Hiiiii GUT family! Sending love from an absurdly sunny LA. I’m here for a couple days to see some art and visit a friend, and might I say the weather is FINE. I’m sending you some of this city’s sunshine. They have a lot to spare.
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…
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.
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.
“The kind of thought that goes into creating a painting, a piece of sculpture, a collage is also the same kind of thinking that goes into producing a creative human being.” — Betty Blayton-Taylor
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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