I’m finally getting around to posting more of my illustrative art here on my blog and I am starting with this series of comics I did at the beginning of the year!
Hallie Bateman who is very good frifends with my very good friends but who I never actually hung out with when she lived here in LA, is an artist. Her substack came across my feed recently and since I recognized her name, I checked out her page. She was inspiring folks to join her in something she is calling Journuary, prompting them to draw a journal comic a day for the month of January to encourage…ah, take your pick! Artistic growth! Challenge! New creative Habits! Perspective! Inspiration! In her blog post she writes “Making art about everyday life is a gesture of love. It’s how I celebrate the miracle of my existence, of our collective existence. The ritual of recording each day elevates my experience, makes it sacred.”
I read about Hallie’s Journuary prompt a week into January, and, as someone who identifies as completist of center, I am proud to say that a late start didn’t stop me from diving into the challenge that same day.
I did it! Things got hairy towards the end there, but I did it! I spent last weekend visiting with out of town friends and didn’t have enough time to comic on those days, which was fine, but I made the silly decision to try and “catch up” on the days I missed, being the completist that I am and all, and this got me even further behind, because trying to do three comics in a day proved to be exhausting and it sucked the joy out of the whole challenge. Eventually I stopped trying to catch up, losing a couple days in the process, but I tacked those days onto the end so I would have a full 31 days of comic journaling under my belt as intended. I had to keep reminding myself that no one was at home refreshing their substack feed and waiting to see my journal comic published before the stroke of midnite, haha. This whole experience has felt very “vegan, but bacon”, which I might have mentioned last week already, but essentially is a harm reduction approach to pretty much any well intentioned thing you want to do in your life. It hits that sweet spot in between an all or nothing mentality, allowing that committing to being vegan while still eating bacon is “better” than not being vegan at all because you can’t do it all the way. That binary thinking is encoded in my DNA, it’s a survival thing, but here I am trying to make room for the fact that doing a 31 day journal comic-ing challenge with a couple days skipped over and tacked onto the end is better than abandoning the challenge once I realized I needed a break. I think this is probably a form of self care, allowing for flexibility and compassion for the self while still maintaining accountability.
I finally reached the end of this challenge! I could not be more proud of myself! It was a pretty manageable project save for when I had to skip a couple days and then I tried to catch up on all of the ones I missed instead of just extending the challenge and journaling new days. During this 31 day challenge I tried to limit my journal comic time to one hour but I rarely succeeded and would easily go for as long as 2.5 hours if I was comic-ing at night and had no other plans before bed.
I’m still trying to find my footing with color work, and I have this new idea to treat my comics like my pottery- taking inspiration from other works of art and reverse engineering them to understand how they are made. One of the reasons I decided to buy the comic Beneath The Trees from the previous entry is because I love how the color and art looks and wonder if I could learn something about technique if I try to emulate it.
That said, I’m definitely drawn to the “less is more” school of thought when it comes to my own art and I think the last panel is maybe my favorite (or at the very least, among my most favorites) of the 31 I have done this past month. After sharing my history of not using color because of some perhaps unconscious desire to level the playing field of the differentiating factor of skin color in my storytelling, I had the inclination to do the opposite for this comic, and only color in my skin. And that was gonna be it, but then I thought, oh what if I color everything that’s living instead? Cause what I really wanted to capture was how sacred the quietest moments are when you (me, we) are in that meditative state of being un self conscious and simply connected to whatever it is we are doing in whatever environment we are in. It’s been unseasonably warm in LA this winter and I’ve been able to spend a few afternoons hanging out on my porch, which faces west and allows me to see the changing colors of the sky behind the shadow of trees when the sun sets. As I sway on my porch swing, all I can think about is how perfect everything alive around me is, the leaves, the trees, the plants, the sounds of the birds above. It is unbelievably serene and that’s how I wanted to end this journal comic challenge, after starting it on day one by recording myself distracted and being completely unserene. Which kind of ties into the theme of the whole challenge for me- committing myself to (at least!) one intentional artful act a day gave me a bit of a reset. As I mentioned earlier, it helped get me off tik tok (which was a complete surprise), I started smoking less weed (an even bigger surprise!) and made me feel a bit more connected to myself. Incredible. I expected nothing of this challenge other than an opportunity to draw more regularly and maybe feel accomplished if I made it to the end. I got so much more than I bargained for.
You wanna know one more wild thing? The day I started this challenge, my first comic was an embarrassing admission of accidentally leaving my stove burner on for hours (something I do not do regularly but do have a traumatizing history with). And guess what. I did it again on the final day of the challenge!!! After breakfast on Sunday M very politely and non-judgmentally asked “did you mean to leave the burner on on the stove?” Bless his compassionate heart. My face immediately fell and I groaned, that hot swell of shame building up in my cheeks. “It’s ok, it happens” he said simply, knowing the spiral I was on the brink of, and without another word he left to turn it off. So I turned it off, too, that shame bubbling up. Took it as another reminder to myself to pay more attention when I’m in a hurry in the kitchen, but also I was able to make some space to just feel grateful that someone noticed it before any damage was done. I could have ended this challenge with a comic depicting the exact same thing I did 31 days ago, could have had a field day with the symbolism dripping all over my mistake, turning it into some sad diatribe about human fallibility and guilt. Instead I decided not to linger on it, to shine a light on the beauty of my day instead of the shame of it. This, also, a form of self care: acceptance and kindness.
I’m not sure what’s next for me! I have already considered the possibility of journal comicing for an entire year, an idea that I absolutely love, but I’m doubtful I can sustain it, and I don’t like to move into projects that I don’t have a reasonable certainty of finishing. I’m wondering what other kind of parameters I can implement for myself that will keep the creative juices flowing and keep the drawing habit active that don’t require as consistent of a time suck. Every other day? A weekly journal comic where I review the highlights of the past 7 days? Or just an hour a day of drawing/comic-ing for whatever it is I am working on? Is it time to move into more structured storytelling? I dunno! I am gonna give myself some time to marinate on it. I do feel more confident in incorporating comics into my memoir idea and that feels exciting, something I would like to focus more on in the next few months. As my therapist loves to say to me all the damn time, “more will be revealed!”
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