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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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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Unless otherwise noted, all images in this post are ©️ A. Cowen. All rights reserved.
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I am turning into something that I never would have labeled myself, a procrastinator. I see it happening. I feel it happening. I seem at a loss to understand this stasis, this apathy.
Part of me thinks this is explainable, expected, a function of an instinctive survival mode. Part of me thinks that my way of doing that, surviving, is shutting down the overload. My move towards minimalism, an embrace of simplification, was always partly rooted in that, in survival.
“Pick a point in the distance and focus on that,” they say, to help with motion sickness.
“Just keep your head down or eyes closed until the ride stops.”
“Can you sleep through it?”
It didn’t used to look like procrastination.
I continue to simply not deal with lots of things. Even I find it hard to believe how the things undone or put off or buried under the couch cushions or pushed into the recesses of the closet or lining the perimeter of the room are piling up.
If I just don’t look at anything directly, will it all go away?
If I just keep writing, keep drawing, will the noises subside?
If I ignore it long enough will this persistent pain fade?
My highlight this week was several unexpected bags of food in my grocery delivery. We got someone else’s food, and it felt like we won the lottery. We were delighted by these bags of things that we would not have bought: three containers of Starbucks cold brew, three containers of organic sweet cream creamer, three bags of peeled garlic, a large clamshell of blackberries, a bag of individually wrapped mozzarella balls, and a large tub of whole milk cottage cheese.
We marveled. We exclaimed. We smiled and laughed at our good fortune. We were like Dr. Seussian characters in our delight. We could have made rhymes.
We laughed that things had been ordered in threes.
I am not one for iced coffee, but the cold brew and sweet cream creamer was beyond decadent. It tasted Iike a coffee hard candy, I decided, trying to pinpoint the echoes, an almost familiar taste. My multiple cups of coffee a day with 1% milk and too many drops of stevia never taste like hard candy. (I decided to test it. I made a few cups of coffee, filled an empty container, and put it in the fridge. Even using the creamer, it was not the same at all.)
My son, who doesn’t drink coffee, filled his stainless steel water bottle with cold brew instead of water all week.
It’s almost sad how much someone’s messed up delivery delighted us. Almost.
There was a package at the door this week. There is never anything at the door anymore, no deliveries beyond the groceries, which I spread out as much as I can, and the monthly dispatch of toilet paper, paper towels, canned chicken, coffee pods, and shower gel, shampoo, trash bags, or hand soap, whichever we are out of. It takes us a long, long time to run out of laundry detergent.
These are contours.
There are days when we don’t even turn off the house alarm.
There are no phone calls.
There are no texts.
There are no more emergency calls.These are contours. Our days have repeated edges, a cookie cutter semblance, and yet they are entirely different than a year ago and different again compared to five years ago.
It feels silly to miss treats.
The freezer is stuffed with frozen spaghetti because boiling water feels like the only thing we are missing.
Procrastination.
The package at the door was a drain clog tool.
He showed me his sweater, ripped from the cuff at least three inches up the seam. A few weeks ago I did a Frankensteinian mending job on the same cuff, a few inches over, where a cat had ripped a horizontal hole.
I would like to say I mended it beautifully, but I didn’t. My primary objective was as much thread as possible to make it impervious to ripping or unraveling. It’s a lumpy mend.
I had a favorite little black cashmere sweater for years with a ripped seam under the arm. I kept planning to mend it, but I was always torn between doing something obvious, something visible, or simply sewing it up with black.
That sweater, along with most of my clothes, doesn’t fit now. Nothing comes even close to fitting.
Contours. They change.
Our edges change.
We like to think that our edges stay the same, that we won’t shrink or outgrow the boundaries of the cookie cutters we think represent our days, our edges, our patterns, habits, and routines.
One year, there were animal cookie cutters from William Sonoma. They came in a square metal tin that I think may have looked like a circus or maybe like an animal crackers box. Or maybe it was an ark? Maybe it wasn’t fancy at all. I do know there was a box. It might still be on the top shelf in the cabinet, although I think the cookie cutters have all been discarded.
I’m not even sure I ever made animal cookies.
I don’t recognize myself when I see photos now. I’m not me. This can’t be me.
The world is falling apart, and I’m just trying to hold onto my little part and pray a lot of unspoken things.
As an exercise, gauging whether I am exaggerating, being hyperbolic, I wrote out the contours of my days, tracing the routine edges. The major contours haven’t changed. In a lot of ways, very little has changed. That, in and of itself, is sad.
Last week, when I decided to do contours again, I realized I would have to take photos. On Saturday, I went to the lake. Week after week, I talk myself out of leaving the house on Saturday. Some weekends, I’ve gotten as far as shoes, maybe even picked up my bag, bounced my keys in my hand, and then talked myself out of it.
But I needed photos to be able to start my 100-day project, so I went to the lake. I snapped dozens of photos, a few of which I drew in this first week. I walked the perimeter, the edge of the loop, the contour marked by a paved path.
At the lake, I stopped to contemplate a trio of crows sitting on a bench, another on a nearby rock, and one in the tree overhead.
I wanted some kind of sign, but not them.
So often we want something different than what we are given.
I looked, but maybe I was too busy trying to take photos of people walking towards me, or ahead of me, or standing still looking out over the lake.
One mother was trying to hold her daughter from the edge. She seemed maybe a bit too old to need to be held back, but then she grabbed her mother’s phone and ran, and even I felt a bit of panic as she hurtled toward the edge as if the edge wasn’t there at all.
On the other side of the lake, back in my car, I watched a woman walk up and sit down on the very edge of a bench, two little girls running past her to the edge of the water. Then an older woman approached, a grandmother (I guessed), and she spoke to one of the girls, pulling her back. I watched, trying to sort out why she only talked to one of the girls and why the mother said nothing. Then another woman appeared, and another girl ran into view to join the other two, the three constantly milling and moving, pulsing spots on a heat map, undulations of energy.
Then there was a man, and then another man. An entire family had convened, but they had all arrived at this bench separately, in tandem. The quiet photo of the woman sitting on the edge of the bench had evolved into a gaggle of people at the water’s edge.
The girls were throwing bread to the geese. I snapped dozens of pictures.
There were no symbols.
This is really a footnote letter. It’s the kind of letter the how-to-succeed people counsel against. It’s the kind of letter that makes people unsubscribe, and yet sometimes it’s simply the kind of letter that needs to be written. I’m tired in lots of ways.
Macro and micro worlds both show signs of crumbling, and mapping the contours is one way of visualizing, comparing, and understanding change. Writing, ultimately, is for me, but I need you, too.
I took scissors to the notes, leaving piles of breadcrumbs in the file, hacking out the too-revealing parts, separating the raw, the depths, the hot spots, the misanthropy and melancholy and anxiety from the regular-revealing parts. It’s a random determination, mostly. Anything could go. Anything could stay. Cutting by half intentionally removes continuity, creates shadows and holes and chasms.
I resist the urge to rearrange all of the notes here in the margin, scramble them like a game of pickup sticks, further disrupt meaning. I want to be known and yet refuse to be known at the same time.
I keep trying to move things out of the footnote and into the main. I know the voice is here. This is not wallowing. This is objective examination, the looking at still life images and samples on slides.
The iced coffee was decadent even though it shouldn’t have been.
A year ago about this time I thought I was on the brink of so many things. After months and months of (my partner’s) hospitalizations, one right after another after another after another, I still thought that I was on the verge of something. I wrote about sending the invitation. I thought new things were afoot. The possibility was exciting. I felt alive. I was working on my comic affirmations. I was drawing my edges, and, at the same time, I was pushing at them, reaching. I was twisting and turning words, reminding myself who I was deep down.
When we extend our arms and reach, the edge sometimes moves almost imperceptibly, the circle or shape widening.
Reaching doesn’t shrink the contour.
Reaching widens.I was asked a question this week about a rule related to a STEM challenge. The question had to do with whether or not poking holes or cutting holes in a piece of cardboard is allowed. One of the rules is that the piece of cardboard can not be cut into smaller pieces. To me, cutting holes didn’t seem like a violation of that because the outer contour, the size of the cardboard itself, wouldn’t change, but cutting holes is a version of cutting the larger piece into smaller pieces. If you don’t remove the material, just leave it hanging, then you technically haven’t broken the rule.
A loophole.In talking this scenario through, a co-worker mentioned that someone could simply pierce the cardboard with a pencil, or the edge of scissors, and twist and then continue to twist in such a way that a hole was created and widened without removing any material.
I keep thinking about that. I keep thinking about how you can stick a pencil through something and create a hole, a hole that you can continue to increase simply by rolling around the edge (with a bit of pressure), an ever-widening circle.
Contours change.
While waiting for my coffee to brew one morning, I gave the succulents in the window some water. In doing so, something caught my eye. A nail is sticking straight out of the soil, as if it has been raised from the dirt. A nail. A long nail. This plant was given to me last Mother’s Day, along with the orchid that died. Suddenly there is a nail sticking out of it?
The drain clog removal tool is now stuck in the drain. (It’s a bit more complicated and stupid than that, but that’s the net-net.)
I am not a stickler for a week staying on two pages. I often use more pages for a week and view the flipping of pages as fluid. But I’m also fine with layering in some scrap paper on the last day. The longer the sketchbook lasts, the better.
I probably overthink things way too much. This is both personality and a striving for something, and a filling of time, and simply part of how I work. I do think that working digitally compounds this problem in a way that working on paper does not. But I am enchanted by the project precisely because it is digital.
LOVE this new project, Amy. Your posts every week blow my mind because they're so detailed and there's always so much depth. THE footnotes are amazing. And thanks for the mention. That's really kind! xo
I AM a reader of footnotes. I love how yours are often an essay/post/message in and of themselves. Have you read Ross Gay? He also has sometimes meandering footnotes that are their own story. I've been playing with footnotes lately, perhaps (likely) inspired by my delight in yours.
And something I want to make this week is grapefruit-rosemary marmalade. I have the fruit on my counter now. I've never had it or made it, but I keep thinking about it. (I want to make an almond cake to go with it, but that is a separate project.)