This week I've been reacquainting myself with diary comics. I used to make them regularly - if I didn't ink them every day, I would at least jot something down and sketch something out every day. I followed Lynda Barry's suggestion of writing down things that you did, saw, heard, and then made things out of those.
You can see in the comic above and below how I experimented with different formats.

I used dedicated notebooks just for comics for most of 2018, and then went back to combining them into a daily notebook where I also kept track of daily notes about practical things and projects. But I kept doing them for a long time.
I have been looking through notebooks at how comics were a daily part of my life while assuming I would see a hard stop somewhere. My assumption was that I stopped at the beginning of the pandemic, but I kept going on and on, just not necessarily daily.
​I'm going back to a daily practice. It helps me to notice things around me - it invites my attention.

If you are interested in this practice, read Lynda Barry! Start with Syllabus, and then read everything else she's written. I'm going to go reread her now.

I keep wanting to do a blog post about what is new in the studio, but until I can gather my thoughts, here's what I sketched last week.

Last week I was thinking about the sketching workshop I'm teaching at the Dixon this week, and sketched out what I call drawing to understand (what's the shape of these cups, how do they intersect each other in my field of vision) vs. drawing to record (adding context of what I'm observing, what is it on or next to or near, what am I doing while observing). I did these with a Bic pen - I always forget how fun they are to draw with, then I love rediscovering them!

Still thinking about the workshop - sketching with two materials and using the green marker to add a bigger impact to my sketch. 
These two people are the only ones I did for the One Week 100 People challenge - HA! 

Tuesday afternoon was gorgeous, so I took my sketchbook and a few colored pencils outside with my while I talked on the phone. This isn't how I meant for this sketch to go - I had originally thought I would cover more of the page, but with these materials I preferred to focus on shapes and patterns. I like the sparseness of it and the rhythm of the chairs.

This was a weird one. I was waiting for some take-out on Thursday night and wanted to sketch these buildings (of course), but it was dark! I figured I would try my waterbrush pen with diluted sumi ink and just see what happened. The flag is lighted and there was this swirl of smoke moving in and out of it - it was fun to try to capture that with a white gel pen.
Even with that big drip, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. 

Simple coffee cup sketch! Later, I saw this building with shadows and reflections of trees, and the trees were filled with crows, so I had to see what I could do to capture that in the few minutes I had.