Creative Recommendations for July

What I'm reading, learning, watching, and making art with!

Hi friends,

It’s time for my Creative Recommendations for July! These are just for my lovely ~patrons~ aka my paying subscribers. Each month, I curate my favorite things I’ve been reading, learning, watching, and making art with. If you want to upgrade to receive these once a month, you’d make my day 🥰

Context: June was a wild one for me. I found out my publisher loved my Quietest Places in New York book and wanted to add 12 more locations to it. So I’ve been back into production mode, making a ton of art and writing with a fast turnaround (now due July 24). I’ve also been doing a lot of big-picture thinking about what direction I want my creative career to go. Soo… a lot of these recommendations relate to handling stress! Let’s go :)

Learning

The connection between screens and mental health is pretty clear, so I thought that cutting down my screen time would be a helpful way to tackle some of my stress. I’ve tried a million of the screen blocking apps and have gripes with them, so I figured why not make my own?

So I built an app! I’ve been working on it every day after work for the past 3 weeks. It’s called Free Time and it’s fully functioning right now which is WILD. It’s designed to stop unconscious scrolling by inserting a small pause before you open your most distracting apps.

First, you solve a quick puzzle or do a breathing exercise. Then, you take a moment to notice where you are. After that, your apps unlock for a short window before they’re re-blocked. You can designate phone-free zones, so no more scrolling in bed or while you’re waiting in line. I’m still working out a bunch of bugs but you can get on the beta test waitlist here!

I used Claude and ChatGPT to code it, which I have complicated feelings about. I know how to code in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but I don’t know Swift (which is what iOS apps are built in). The feeling of learning a new programming language is very satisfying though and makes me feel proud of myself for stretching those muscles again.

Vibecoding as the kids call it these days

Making Art With

I bought charcoal and used it for the first time since high school art class. I was obsessed with it in high school and especially loved the feeling of getting messy and washing my hands after class.

It was such a nostalgic moment to tap into that feeling again, but as a full-time artist today. Little Nicole would be very proud 🥹 I took my first figure drawing class which was awesome and challenging. Towards the end, I started making comic-style frames of the figure.

I dug up an old still life I did in high school AP Art class. I haven’t drawn anything this realistic in so long that I honestly forgot that I’m capable of it. It makes me happy that I’ve found new ways of creating art beyond just rendering reality.

Reading

I’ve been reading Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg and really enjoying it.

Honestly, I have a good amount of healthy habits in place like eating healthy, swimming, meditating, and not drinking. But I’ve been feeling anxious the past month so I’m trying to fine tune a few of these habits to decrease my stress levels further.

My biggest flex is my InsightTimer streak of meditating for 1.5 years

The 2 new habits I want to build are to increase my workout frequency to 2-3x/week and use my phone less.

BJ Fogg has lots of graphs and formulas to help break down behavior change and the psychology of building and breaking habits. Here’s an example for how I’m making a tiny change to decrease my screen time:

• After I sit down on the subway, I will take out my AirPods and read on my Kindle or a book. Then I celebrate with a smile to myself.

Watching

I’ve been watching the new season of The Bear and am constantly mesmerized by the color grading. Color grading is a post-production process that manipulates the colors of a TV show or movie to evoke a specific mood.

From Youtube video Why is the Bear so Blue?

I’m absolutely not an expert in this but it does make me think about color palettes and what kind of mood I want to create when people look at my art.

Swatches from the LUT pack here

Listening to

I save my most embarrassing section for my paid subscribers so here we go…