Finding Edges and Tracing Contours
Filling illustrated journal pages, the "treat" of a mistaken grocery delivery, and the first week of the contours project
Today’s letter is part art and part life, a look at projects and pages and some general stringing together of the edges of now…instead of whatever else I really should be doing.
“So I don't care to be too definite about anything. I have a lot of edges called Perhaps and almost nothing you can call Certainty.” — Mary Oliver
Premise: Looking objectively isn’t the same as moping. We can be objective when things are good or bad, hopeful or not, rising, falling, expanding, or splintering. Stepping back, snapping a wide angle photo, putting it on a slide, and clipping it under a microscope isn’t emotional. It is a process of examining life, searching for clues, looking for fault lines, grasping for meaning, and constructing narrative, a chain of paper dolls, a curtain of beads, a heat map of days.
Hello!
Thank you for opening this email. If you are new to Illustrated Life, every Sunday I send a letter that is a mix of life and creativity, philosophy and documentation. This letter links you to the weekly Illustrate Your Week prompts, connects you with old podcast episodes and posts, and, once a month, hooks into a series of postcard prompts.
For an introduction to this space, I suggest these crumbs: … & …. But, really, start anywhere. The trail is a circle, and things are not always where they should be.
In terms of what arrives in email… no two weeks are alike. Some weeks are more documentary in style. Some are more poetic. Some are mostly about art and series and the journaling process, and some are not. Sometimes there are logic puzzles, or word games, or bits of science. Everything is glazed with a bit of armchair philosophy.
I hope you will stick around for whichever weekly blend resonates for you. This week isn’t necessarily a poetic week. (I always feel bad when I know that will be the case.)
Below, I share some recent illustrated journal pages and a look at the first week of my 100-day series of contour drawings.
There were good things and things to ponder this week. Things so often come in threes. By the end of the week, there was a butterfly and a bumblebee, unexpected groceries, a delivery, a pickup, and some kind words here at Substack.
I hope you had good things, too. I hope you found things to record in your journal or in your sketchbook. I hope you did some of the things you needed to do, even if other things were left undone.
For those of you looking for something else, you know where to find it.1
Thank you for reading.
Amy
🎯 The Sunday post is free to all readers. Thank you to those who have upgraded their subscriptions or made a donation. I know how powerful creative habit can be and hope you are inspired to make time in each day for your art. Documenting your life is also a form of self-care and a way of paying attention.
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Update: A paywall has been added a few weeks after publication. Anything embedded in footnotes is below the paywall.
Illustrate Your Week, Weeks 8 and 9
The last two weeks in my illustrated journal have found me filling in bits of space, instinctively craving the rhythmic act of making lines, of hatching and watching parallel and perpendicular marks line up. Hatching is one of the most mindful things you can do on paper. It may seem pointless, but it fills and covers space. It creates texture in place of emptiness, shadows that round out form, and hollows under eyes.
You can use hatching intentionally in your drawings, an approach to shading, but you can also simply fill space. Draw some circles or squares and fill them in. I return to this over and over in my journal. When I am tired or anxious or stressed or discouraged or depressed, I fill space.
Takeaway: Filling space can be mindful and calming. Documenting life in an illustrated journal is an active process. You can always make lines.
Week 8 hinged on a central portrait. During our drawing group, I penciled the portrait and then filled in the framing circle, rather than the hair, with the softest of pinks in colored pencil. It was a random choice, but somehow it set the tone for the whole spread. The week stayed soft and light, mostly monochromatic.
I let each week happen, let the energy of the week, how much or how little, play out on the page.
Takeaway: Your pages do not have to be the same week to week. Your voice will carry throughout your journal, but that does not mean that every page will look the same or use the same exact structure. An illustrated journal is flexible and malleable and yours.
Week 9 started, again, with a central portrait that I drew during our Sunday morning drawing group.
I think people sometimes wonder about the process of filling in pages over a week, which is different from starting and finishing a page in the same day. There is freedom in the fact that you can do a little bit every day, and the end result will be something holistic, something that was additive in the making, and that even if you know on day one you want to draw this or that, you can choose at what point in the week you do it. You don’t have to plan ahead. You don’t have to allocate space in advance. If you are recording notes about your life (which I hope you are), you don’t know what is going to happen day to day. The illustrated journal is, in so many ways, a living document in its creation. The beauty is that it also becomes a document, a snapshot of time.
Here are a few photos that show how Week 9 filled in.
(My pages are not quite finished for the week. These are still in progress, and some overflow from today will probably be relegated to scrap paper and “tipped in” with tape.)2
A writer first, my pages are often more words than drawings (a balance I always hope to shift). There are a lot of words, even though the notes are mostly shorthand, but this week, there is a portrait, a self-portrait, a tarot card, a puppet, toast icons, a few Pokémon, a Jiminy Cricket that ties to a rogue memory, a plastic bottle of coffee, and more.
First Week of 100 Contours
I outlined my plan and shared my pre-start tests for this series last week. The first week has been interesting, maybe a bit more stilted and less free than the tests. There has been a lot of thinking.
I am still contemplating whether there is or isn’t a narrative, a worded overlay. I’ve added some words and removed them each time. On Monday, I decided maybe I would add the words at the end of each week, but they still remain wordless. Something about the open space feels inviting.
I’ve also been playing with the topography. On the surface, this is a simple visual part of the project, but things that appear simple often have infinite possibilities.
I played with the ground multiple times after finishing the daily panel. I may have tried a number of topographical elements when making the panel. That is part of the process. But once I settled on one and was finished, I found myself going back to study the topography, the shape and elevation, the balance between the rainbow surface and the figures.
As examples, here are days 5 and 6.
Day 5
I thought my first pass was too large. I like the others, but I kept returning to the first, a portal, a wardrobe, a swirling vortex to be entered. I think the final one is the balance. The topography does read differently in each and, in some ways, places the figures at different points in a narrative. We imagine something different based on the topography.
If the viewer will only see one, I am always trying to find the right one for the story.
Truthfully, I like the juxtaposition of options. I like seeing them all rather than one. The simultaneity becomes part of the story for me.
Day 6
I watched this man leaving a medical facility this week, at the end of the day, green scrubs under a maroon jacket. I snapped photos as he crossed the street and headed down a side street. The contours use three of the photos I snapped.
As a walkway of sorts, the rainbow element became a puzzle, the first pass feeling too staccato in the scene. The second cleaned up the planes in some way. I thought the third one might be my favorite, an edge approached, but the clarity and change in elevation in the last one may work best.3 (All four viewed in sequence, I see him in motion, my brain willingly overlooking the fact that he hasn’t changed.)
Truthfully, I could tweak the topography again, a few more times, a dozen different ways. Where is the stopping point?
Reconsidering (and playing with) the topography is an imperfect process since the lines lose their crispness. This is always an issue when fiddling in Procreate, which is not vector-based, but for what I’m doing, it’s fine. (I probably spend too much time really zoomed in where I see every stray mark or every blurry or blurring edge than is good for me.)
Week 1 has reinforced the fact that stretching and pulling and independently warping and distorting edges opens this project up in new ways. Week 1 confirmed that the topography is important, that there is mapping to come.
Sometimes the right approach isn’t obvious. This is true with all creative work, the challenge to find the right angle, the right mix, the right line, the right composition. Really, there isn’t necessarily a right answer. We are always working to find the one that we like best, the one that best conveys what we are after. Or we simply say good enough and move on.
Takeaway: There isn’t an absolute right answer to discover, but working digitally makes it easy to try multiple options and compare. This process isn’t all that different from editing a written piece. (The time I spend editing posts, though, is not at all the same. I spend much more time with words.)
Here are the first seven in sequence:
Six of them I like. One was a misstep.
Weekly Bits and Pieces
Related posts:
Slices of Life ICAD (2023 look back)
Stone Lanterns and 100 Day Projects (pre-2024 start)
Day 1 Starts Nice and Green (start of 2024)
Made It?
Thank you for reading along! I always enjoy your comments and invite you to chime in. Let me know what stands out for you, what you think after reading, or where we connect.
What one thing will you draw or make this week?
Are you the type of person who reads footnotes?
🌟 A big thank you to
of The Next Write Thing for including me in a roundup this week on Qstack (by Mr. Troy Ford). Nan is someone I read every week, and I am always inspired by her memory, her storytelling, and her generous and outgoing spirit. Thank you to Mansi of The Ripple Maker for kind words this week, too.🌼 I’m sure most of you saw that Tammy of Daisy Yellow is now using Substack, too. It’s nice to see familiar faces appear here.
📒 Others to enjoy: Laura, Trish, Duane, Jason, Elizabeth, Holly
💥 This is a mesmerizing piece by Marya about the nature of story.
Thank you for reading Illustrated Life. Writers need readers, and I am grateful for every reader!
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