Monthly Guide

A collection of 26 posts

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Monthly Guide

July 2024: Looking is Loving

Wendy MacNaughton says that drawing is a way of looking, and that looking is loving. What is being in love, but noticing someone's every detail and adoring it?

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April 2024: Use your supplies (up)

If I could offer one piece of creative practice advice it would be this: Use your supplies. Think of them as experiences – like a concert ticket or a birthday cake – not a collection of treasures. We're never meant to keep them. Plus, they don't last forever

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March 2024: Looking carefully

Danielle and I are slowly making our way through Sarah Urist Green's You Are an Artist, and recently completed an art assignment modeled after the practice of Nina Katchadourian's marvelous Sorted Books Project. We were told to look at someone's book collection and pull

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February 2024: Trying something new - oil pastels, part 1

Meet my new obsession: oil pastels. They are quick and opaque. They are vibrant and smudgy and all around lush. Over the past decade I've been slowly adding mediums to my collection. I started with watercolors, brush markers and fine liners pens. Later I added in gouache, colored

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December 2022: Finding new shapes

Artists always need shapes, but sometimes finding new and interesting ones can be harder than it seems. Big blobby shapes that look sort of like boulders are always the first thing to come out of my hand, so if I want to incorporate other shapes into my markmaking play I

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November 2023: The Inhale

If I turn back two pages in my sketchbook, I find this, dated 10/26/23 and labeled #1. I had a burst of desire that day and thought I'd try for a streak of daily abstract mark making. This spread had taken me me about five minutes

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October 2023: Spooky Season

It’s Spooky Season! It’s taken me years to come around to the charm of this time of year, as I’ve never been one to do fear for fun. I’ve been asking people why they like scary music and creepy fall vibes for years now and I

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September 2023: Cross-training

In my years as a physical therapist I began to see how art and therapy bleed easily into each other: in both places were tender people who lived with some kind of pain, working gently over time to transform it into something that felt good in their body and allowed

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August 2023: Perfection

When I started Easy Does It almost two years ago, one of the first topics I expected to write about was perfectionism. It was the most commonly cited creativity villain in the messages I had received from followers, which were all variations on: "I want to be an artist,

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July 2022: Value, Part 1

Last weekend we went camping near a lake, and I woke up at dawn with my little dog Miko who was absolutely beside herself that we had spent the entire night outside, and were in fact, still outside now at 5AM. She had dreamed all her life of going on

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May 2023: Noticing

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April 2023: Materials play

A key to creative energy is the willingness to use your supplies. Use them freely, use them on things that don't work out, waste them, use them up. As much I know this, I still feel resistance from the part of me that wants to collect art supplies

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March 2023: Shifting color

I'm thrilled to be sharing about one of my favorite topics: color. I want to focus specifically on how colors compare to each other, because it's often the relative shift between two colors that matters more than the exact colors. I felt that it would be

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January 2023: The Art Start List

It's 2023! I have so many things I'm excited to share with you this year. We're going deeper and wider and I'm so looking forward to getting to know you all more and learn together. I'm also energized because New

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Dec 2022: Wintering

Winter is here! We had our first little bit of snow at least, and I feel the shift in my body - dark, short days, and the pull to be inside, in the warmest spot I can find. I'm noticing the way my approach to making art changes

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November: Making compelling art

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Sept 2022: Art + Online, Part I

Earlier this summer, I read this thoughtful question from JC in our Discord and I've been cooking up a response now for a long time. Here's what she wrote: I'm here to try to learn to enjoy art for its own sake, reveling in

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Aug 2022: Gazing

Last month I wrote to you about how my creative process was in a swing toward the inhale side of things - it felt quiet, receptive, dormant. I wrote about beginning, again, which is the natural rhythm of things and the most important skill an artist can have. But even

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July 2022: Begin, again.

I haven't really painted in the past six weeks, at least not in an expressive, personal way. Looking back in my sketchbook for June pages there are just 3 diagrams that I made for the shop. My last free sketching page is from May 21!

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How to make a self portrait

Note: I wrote the draft of this piece using voice transcription as I took care of my new 4lb puppy, Miyoko. I’ve now gone and edited out all the puppy bits (hi sweetie and wow your teeth are so sharp and how can anyone be so perfect?), which I’

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June 2022: The Selfie

Every June I paint a self-portrait for my birthday. It's a way to spend time with myself, notice how I'm changing, and knit that together with how I'm evolving as an artist, making it into a physical thing that, too, will begin to age.

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May 2022, Part 2: Skills

Hello EDI friends, In Part 1 we explored how to approach consistency and skill building without getting washed away by a pressure to be “good.” This week I’d like to build on that idea. The pressure to be good masquerades as something that will make our creative practice more

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May 2022, Part 1: How old do you have to be to make a bad drawing?

In Making Comics, Lynda Barry asks: how old do you have to be to make a bad drawing? This brilliant question catches on all the snags in our tangled thoughts about good art and who gets to make it. And if we let it, it dissolves them right out. I

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April 2022: One thing at a time

One thing that makes art-making a satisfying experience for me is exploring one(ish) thing at a time. When I was just beginning, trying to paint a realistic portrait was not very satisfying because it asked me to attend to a lot things I wasn't skilled at -

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March 2022: How to Paint a Thing

Years ago I had a yoga instructor who would start every class in child’s pose or another restful place, and make sure we knew: “this is always available to you. You can come back here any time during the practice.” I would take that invitation seriously, sometimes spending half