspire us to “put on my art eyes”. Not just for the universally-acclaimed, empirically proven “beauty”, but for the things that reward our attention with surprise, wonder, and awe.

Are you part of the Grown-Ups Table?

Assignment & Book Giveaway: UNEXPECTED AESTHETICS.

This week one lucky GUT member who shares their artwork in the GUT group chat will win a copy of Tucker’s new book, Mostly Everything. Thank you, McSweeney’s!

When I asked Tucker what he does to notice the world around him, he said he keeps his eyes sharp by looking. Walking around is like a treasure hunt where you can discover “accidental aesthetic choices” — when people have made decisions that are aesthetic but did not consider the aesthetics. For example, you could notice different color wires coming out of a wall, or people painting back over graffiti with colors that are almost right. “The aesthetics aren’t the purpose, but they end up being a result. … I look, and see those choices.”

It takes practice to develop that openness and attention. This week, I want you to go look, really look, and draw what you see. This week we’re doing a LOOKING treasure hunt, with categories inspired by Tucker’s work. Here’s how it works:

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Welcome back my fabulous GUT friends!

You all are too great. Thank you for all the kind words of support and suggestions around my recent elevation into bionic status. (Read: hip replacement.) I am grateful, healing, and looking forward to getting back in the saddle (which is to say the studio) asap. Phew. AND. I loved all your TV studies from last week’s assignment - you all made such amazing drawings inspired by mysteries and medical dramas, the US open and the WNBA, and of course the new season of Bake Off. I bow.

Also, huge shout out to our Austin GUT members for organizing an IRL meetup and sharing some pics. We included them in the GUT gallert at the end of this missive. I love you/us.

Join the wonderful GUT community! ❤️

Which brings us to now.

We’re at that transitional, disorienting moment in year when the weather still feels summerish, but the youngs are back to school - so it doesn’t quite feel like “summer” anymore. Plus, I hear the Bay Area is about to get our regular fall heat wave, which is essentially our summer. We do things different around here. ;)

Related, I know our GUT visiting artist this week from around the bay. And like SF weather, Ali has always done things her own way, too. And thank goodness for that.

Back to school with Ali Liebegott.

As a kid, my favorite thing about Fall was back-to-school supplies. (Reminder: stock up on some oil pastels for next week, GUT!) My first painting canvas was unwashed blue denim stretched around a Mead three-ring binder. It was there that I first experimented with typography (bubble letters!), learned the aesthetic value of a good lyric and/or quote, and perfected cross-eyed cartoon characters. I also loved binder paper. The magenta and cyan lines. All the potential an empty page offers. I could — we could — do anything on that paper.

Thinking about this reminded me of a body of work I adore, by my friend, the writer and artist Ali Liebegott.

Ali is an artist, a writer, and a poet. She is the author of four books: The Beautifully Worthless, The IHOP Papers, Cha-Ching!, and her novel-in-prose The Summer of Dead Birds. I first encountered her writing and poetry when she lived in SF. She was active in the queer literary scene, and working at Rainbow Grocery (which is its own scene - IYKYK). She was invited to write for the groundbreaking television show Transparent, moved to LA, and has continued to have a pretty amazing career in TV, going on to write for The Sex Lives of College Girls, The Conners, Little America, Love Life, Big Mouth, I Love That For You, and Beast in Me. And while she writes, she paints.

And a lot of those paintings involve writing.

Ali told me once (and I hope I’m remembering this correctly) “I’m not really interested in learning to paint the right way.” I love that. While she mentions in our Q&A that she would love to go to art school someday, I love that ultimately she is interested in learning more so she can make her own decisions about what and what not to use - so she can keep painting her way. Not some realistic “right” way. Ali is our perfect rep for the number one hard and fast rule of DrawTogether & the GUT: No rules in art.

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Ali Liebegott: Paintings as poems.

Wendy: How did you get started painting?

Ali: I really started painting in 2001 after 9/11. I had moved to Providence, Rhode Island from NY and became obsessed with feeding ducks at the local pond. I started keeping an illustrated watercolor chronicle of my duck feeding, and that morphed into an illustrated novel that I never completed called, The Crumb People. I moved from there into oil painting, and have [painted with oils] ever since. Today, I work in both oil and watercolor/gouache.

Wendy: How do you balance your writerly self and your painting self? How do these two mediums feed you?

Ali: Unlike when I worked at the grocery store, when I started working in TV it was too much for me to work all day, and then go home and write more of my own stuff. I needed to do something at night that was coming from a different part of my brain than writing, like painting. I would say since 2014 I have been much more regularly oil painting. So I usually paint when I’m employed as a TV writer, and write when I’m not employed. Painting is very separate from my writing, more meditative, calm, fun, playful. Writing, because I’ve done it as a profession, is more fraught, less fun. But both are necessary.

Wendy: When you include text in your paintings, do you consider that your writing as well?

Ali: No. But I think of my paintings as poems sometimes. I’m trying to capture a moment, a specificity. There is a narrative quality to them, easter egg details sometimes. I am constantly trying to think about how text can operate in visual form.

Wendy: You once told me that you liked a person’s art because it was clear they didn’t go to art school, and you liked that unschooled approach. What is that to you? What do you like about it?

Ali: Well, I think I often respond to a rawness and a feeling of boldness, breaking the rules. I know that that can also occur in people’s work who have gone to art school. I would love to go to art school. I actually want to learn all “the rules” and then I guess decide to go from there on whether I should break them.

Way cheaper than art school.

Wendy: And for those of us who struggle with wanting to get things right, what makes you feel so free?

Ali: HA! I’m tormented by wanting to get things right too. I grew up with the idea that an artist was the one kid in class who could perfectly render something, work in realism. Because I can’t render anything, have some sort of problem with seeing things as they are, spatial reasoning, perspective problems, I’m often frustrated and humiliated when I look at my own work. It’s been a whole process for me to let go of the things I can’t do and just leaning into the things I can. I love color, and humor. But it’s been an ongoing process for me to accept my technical limitations and try and work around them.

Wendy: Do you have anything else you want to share with readers of the GUT?

Ali: I guess just to say that nothing brings me peace and joy as much as painting. The way time moves, it’s like someone has washed my brain out by the end. I’m so glad that I have a regular practice which I honestly think of as a kind of meditation. I want to be one of those people that’s painting until I’m 100.

Wendy: Thank you so much for chatting with us, and sharing your work, Ali. I think I speak for all of us when I say that we hope you’re painting until you’re 100, too.

For ages 6 - 106. Join us.

Alright everyone, we have an Ali-inspired-text-as-visual-back-to-school assignment for you….

The Assignment: Binder Paper Poem Paintings

There is a series of paintings Ali made a while back that I love. She paints classic binder paper and uses that as a foundation or background for a text painting. They feel accessible and universal. And they are deceptively simple. A concise headline and a few hatch marks can convey a lot of dark humor and ton of depth and feeling. Here’s Ali on the series:

I think the first [binder paper painting] came about as a painting inside a painting. You can see it as the list of things to do: feed ducks, take meds, etc. This was from that illustrated novel I never finished called The Crumb People.

I just began to make these other "list paintings." In some ways it was like a warm up exercise. First draw the lines in pencil, then the holes. Then cover the watercolor clock in an ochre, then make the red and blue lines. It would usually take two nights to finish one painting because the notebook paper would have to dry before I decided what I was going to write on it.

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