Creative Recommendations for September

What I'm reading, listening to, and making art with!

Hi friends,

It’s time for my Creative Recommendations for September! These are just for my lovely ~patrons~ aka my paying subscribers. 

Each month, I curate my favorite things I’ve been reading, learning, and making art with. If you want to upgrade to get these 1x/month, you would make my day!

I’m coming at you live from Climate Week, sleepily typing this while I recharge my social battery. 

Reading

Contrary to last month, I’ve barely had the brain space to read this month! I did finish reading Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. It’s a very meta book, teaching about how comics are created as told by comics. There’s so much that can be extrapolated from this book on how to be an effective storyteller, communicator, and ways to understand the inner workings of different art mediums.

Learning

I learned how to make live art over the past few months in preparation for an event during climate week for Canary Media with John Kerry and Alex Honnold. I took a bunch of Youtube + Skillshare classes to scaffold my way towards understanding the skills required to do these.  I worked on drawing people, having an icon library, structural hierarchy, and passive listening skills. 

I was very nervous and the event went great! I’m so proud of myself for being able to learn this entirely new skill and hope to do more soon! If you want me to do live art at an in-person or virtual climate event shoot me a note. 

I also did one during the MCJ live Podcast recording with Tom Steyer.

These are a few classes I took:

• Visual Note Taking 101

• Cartooning: Drawing Bodies + Poses

• Draw your Notes: Intro to Visual Note Taking

• Visual Thinking: How to Create Sketchnotes to Capture + Synthesize Content

• Graphic Recording 101: Learn to Draw Live Visual Notes

• Info-Comics with Susannah Hainley

• Mini-comics Templates with Marek Bennett

• How to listen + process information while live visual note-taking

Listening to

I’ll be the first to admit that my music preferences are not my most unique quality. Yes, I love Taylor Swift (but not to like an outrageous, doxxing an anti-Swiftie degree). One of my less embarrassing music choices is that that I like listening to classical music while I paint. This is the playlist I listen to for all my climate art workshops. I particularly love one classical pianist, Gibran Alcocer, and his track called Idea 10.

Making Art With

My iPad! I’ve been getting into more digital art this month. I’ve been learning more about color theory and find that my iPad is the perfect playground for it.