First, three comics that started in my sketchbook during my summer trip to Greece.

You can check out my last post for lots of other sketchbook pages from that trip.

Joanna also shared lots from her sketchbook from the same trip in her 2 most recent posts, including some comics. Go check ‘em out! One of my favourite parts of these trips is seeing how we pull from and capture different things from the experiences we shared as a group.

A flip through Jo's sketchbook

Greece art retreat - part 1

I recently returned from a trip I’d been looking forward to all year - a sketchbook retreat with Mike Lowery and Katrin Wiehle in Zakynthos, Greece! I booked the trip to celebrate a milestone birthday and loved the chance to focus on sketching and making art with a bunch of other talented artists…

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a year ago · 8 likes · 4 comments · A flip through Jo's sketchbook

A while back I also wrote about trying to draw a single panel every day. I fell off that wagon multiple times this year and have now settled into drawing any-number-of-panel comics every so often, still with the focus on capturing small moments, with no intention to fix bad drawings or draw them digitally. Here are a selection of those!

That’s it for now! As always, thanks for reading :)

In June/July, I went to Greece for my third sketchbooking retreat hosted by Mike Lowery and Katrin Wiehle. (You can see what I wrote about last year’s retreat in Morocco here).

Unlike in previous years, I had a day job I was taking a vacation from and I think that made the trip feel even more precious this time around. Finding the energy and making the time outside of work to focus on drawing and creative stuff is still an ongoing struggle. So by the time I left Greece this year with a sketchbook more than half-way filled, I realized how much I’d needed the reset, in the same way a massage makes you realize how much tension you’d been holding for too long. Things can feel different and I wanna hold onto that feeling in my regular life without having to fly to another continent.

Now, fewer words and more drawings!

I brought a blue Pilot mechanical pencil with me on this trip, which I’d only picked up maybe a week before. I liked it so much that a few days in, I’d already used up all the lead that the pencil came with and I hadn’t brought the refills!

Coincidentally, Mike and Katrin already planned to gift us blue pencils, so I didn’t go wanting for my sweet, sweet blue for too long.

One day, Katrin and Mike told us we’d be going somewhere close by to do some life drawing with a local model. We split up into several cars, walked past some trees, and settled down to draw our model — a goat! It’s a real treat to go somewhere without all the details and be able to trust that, whatever it is, you’ll enjoy it.

On our second to last evening, we were treated to performances by a Greek band and dancers. This involved lighter fluid as well as some dance moves only the women were instructed to copy.

I spent another night in town after the retreat before going home and ended up with a sketchbook page I really liked.

I had amazing food on this trip, including some Greek classics. (Side note: Feta is traditionally made with sheep/goat milk, but tzatziki is normally made with cow’s milk. I wonder why?) But I also gotta shout out these fries I had and wrote about on the page above. We’d talked about what our favourite preparation of potato is and my new answer is whatever these were. They’re obviously not the only good memory from this trip, but I will be thinking about them.

Next time I’ll share some short comics from this trip that I’m planning to draw digitally. Until then, take care and thanks for reading! :)

But as kids, my sister and I did have a handheld console that was exclusively for playing an off-brand version of Tetris called “Brick Game.”

It had a bunch of different modes including an upside down mode where you cleared lines at the top of the screen.

This is what I occupied myself with during the big summer power outage we had here in the early 2000s. At least while there was enough sunlight to still see. This thing was not backlit.

The second time I ever saw my now partner, Alex, was at a mutual friend’s game night. We played Tetris towards the end.

I asked him recently what impression I made on him. He said I was quiet but that Tetris made me come to life.

Over the past month or so, Alex and I have been playing a lot of Tetris.

We pass the controller back and forth, trying to beat our fastest time for clearing 40 lines (sprint mode in Puyo Puyo Tetris on Nintendo Switch).

(My best is 1:29:something)

I don’t think I’ve played this much Tetris maybe since that one time I had a weed gummy under a friend’s supervision and then we played for at least 3 hours straight.

Maybe two years into our relationship, I crocheted a Tetrimino as a Christmas present for Alex. I made it a friend shortly after.

Alex is a capital G gamer (a term I doubt capital G gamers use).

There isn’t a huge overlap with the games we each like playing, but Tetris is one we can enjoy together. And the bonus is that it’s one of the only games, if not THE only game, that I’m better at than him.

That sounds quite official but it was a casual thing. It was through the Tuesday Making Club, a group of us who hang out in a local cafe here in Toronto each week while we work on our own things, both creative and otherwise.

I’ve wanted to run a crochet workshop for a long time but didn’t know how to make that happen, nor whether I was really “qualified” to do it. Teaching people I already know made that all easier and less scary. And it made me more comfortable inviting a stranger to join in too when they happened to show interest!

I first learned to crochet as an 8- or 9-year old from someone who supervised us kids in the afterschool care program. I learned how to make rectangles and after getting my own hooks and yarn, I just made rectangles over and over with no particular purpose other than the act itself.

I can’t remember the name of this person who taught me, but I’m grateful for them and the crocheting seed they planted in my little brain way back then.

After many years, Philippa Rice’s crochet characters (one example pictured below) led me to revisit crocheting and I started making up my own characters which now take up a whole couch back at my parents’ place.

When the chance to run a workshop came up, I decided on a granny square as the project. This came from my deep research (googling “crochet projects for beginners”), finding a pattern, and making a granny square for the first time. I, perhaps naively, thought it’d be a small and simple enough project for people to get through in a few hours, and they’d have a nice coaster at the end of it.

But I didn’t want to just walk through someone else’s written pattern. I find following a long list of numbered steps kinda stressful and tedious. It’s helpful as a reference while learning something, but it’s not as enjoyable as getting the gist and then getting into a groove. It’s like how a written recipe is useful, but if I can understand what purpose certain ingredients and steps serve, I can cook it again without having to reference much and that’s when it feels like I’ve really learned something.

So I broke down the pattern into a visual cheat sheet of sorts so people wouldn’t really need to follow the written pattern with its numbered steps. I wanted them to understand why they were doing certain things so they wouldn’t need to keep checking a long recipe to see what came next or if they missed a step. I think this ended up working out well, at least for the people who stuck with it 😅

If I were to do another workshop, I’d try staggering working with individuals or pairs instead of trying to get the whole group through the first step before moving onto the next. Some people did give up part way though and I think that had something to do with it.

In the end, nobody finished their granny square during the workshop itself but I helped two people finish theirs over the following weeks. One of them made more on their own and ended up buying their own yarn and needles too, which I think is the best outcome I could ask for!

I’d like to think that I helped plant that crocheting seed in their mind the same way someone did for me all those years ago.

Notes

Curtido is a Salvadoran slaw.

There are recipes that make use of natural fermentation at room temperature (and maybe this is the traditional way of doing it). But I don’t trust myself with that, so I’ve used recipes that rely on vinegar. These days I decide on the amount of vinegar to use by eyeballing it and having a taste at the end.

There’ve been several times lately where drawing digitally has felt laboured. Having the ability to undo things can be great! But I catch myself redrawing a line over and over and over again, only for it to look basically the same once I zoom out. It makes drawing less fun.

This reminded me of a bit from a podcast last year. The illustrator Maddy Vian talked about how she changed her style, not because she didn’t like how her work looked, but because she wasn’t enjoying her process.

So what do I need to do to make my process feel good? Chill out, probably. Stop holding my breath when I’m drawing. And…

Wonkify is my new mantra. When I feel like I’m redoing things unnecessarily or when drawing feels sorta strained, I tell myself to embrace the wonky. It’s really just another way to remind myself and give myself permission to loosen up.

The more I repeat this word to myself, the more I notice it’s the wonky elements of other people’s illustration work that makes it exciting and refreshing to me. I don’t draw in a very realistic way anyway, so why not have more fun with that? Again, like, just chill out man.

Below are some wonkification exercises I did in a sketchbook. I started with a regular drawing of an object, and then tried to push proportions and perspective to wonkier places in subsequent drawings.

It’s generally easier for me to be loose in a sketchbook, so the real test will be putting this into practice when drawing and colouring digitally to make “final” illustrations. But hopefully the mantra will help with that!

I bring you a little story about a surprise source of joy during the holidays.

This marks a year of me consistently sending this newsletter out at the start of each month! It’s been a great motivator for me to write and draw more, and I’m hoping to share more stories like this.

Thank you for reading! :)

Back in July, I christened a new sketchbook with a quick drawing after a walk.

And very quickly, I started drawing a single panel about my day, every day. I started using a separate pocket-sized sketchbook dedicated to these drawings to keep them altogether.

I was pretty consistent and pushed myself to draw something even when it felt like my day was pretty dull, especially after I started a new job and was staying in a lot again.

But after a short trip to Colorado for a wedding, I completely stopped these daily panels. I didn’t feel too bad about it during the trip itself but when I got back home, it started to nag at me. Whatever momentum I had built with this habit was gone and it was so hard to get back into it. Even though this was an entirely self-initiated thing, I felt guilty about not keeping it up and that made it even harder to pick back up again.

—

When I first started these panels, I posted them in batches to Instagram which folks seemed to enjoy. But when I was trying to get back into it, I realized that I was thinking about how they would look to other people. Is this boring? Am I just gonna draw about what I ate again?

I had to ask myself why I wanted to do this. I decided it was to:

1. Remember the good and interesting thing about my days

2. Practice drawing and try things out without any pressure

The second point here is simply what a sketchbook is for, but it’s also something I forget about often because other people on the internet have such good looking sketchbooks.

I’ve decided to consciously take the pressure off myself. This means being okay with bad or uninteresting drawings, and also not beating myself up when I do miss a couple days here and there. I’m also only going to share a selection of them online, if I want to.

Streaks can be motivating but once they’re broken, it can have the opposite effect. (If I lose my Duolingo streak, I will be devastated). So I have to think about this just as a fun thing I do for myself because I want to.

And now, because I want to, here are some more of these drawings which I haven’t shared on Instagram!

Thanks for reading!

I hope you enjoy the rest of 2024 and I’ll see you in the new year!

I tried to be realistic with myself about how much energy I’d have for the challenge and decided to draw roughly every 5 days and that also lined up with prompts I found interesting. I didn’t even fully read the entire prompt list.

Unlike last year (see last year’s post) where I had most of my drawings done before the month even started and I also had a lot more free time, I only really started thinking about each prompt after completing my drawing for the previous one.

All my drawings started in my sketchbook, then moved to Procreate where I made another sketch, sometimes planned out colours, and then did a final drawing.

Stats

Total # of drawings: 7

Average time in Procreate: 2 hours 49 min

Total number of faces across all drawings: 25 (Find them all!)

The drawings!

Now it’s time for a little show and tell. Here are all my drawings for the month with the sketches for each of them.

Prompt 1: Cookie

I briefly considered drawing a bunch of different kinds of cookies but quickly gave into my instinct to have some sort of character involved.

Prompt 5: Spice blend

This is the only drawing of the bunch that doesn’t have a face in it.

I always have a za’atar blend in the pantry and decided to base this off the plants that the herbs and spices come from. I learned what sesame seeds and cumin seeds look like on the plant thanks to the magic of the internet.

Prompt 10: Taco toppings

I initially thought of a tortilla pulling off an outfit from a rack of clothes made of taco toppings. That then morphed into taco topping costumes.

Prompt 15: Veggie garden

A friend commented from their dog’s Instagram account on one of my previous drawings and that gave me the idea to have her as the main character for this prompt. I looked up what fruits and veggies dogs can eat and learned they can’t eat onions.

This drawing is where I really tried to push myself to do something other than a straight-on composition. My aha moment was when a vision of really big tomatoes came to me, and this led me to a composition I think is more dynamic and interesting.

Prompt 20: Comfort food

Before a food I’d consider as comfort food came to mind, I had this idea of me comforting a food. The idea of a baby burrito followed quickly.

With this one, I tried to move away from my initial composition again, adding the corner of the wall in the background instead of another straight-on centred composition.

I didn’t go into this one planning to use an analogous colour palette. I think it mostly came from me being too lazy to really figure out the colours (something I generally find to be one of the hardest steps), but I really like how it turned out!

One thing I wish I did differently was draw a character that wasn’t myself because I think I need to show that I can draw other people that aren’t me lol.

Prompt 25: Spicy food

Someone in my partner’s family recently showed us their collection of chilli peppers they grow to make homemade hot sauce. I knew I eventually wanted this prompt to focus on peppers in some way.

With the fun I had using an analogous colour palette on the last prompt, I quickly had a picture in my head of similarly limited palette for this one too. That, and a more graphic style where I leaned into the halftones even more.

Prompt 30: Candy

I was brainstorming in the shower, as one does, when I had the idea of a KitKat getting split apart. I pictured each piece being on different boats and them reaching out to each other as they drifted away. That led to the image of the Creation of Adam.

I browsed the Bulk Barn website to help me find candy shapes to include. Great resource.

I’m especially happy with the colours on this one because it really feels candy-ish to me.

I’m happy I decided to take on an October drawing challenge in the end. I accomplished my goal and made it through the month (I almost didn’t). And I had some drawings I really like come out of it!

As always, thanks for reading! :)

Last month, I finished a 3-month long course about creating characters for books and toys, run by Make Art That Sells. Each month we were tasked with creating characters based off a text written by our instructor Zoë Tucker, then using those same characters for a toy-related assignment given by our instructor Riley Wilkinson.

In the end, my favourite month of assignments revolved around a non-fiction text about ostriches. Here’s a look into my work for these two assignments!

Assignment #1

Creating illustrations based off a non-fiction text.

Step 1: Read and annotate

I already had so many ideas running through my head when I read through the assignment text for the first time. Ostriches kicking, dancing, watching other birds fly because it can’t. I annotated the text with these ideas.

Step 2: Thumbnails

I drew thumbnails on my iPad for spreads based on different snippets of text that stood out to me as particularly fun. I would have happily drawn all of them, but I chose one out of the bunch to focus on for the purposes of the class — a breakdancing ostrich wooing potential partners.

Step 3: Figure out how to draw ostriches

I then collected a bunch of reference images and switched to drawing with the ol’ pencil and paper (I get too finicky with the iPad).

When drawing from reference, I tend to draw in a completely different way than drawing something from my imagination, often focusing too much on details instead of capturing things in my own “style”. Maybe this is normal, but I don’t like it. I found having lots of references helped me avoid this trap. Instead of focusing on any one image, I had to try to distill everything I saw into the Essence of Ostrich™️.

I usually like to use dots for eyes in my drawings and I very quickly saw that that wasn’t gonna work here.

Deciding on big cartoony eyes, I started playing around with eyelids and lashes too. I thought this could work well for a breakdancing ostrich character who is presumably cool.

I drew ostrich faces over and over and over, trying out different beak shapes, levels of eyelid closure, and adding a little tuft of hair. Among the crowd of faces, there is one that reminds me of Jar Jar Binks. And there’s another that made me feel like I was onto something.

.

I kept drawing faces, trying to figure out what worked well and what didn’t with the drawing I starred. The eyes still didn’t feel ostrichy enough. My eureka moment was trying circular eyes farther apart, rather than oval eyes sorta close together. I was closer to capturing that Essence, and the personality of the ostrich I wanted — more dorky than cool and aloof, I decided.

Step 4: Figure out how to draw a breakdancing ostrich

With a better idea of how I wanted to draw the face, I drew the character’s full body and clothes. The tricky part here was figuring out how ostrich legs work, and how to map them onto a breakdancing move.

Ostriches’ legs look like they bend backwards compared to human legs. What looks like their backward knees are actually their ankle joints. I kept finding myself trying to draw them like human legs because they would almost look broken when I drew them bending the anatomically correct way. I settled on a combination of leg ankles that broke my brain the least.

Step 5: Draw the rest

From there, I switched between sketching, inking, and colouring in Procreate on my iPad and drawing in a sketchbook, particularly for figuring out how I wanted to draw a hippo and a crocodile. Lastly, I cleaned up some stuff in Affinity Photo like text and alignment.

Tada!

Here’s what I ended up with.

Assignment #2

Creating a seek and find game/toy, building off the same characters.

I’ve wanted to make a seek and find illustration for a while, so this assignment was a great motivator to actually give it a shot.

By now, I had a better idea of how I wanted my characters to look, especially after drawing so many ostriches. I’d also defined most of my colours and brushes in the previous assignment, so the process for this illustration was a lot more linear.

I’ll spare you from reading more words about my process, and let these images speak for themselves.

Tada!

As always, thanks for reading!

From me and my ostrich friends.

Contrary to what people have thought of me in the past, I actually do want to make friends and I actually do like people!

My issue is that I assume other people won’t find me interesting and won’t like me. Or worse, they might find me annoying or off-putting somehow. So keeping to myself is usually more comfortable.

But it becomes a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

School and work defined my life for so long but there was always a dissonance between who I was in those settings and who I was to myself. In my performance as the student or employee I thought I ought to be, I hid and suppressed me-me.

After leaving my job at the beginning of last year1, I was for the first time in decades, able to just exist as myself. And in that time, I think I learned to like myself more. Or rather, I learned to be less embarrassed and less scared to exist as myself around other people. I allowed me-me to take up more space within myself and my identity.

A side effect is that I’ve enjoyed being social more and feel more connected to other people and the real world I live in, rather than living so much inside of my own head. I’m not rid of all my social anxiety, but I think the hurdle feels smaller.

Here are some drawings of me being social.

I landed a new job and start in a few days. Yay for having an income!

I want things to be different this time. I hope going into this job with a stronger sense of myself will help me not let work-me eclipse me-me this time, and give me the energy to keep being a positive presence around other people.

As always, thanks for reading :)

Last summer, I went on a sketchbookin’ retreat in France, hosted by UpTrek with Mike Lowery and Katrin Wiehle. It was genuinely one of the first times I really felt like myself around other people. I only noticed when it was over that I wasn’t tired despite hanging out only with strangers for a full week. And by the end of it, we weren’t strangers anymore 🥲

I joined again this year, back in late May / early June. This time was in Morocco. It was my first time in the country and the continent! I spent two nights in Marrakech on my own before the retreat (which I could write a whole bunch about, and which Mike encouraged me to do). Then I met up with some new people as well as friendly folks from the previous year before they whisked us off to Agadir where the retreat was held.

One of my big regrets was not taking more photos during this trip, especially of the food. I was really spoiled with good food during this retreat as well as at the riad I stayed in beforehand.

Some key culinary takeaways: 1) they have a lot of different kinds of bread and they’re all good, and 2) I no longer hate raisins (in certain contexts anyway).

I also learned there are a lot of cats.

We had a few day trips. One was to Paradise Valley, where we hiked a bit to get where there was a natural pool and spent some time at a fish spa. I did not let the fish nibble on my feet.

Another day trip was to a beach town named Taghazout where we wandered around and hung out at a restaurant by the water to draw during lunch.

When we weren’t going on little trips, we hung out at the venue. I introduced people to the game Wavelength, which now has a mobile app that I love the design of. Turns out this is a fun way to get to know other people and at times can be quite revealing. Like when we had to guess where someone’s clue of “a healthy stray dog” lied on a scale of unsexy animal to sexy animal, and as a group we landed on a stray dog being more of a sexy animal like in Lady and the Tramp.

Coming back from one of our day trips, our guide picked up some bananas for us and we wondered how different these ones would be from the “city bananas” we got as part of our lunch. That spurred me to to draw a bunch of bananas during our last sketching session of the retreat.

I’m so grateful that I got to join the retreat again this year. Here’s hoping I can keep growing my sketchbook habit and keep enjoying the company of other fun creative peeps.

That’s all for now, folks!

I think it worked well for me because:

1. Episodes were coming out weekly so I was pacing myself

2. I could pause when I saw something interesting to draw, without feeling like I interrupted super important dialogue or drama

3. I like food and want to get better at drawing it!

So here are some of my Top Chef sketches, which I drew in a sketchbook then selectively digitally coloured from memory after the finale.

Now that the season’s over, I’ll need to find another good show to watch ‘n draw! Any suggestions welcome!

As always, thanks for reading/looking! 👀

This is something I’ve wanted to write about in some form for a while now, so if you’ve made it to the end, I hope you got a little amusement out of my observations of this very particular thing in the world.

Thanks for reading! :)

This past year has also been the most I’ve drawn since I was in high school and the most fun I’ve had doing it for quite some time.

So I thought it would be fun to look back at some stuff I’ve made throughout the years and see how it’s evolved. There’s actually a lot of stuff I made even as a teenager that I still like, and I think that’s kinda neat!

2008

Context: The year I was in grade 9 and 10. I’d been playing around with Photoshop for a few years.

This is something I made as a Threadless submission back when they primarily ran T-shirt design competitions. I drew this on graph paper that I taped together and traced over with regular printer paper, scanned, and coloured in Photoshop. I still really like this drawing and it doesn’t feel too far off from something I’d make today.

2009

I think this is the year where people from the Threadless community started Make Something Cool Every Day, a challenge to… make something cool every day. I did not actually make something every day but it was a good motivator.

I learned to make proper repeat patterns, kept playing around with hand-drawn lettering (a love that started when I was much younger and drew a lot of bubble letters), and kept making jokes that maybe aren’t that funny.

2010

I continued playing around with lettering and optical illusions, but also explored more digital-forward stuff like drawing with the cheapest Wacom tablet available and dabbling in some vector drawing.

I painted this $5 bill with all the images of people swapped out for animals. I’m highlighting this for this year because I still love animal characters and I don’t know if had shown up much before this. I still draw bears the same way! I’m also not much of a painter and give my past self kudos for just going for it.

2011

Context: The year I graduated high school and started university.

As I wrapped up high school, a lot of my drawing came out of doodles in class.

This was another Threadless submission, around the theme “three words or less.” I drew this on the final day of submissions, with a brown and near-its-death Crayola marker on printer paper and cleaned it up in Photoshop with a Wacom tablet.

It didn’t win that themed competition, but it did get printed and I achieved my arbitrarily time-bound goal of getting my design on a Threadless shirt while I was still a teenager. I got $2000 which was actually the first time I made my own money, so it’s cool I did that with something I drew. The shirt is still for sale on their website, but it’s in a colourway I dislike and didn’t choose. These days, I very occasionally get a few cents in royalties.

I’d drawn some comics here and there over the years that were joke-driven, or not really personal, like “Trialogue” above. But when I started university, comics became a way of processing new things and became more autobiographic, sometimes without a joke.

2012 & 2013

As school and work took over my life, I started drawing less frequently. But I tried to make time for it and used it as a way to procrastinate on assignments.

2014 & 2015

In these years, I experienced a mix of the highest highs and lowest lows of my life and my sketchbook became even more of a journal, with both drawings and notes. A lot of this led to my first zine that came years later.

I also finally cut my hair short in 2014, and start drawing myself differently.

2016

Context: I graduate from university and start working full-time.

I’d been looking forward to being done with school and finally having time to do what I wanted! But it seems I still didn’t draw much. I did make some comics, though, which were a mix of documenting vague emotions and storytelling.

2017 & 2018

I’m primarily drawing comics in these years, especially autobio ones. I started sharing them on Twitter and then on Instagram, which I admit motivated me a bit to draw more.

I used comics to document some health things during this time, which became the basis of another zine a few years later.

There start to be more instances of me using other characters in my comics to represent myself, like this flower I call Elliot.

2019

Context: I bought an iPad!

I find deciding on colours one of the trickiest things, and having an iPad made it so much easier to play with colour. But with that also came the abundance of choice and the possibility to undo things forever.

The very first thing I did after getting Procreate was make my first zine based on notes ‘n memories from 2014/2015. This had 38 pages of comics and drawings, which feels like a lot especially looking back on years I really struggled to make much at all.

I continued to use Procreate mainly to draw comics.

Now

I mostly use Procreate to draw these days, but am slowly incorporating some analog things back into my drawings. And I’ve started using illustrations and other drawings to channel my ideas into, rather than only comics.

Even with all the changes throughout the years, I think there are threads of humour and sincerity that are nice to look back fondly on through over a decade’s worth of making stuff. I hope to keep carrying that forward while my art still evolves.

As always, thanks for reading! Especially if you’ve made it to the end of this extra long post.

:)

1. I want my body to be cremated. (I don’t want to take up space)

2. I want people at my funeral to wear whatever they want and whatever makes them comfortable. (I hate dress codes)

3. I want people to remember me as a kind and funny person. (I hope that’s the kind of person I am)

In the past year, as I’ve started emailing people to say “I’m an illustrator, please hire me,” I’ve come up a with a few words to describe my work. Playful and humorous are two of the main ones.

These feel right especially after I noticed a pattern in not only what kind of feedback I was getting, but also what feedback was the most validating to hear.

It wasn’t that my art was beautiful or impressive. People aren’t going, “wow, how did you do that?!”

The best reaction is someone laughing or being amused by something I drew.

I’ve been getting more curious about single-panel / gag cartoons lately. (Think New Yorker-style cartoons with a single image and caption). It’s kind of surprising that I never felt the urge to make these kinds of cartoons before but something unlocked in my brain recently and now I think about them often.

The well-defined format has opened up a new channel for me to direct ideas into that I didn’t have a place for before. And those ideas? They’re dumb jokes.

With comic and illustration ideas, I’ve had a bad habit of letting them stay strictly in my head, where I mull over them for way too long. Sometimes years. I build things up more than I should and ideas become overly precious.

With joke ideas, I’ve been writing them down more consistently instead of letting them just be fleeting. This helps me not forget them, but also stops me from feeling so precious about them either.

I think I want to eventually submit them to publications. The New Yorker only accepts submissions that haven’t been published anywhere, including social media or personal blogs. But in the name of not being precious about things, I’ve decided to share what I’m making while I’m still learning to craft a good gag instead of stashing them just to submit to one extremely well-known publication. Seeing my collection of joke ideas in my sketchbook grow makes me hopeful that I can keep coming up with new and possibly even better ones and that I’m not wasting the couple of good ideas I’ll ever have.

Here are some sketches and final drawings of a silly origami joke I shared on Instagram last month.

I’ve been listening to the podcast. The hosts present joke ideas to each other and work them out aloud and I find it even more enjoyable than I thought it would be.

They basically go back and forth asking “what if…?” morphing their ideas into tighter, punchier jokes.

It’s encouraging to see how other people finesse a joke and to be reminded that they can just start as a little seed of something instead of coming to you fully formed as if you’re some sort of prophet of giggles.

Some little belated news: I have some illustrations in the latest issue of Kazoo Magazine! It feels special and fitting that my contribution was for the Weird Issue.

That’s all for now! Thanks for reading :)

In the past few years I’ve learned that I’m quick to dismiss my dreams. I imagine things for a split second and think “that would be cool” and then let it stay strictly in that imaginary, essentially impossible world. Lately I’ve been challenging myself to break that habit, sometimes taking big steps, and sometimes taking little ones toward what I want.

So I thought it’d be fun to picture my dream studio. A space dedicated to all my creative explorations. It’s something I’ve thought about often but only in abstract and in bits ‘n’ pieces.

So what’s in my ideal space?

• comfy places to sit

• a place for my crocheted friends, like Geoff and the Tetris piece pictured below

• art that’s actually framed instead of just sitting in plastic sleeves like they are in my real life

• a huge desk I can spread out art materials on that is not also a dining table

• some windows with good natural light

• some little desk friends of mine, like Billie and Wormeo pictured below

• a fabric and sewing workstation to make quilts and other things

• a place to store my yarn collection

• lots of places to stick up drawings and works in progress

It’s unlikely I’ll ever have a space exactly like this. And I don’t want this to become a pass/fail kind of goal. But I can aim to slowly change my surroundings to make me feel the way this imaginary studio does, and appreciate the aspects of it that I already have, now that I’ve spent the time to really picture it.

That’s it for now!

I’m gonna aim to share something at the start of each month moving forward, so I hope to see you next month!

Thanks for reading :)

This past year I finally added a bio to my website where I already had a collection of my drawings, comics, and other things. I think I went a decade or so without one because I’ve always felt like I needed permission to call myself anything. The stuff I put on my website had nothing to do with what I studied in school, nor what I was doing at work. Instead, the website’s mere existence was the small but meaningful way for me to claim that part of myself. But this experience of adding my face and describing myself in words turned out to be quite meaningful too. This is the key sentence I landed on:

“I’m an illustrator, cartoonist, designer, and generally a maker of fun stuff.”

With any title or label, people have their own expectations and ideas. And I struggle with this all the time. I try to anticipate what people’s expectations are, which is impossible to do accurately. Here’s a real-life example, not with a title, but with a fairly innocent question: “do you play ping pong?”

I’m so scared of not living up to people’s expectations. Or perhaps more accurately, I’m scared of not meeting the expectations I expect them to have. So I either downplay things about myself or hide parts of myself completely. But feeling unseen can take a toll, and it turns out that telling people you do something significantly increases the chances they’ll let you do that thing!! Who knew?!! Now I remind myself that these little descriptions are just a shorthand to pique people’s curiosity enough to check out my work. Then the work speaks for itself and they can decide what to do with information.

The other side of this is internal. “I am an illustrator” has a different vibe from “um, yeah I like drawing.” The latter remains true but the former is me taking myself more seriously. Not in a hoity toity way, I hope. But in a way that is less dismissive of myself and the things that I truly enjoy doing, have been doing, and hope to keep getting better at. It also feels like a way of taking a little bit of power back from our corporate overlords — I get to call myself this because this is me. I just gotta keep practicing saying those words out loud.

Is there something you want to start calling yourself?

As always, thanks for reading!
Jaclyne :)

Here were the layers of my lasagna:

We ended up having pasta the next day too for New Year’s Eve dinner. My partner said this about his Italian family:

Pasta is my favourite food. Some time during the pandemic, I started taking photos of each time I cooked it. I find it comforting to look back at them at the end of the year, remembering special occasions I cooked for, or sometimes just a really good bowl of pasta.

I started making pasta from scratch years ago but only recently realized that it had been that long. (What is time?) I thought I’d share some thoughts and reflections on learning a new skill for your own enjoyment, as well as some practical pasta-making-specific tips at the end of this post.

Lesson 1: Make what you want to see (or eat) in the world

As a lactose-intolerant person, I get anxious going to Italian restaurants. Making my own pasta was appealing because I’d be able to eat it without fear for my digestive organs. So I initially mainly made stuffed pastas to fill the void that the common ricotta-filled pastas left in my heart.

My go-to filling has goat cheese as the base in place of ricotta, with a little lemon zest and juice which makes it more easily squeezable onto the pasta dough. It goes well with a lot of other additions like caramelized onions or chopped up cooked broccoli. This goes well with a bunch of sauces.

Another successful filling was hummus with za’atar. I don’t know at what point pasta stops being pasta but I don’t think it matters. I thought it would taste good, made it, and it did indeed taste good. I topped this off with a shallot and red wine vinegar vinaigrette, parsley, tomato, and onion. Delicious, even if possibly sacrilegious!

Lesson 2: Try doing something different, you might like it!

In 2023, I went to Italy for the first time. (I looked up phrases like “what cheese does this have?” and “without milk” beforehand to be prepared.)

I had my favourite plate of pasta in Bologna — green tagliatelle with morels. It may have tasted so good because it had butter, which I had asked about but decided was worth the risk anyway. But I also had never had tagliatelle so thin and delicate before.

I had been almost exclusively making stuffed pastas at home ‘cause I figured there was no point in making other kinds that I could just easily buy. But I decided to try and replicate the feeling of that tagliatelle at home.

Worth it, and so fast! I made the noodles at the #7 thickness setting on my pasta machine (Mercato Atlas) and dressed it with a homemade parsley pesto I had frozen, tuna, and red peppers.

Lesson 3: Do the parts you like

One of the reasons I tried making my own pasta in the first place is Pasta Grannies, a Youtube channel (and cookbooks) mainly featuring Italian grandmas cooking their own recipes. You’ll often see a 90-something nonna rolling out her pasta dough super thin, by hand with a huge rolling pin.

For my first few attempts at making pasta, I didn’t have a pasta machine yet. I tried rolling out the dough thin but was quickly reminded of how weak my wrists were. I gave up eventually and made some ravioli with my thick sheets of dough anyway. Even after 15 min of boiling, the pasta was still hard.

Since then, I’ve fully embraced the pasta machine. I don’t need to impress anyone with how thin I can roll out dough by hand. It is liberating to let myself not care about getting good at something, and instead focus on the parts of the process I enjoy more. I’m glad I tried it, but I don’t need to do everything.

Lesson 4: You’ll get better at it

I recently made fresh tagliatelle on a Sunday night. I made the dough and noticed I had my own sense of when it felt good, and a fairly accurate idea of how different it would feel after its rest. We tossed it with some tomato sauce that my partner’s nonna had given us.

It felt easy, and it definitely hasn’t always felt like that. Who woulda thought? If you do something over and over, even spread out over the course of a few years, you’ll learn some things and get better at it. I did something for my own enjoyment and developed a skill. That feels good!

Practical tips

If you’re interested in making fresh pasta too, here are some tips you might find helpful.

Tip 1: Don’t force all the flour into your dough

I start off with 100g of flour for every 1 large egg, but I often don’t work all the flour into the dough and am left with some extra flour I can use later when making the final pasta shapes. The temperature and moisture of your kitchen will affect how much flour you really need, just like any other dough. The dough will soften a bit after you knead and rest it, but it’s not gonna make miracles happen. This is where you’ll develop your intuition over time.

Tip 2: Freeze your pasta as you go

As I make the pasta, I lay it out on a plastic tray and put it in the freezer. This keeps the pasta separate from each other and is especially helpful with stuffed pastas where the filling can sometimes make the pasta soggy while sitting out.

I do this even when I’m going to cook it the same day. And when I’m keeping it for later, I just move them from the tray to a sealed bag to keep in the freezer.

Tip 3: Give yourself time

This is just a general cooking tip.

Make things easy for yourself especially when you’re starting. Give yourself plenty of time, or focus on fewer things. Like make the pasta but use a simple or pre-made sauce. Or freeze your pasta and cook it when you have time to prepare a sauce and other things to go in your final dish.

Making pasta has often taken longer than I expected, particularly when I was first learning to do it. I’ve gotten better at estimating prep times, but I’m no chef and it still occasionally results in having 9 pm dinner. It doesn’t hurt to start earlier, especially if you’re freezing the pasta anyway!

That’s all for now!

If you’ve ever wanted to make homemade pasta, I hope this serves as a bit of encouragement. Or if there’s something you’ve wanted to try doing but have found it intimidating, I hope you’ll try it out anyway and chip away at it.

As always, thanks for reading! 🍝

This is the last newsletter of the year so I’m sharing a few things I enjoyed in 2023. For fun, all the drawings below have been done with my non-dominant hand apart from the colouring and most of the text.

Books

These two books are fun and also very satisfyingly encapsulate the kind of stuff I want to make. There are so many illustrations in these books that make me go up to whoever is around and say “haha look at this.”

Shout out to Type Books in Toronto where I picked up both of these without having heard about either before.

The Unfortunate Life of Worms by Noemi Vola

A weird, fun, delightful book that’s also beautifully designed (it has pink painted edges!). I initially couldn’t tell what age range this book was aimed at. Not that it matters, as an adult who likes children’s books. Skimming through the table of contents made me think it might be a non-fiction book with facts told in a fun way. And I guess that’s somewhat true, but it also turns into a story partway through. I still can’t really describe this book accurately but I sure did enjoy it.

The Jewish Deli by Ben Nadler

This book combines 2 things I love: food culture and illustration/comics. As the title makes obvious, it focuses on the Jewish deli and explores its food, history, and culture. I’m not fully done reading this but it has yet to disappoint and I’ve learned lots of fun facts like why brisket became such a staple cut of meat. It is mind-boggling to think about how much work must have gone into this book and how it only retails for $25 USD.

Movies

Past Lives

There’s a lot of praise for this movie already so I’m not going to be adding a lot of original viewpoints here. But I will say that I had to stay in the theatre for a bit after the credits rolled because I kept crying. And not in an everything-is-so-sad kind of way, but rather in an emotions-and-people-are-so-complex-and-it’s-beautiful-and-bittersweet kind of way. In its understated and gentle nature, it reminds me of my #1 favourite movie, Weekend directed by Andrew Haigh.

Ninjababy

There are a lot of movies about unexpected pregnancies but this Norwegian one in particular really resonated. It might be partly because I’ve mostly solidified my feelings in the past few years about having or not having kids and thought more about the privilege of having agency and choice in your life. It’s also special to me because the main character is an artist, and her drawings are incorporated into the movie as a way of showing her thoughts, including the Ninjababy character.

This movie is based on a graphic novel by Inga H Sætre (whose drawings are in the movie, I believe). So there are multiple levels of “wouldn’t it be cool to be involved in making something like this?” for me.

Games

PlateUp!

I am a big fan of both time management games and food-related games. I love the Overcooked franchise and have replayed it enough to have 4-starred most levels and completed all levels on multiple devices. PlateUp! provides a different kind of replay-ability since it’s not fixed levels and it’s different each time you play. Steam says I’ve played over 100 hours and the large majority of that was me playing solo.

One more thing

The resurgence of Nanalan’

Nanalan’ is a kids’ show from Canada that originally aired as shorts in the early ‘00s. As a kid from that era, there’s definitely some nostalgic joy for me when seeing clips of this show, but seeing so many memes around it lately makes me happy in a different way. The idea that these puppeteers and creators made something with such adorable characters that resonate with people decades later is just such a delight.

I am particularly obsessed with the following clip of Mona being upset.

That’s all for now!

I hope you have a good end of year, however you spend it.

As always, thanks for reading!