Day 21. Visual Storytelling: Self-Portraits

Silly selfies to kick off a new week of daily drawing!

Helllloooo GUT!

It’s day 21 of our 30 Day Drawing Habit here in the Grown-Ups Table and I AM BLOWN AWAY by each and every one of you. Did you see all the radically unique, and exceptionally creative, and bravely vulnerable Internal Weather System Charts GUT GUT members made? They are GORGEOUS. Many of you said you experienced a big internal shift with this one: When you started, you didn’t enjoy it. It was hard. By the end, you loved it. Many of you said it was your favorite drawing yet!

What a great reminder that when things feel hard, we can pause, take deep breath, and recognize that hard, judging voice in our heads for what it is: Fear. Discomfort. Old Narratives that no longer serve us! And we can KEEP GOING. Learning is HARD. Growing HURTS. If we crumple our paper and throw down our pen when things feel frustrating, where do we go? Nowhere. We stay right where we are. No learning. No growth. No change. If we keep going, then what happens? Uur drawings may very well end up more beautiful than we could ever imagine.

As always, I’ve included a selection of our Weather Charts at the bottom of this dispatch for members. It’s a small handful pulled from the many hundreds of drawings you’ve shared since yesterday. Bonus today: Some kids got in on the action and we included some of those, too! 🥹❤️

Okay, let’s get to the drawing. It’s SUNDAY! That means…. New theme for the week ahead!

Visual Storytelling!

Every day this week we will explore a new kind of visual storytelling. All will be simple and approachable and fun. And, as always, you do you. If you want to blow me off and draw a flower for ten minutes, draw a flower for ten minutes! All that matters is that we’re drawing and we’re doing it together.

What is Visual Storytelling?

Visual Storytelling is, simply put, communicating through visuals. For our purposes, it’s using drawing to tell a story. Every image tells a story. By putting visual cues in the image, we can shape that story more specifically for the viewer. Or not!

For example, here are three visual takes on the same plant drawing. How is the story different in each?

Image 1. Plant in space. Image 2. Plant on table. Someone has knocked over a cup of coffee which could mean tragedy! What do you think happened?? Image 3. Plant on table. Someone has knocked over a cup of coffee. Off in the background, someone yells “I WON!” It’s up for interpretation, but to me this piece of visual storytelling clearly says that two people were having coffee one morning and there was a knock at the door and one went to answer it and there was Ed McMahon standing at the door with a giant check for publishers cleaning house so naturally they yelled “I WON!” and the other person immediately jumped up and knocked over their coffee.

Little things, big stories.

There are so many ways to use drawings to tell stories: Comics. Diagrams. Data Visualization. Drawn Journalism. Illustration. Graphic Novels. Graffiti… Cross walk signs!

Look around your house for places where drawing are used to tell stories. Diagrams on the back of a chocolate chip bag. Battery installation in a fire alarm. Comics in the newspaper. Your to do list! All this week we’re going to use drawing to tell stories about our daily lives. I'm excited to learn more about everyone through our visual storytelling!

Today we are going to start with a fun and basic one: the comic self-portrait. Like the first of last week’s series, this is inspired by our hero Lynda Barry, who was herself inspired by Cartoonist Ivan Brunetti, who was also inspired by Chris Ware, who was also inspired by…. (this is how art works. As my good pal Austin Kleon says, “Steal Like an Artist.” I would just like to add to that sentence IN ALL CAPS “with public reverence and attribution at all times.”)

Got a favorite kind of visual narrative?? Favorite artist who tells stories with pictures?? Someone YOU feel indebted to and even steal from?? Share your favorite visual storyteller in the comments!

Ivan Brunetti wrote a slim bible on cartooning called…

Cartooning is a brilliant guide to sequential visual storytelling in 75 short pages based on a class Brunetti teaches. Here’s one of my favorite pages- all about expressive eyebrows. (See Brunetti’s caption citing Chris Ware with reverence? That’s how we do.❤️)

Lynda Barry’s Making Comics is much like Brunetti’s “Cartooning” in that it’s a written translation of a class on comics she teaches. But of course, it is entirely Lynda.

At the start of each semester, she steals a version the cartoon character Brunetti teaches and uses it to kick off her class.

And so, dear friends, in true STEAL order, the GUT will follow suit, and steal Lynda’s theft of Ivan’s Theft of Chris… etc.

Today we are going to draw our own self-portrait characters. We will use them later in the week, too.

BUT FIRST. BEFORE WE START DRAWING.

This is important: I’d like to you draw a caption box at the bottom of your drawing paper every day this week. Like this:

Today’s caption. “Day 21…” I left mine blank for now.

This is a fun experiment we’ll do together.

While each day’s drawing will be self-contained, we will ALSO create a loosely tied-together sequential piece using this week’s drawings. Every day we will write a caption on our drawings. At the end of the week, we will be able to read them all together as one piece and see how they do or do not tie together.

(I’ll tell GUT subscribers what we’re writing below.)

Does that make sense? (Leave questions in the comments, as always.)

Alright, let’s dive straight into it. Let’s do some visual storytelling.