Creative Recommendations from November

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

Hi friends,

It’s time for my Creative Recommendations from November! 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 🥰

Reading

Now that I finally launched my app, Free Time last month, I’m finally benefitting from using it! I have more free time to read again. I devoured a few books this month. I read Cry When the Baby Cries by Becky Barnicoat, Fahrenheit 451, All the Way to the River by Elizabeth Gilbert, and Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

I’ve been trying to read something light before bed, because if I read anything too sci-fi or intense, I have wild dreams about it. I find that short, philosophy or Buddhist books before bed have been perfect. Last night, I listened to the Power of Now on audiobook. Nothing like a little Eckhart Tolle to make you fall asleep (in a good way).

As the year ends, I’m so happy to see I read 31 books! Several were graphic novels, like

K. Woodman-Maynard

’s, Tuck Everlasting, which I loved so much and read in 2 days. A lot were research for my own book, Quietest Places in New York, to study silence and sound. And many were about digital minimalism and technology addiction, to build my mindful screen time app. Here are some of picked my favorite books:

If you want to see what I read, you can look at my Goodreads here.

Making Art With

I’m back on my quest to get better at drawing people. The children’s book I illustrated for the Building Decarbonization Coalition called The Clean Green Neighborhood was published a few weeks ago. As many of you know, I spent months learning how to draw people for this book. And I’m really happy with how the characters turned out!

Learning for a project is my favorite way to build new skills and stay motivated. Now that this book is finished, I don’t have a clear reason to draw people. But a few weeks ago, I decided to just try drawing them for fun (gasp!).

Now that art is my job, I sometimes struggle to separate the joy of making art from the financial aspects of my business. Doing silly little drawings like these felt like a good place to start.

I went to the art section in the library and found this book on Kawaii drawing. It’s not the style of art I plan to create, but I figured learning from examples on how cute drawings are created could help me develop my own style.

It was filled with these tutorial drawings that reminded me of a horse-drawing book I used when I was a kid. My best friend and I went to the cafe in the Brooklyn Museum and spent the afternoon working on art projects. I was drawing mermaids and she was animating a project. It was so sweet.

Learning

I’ve been making a bunch of reels for social media because all 3 of my big projects launched in a 1 week period (the app, the first copy of Quietest Places book arrived, and the children’s book launched). Soo lots to talk about!

I’ve never been the most confident on camera, but I started thinking about it as practice for public speaking, and now it feels less cringey when I’m yapping to myself. I like to imagine I’m practicing for a future talk or presentation (a big dream of mine is to do a TED talk one day!).

The most helpful thing I did was download a teleprompter app on my iPhone so I can see talking points while I record myself. I found myself looking away from the camera or fidgeting too much if I didn’t have this. If you want to watch me get over my nervousness on camera, you can follow @mindfulnicole on Instagram.

Inspired by

Over Thanksgiving, I went home to my parents in Pennsylvania. My mom and I went to a local museum, the Michener Museum, and got to see one of my favorite paintings ever. It’s a 22-foot oil painting by a local artist, Daniel Garber, called A Wooded Watershed. I grew up going to this museum and was always mesmerized by this painting. But going as an adult, as an artist, it hit different this time.

A Wooded Watershed, Daniel Garber. 1926

My mom and I sat on the bench and both sketched the painting in our little notebooks. It was such a lovely moment and felt like we were in our own private art class.

View it on Google Arts & Culture in detail here

Listening to

My childhood best friend and I went camping this summer and we talked about how I wanted to get better at finding music that I like. A few weeks ago, she texted me that she couldn’t make it to a concert and asked if I wanted her ticket. It was for a band named