DT Grown-Ups Table: Gratitude Part 2

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Hello GUTters! (Gutsters? Gutties? Guts???)

I hope everyone is having a special weekend/time of thanks. Hopefully it involved some delicious food, laughter, and joy with people you love.

We have a three parter today: A fun conversation, Review of last week, and the new Drawing project: Gratitude Part 2 (we’re making a Zine!) - and as always (as of a couple weeks ago) a few drawings created by GUT during the previous week.

Talking process with Mike Birbiglia

While I’m acutely conscious of the GUT not being a self-promotional platform (we have social media for that, right? blargghhhh) there will be times when things I do or make relates to The GUT. If I think y’all might appreciate or benefit from them, I’ll share them here. This is one of those times.

I have no idea how to do decent screengrabs for something like this! (FWIW my voice is not nicely kerned.) But what is interesting about these photos is all the cards on the wall behind Mike and me. This is how Mike works out his shows. Each one of those cards represents a story, and he arranges and re-arranges on the wall in different orders as he works out his show. I ask him about it in the interview. Take a listen.

When I was in NY, I had a fun talk with artist/storyteller/comedian/actor Mike Birbiglia for his podcast Working it Out. (Yes, that Mike Birgiblia - all his performances and films and books are so great.) We talked about creative process, backstories, perfectionism, and how drawing helps us connect with each other and the world. Working it Out is always an inspiring listen - Mike talks with storytellers, actors, writers (and now visual artists!) about their process. Highly recommend listening while drawing. (And if you are in NY, check out Mike’s current Broadway show The Old Man and The Pool is at Lincoln Center right now. Recognize the not-so-well-kerned handwriting on the playbill?

Grown-Ups Table Gratitude, Parts 1&2

Part 1 review: Week of Gratitude

Last week the wonderful

Courtney Martin

gave us our drawing assignment: draw a Week of Gratitude, much like our Ross Gay-inspired Week of Delight. Despite being pulled in every direction this past week, many of you took a moment to sit down, train your attention on something you are grateful for, and draw. The outcomes are wondrous. Check out the chat on the substack app (for newcomers, that’s where we post our drawings) to see the 100+ drawings people shared. I’ve included a handful at the bottom of this edition of the GUT (Sorry, I just can’t call this a newsletter. Does anyone have a better idea of a name than “newsletter”? Does Edition work? Publication? Missive? Dispatch? What do we call this?? Feel free to offer suggestions in the comments. )

In any case, it was a really special week of drawing. And now we are onto part 2 of our 2 part Gratitude extravaganza. Same subject, but with a twist:a totally new medium.

We’re making mini-books, people.

Gratitude Part 2. Gratitude Zines!

Oh, yeah. Let’s do this.

For a long while, my friend

Austin Kleon

(he of Steal Like an Artist, Keep Going, and Share Your Work) made a little zine every day (AKA mini-handmade-magazine) and put it inside his kids school lunch. This led inspired him to create a wonderful little Gratitude Zine that he published as a downloadable PDF on his blog. When he shared it again this year, and I thought it would be fun to share his zine with all of you so you could do it - AND we could do a sort of GUT-version of it - essentially create a DIY gratitude zine that you can make and draw yourself.

So first things first, let’s learn to make a zine.

Tiny books! Aren’t they the cutest! This is what we’re doing this week.

There are a ton of ways to make a zine. The no-staples zine we are making today comes from the great zine-making book “Whatcha Mean, What’s a Zine? The Art of Making Zines and Mini-Comics” by Esther Pearl Watson and Mark Todd, which contains a ton of other mini-book forms and DIY techniques and inspirations. Highly recommend.

Still from Austin’s simple zine-making instructions. Thank you Austin!