I'm a day late but I am here and life is beautiful and I have made so many small and beautiful things this month.

Last month I was really stressed out about not wanting to draw so much, and what it might mean for my fragile artistic soul. Turns out I just needed to give it, like, a week. A dear friend wanted some advice on how to start drawing and in showing her my tips and tricks I remembered that I really really enjoy doing figure drawings. In many ways it's been the core of my artistic process since I was a kid. You just gotta find some website or other that does class-mode bursts of reference images, where they start really fast and then get longer as you go. These ones I did all through line-of-action.com and I cannot recommend it enough.

They start out really fast, just gestures, like 30 seconds.

And then scale up in time until you're at 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes. And with that sort of warmup, suddenly 2 minutes feels like plenty of time to capture someone's image. Or at least their pose, their vibe.

And at this point I'm looking at my page like damn, I forgot how fun drawing was. I forgot how good this can be, when it's just for the fun of it. I love shapes! I love people! I love the challenge of capturing a form, of making it feel interesting and evocative and solid in all the right ways. It's a good time!

And then line-of-action also has a course for hands, which I'd never seen before,

and it has a course for animals, which I'd never seen before,

and suddenly it's been two days and I've been sketching nonstop and I'm out of my favorite red mechanical pencil lead and I've drawn what might be the best hands I've ever drawn and what's definitely the best horse I've ever drawn. And, like, it felt easy. And I'm really really happy to be an artist, and to be where I am. And I'm really happy that my friend asked for some pose drawing pointers.

All of which is fine and wonderful, but it's not everything, because I've also been crocheting a bit and I made some flowers that I'm really proud of. I sent them as a gift and I'm really hoping the package arrives before they read this email 'cuz I'd hate to spoil the surprise.

I think they have an otherworldly beauty that I quite appreciate. There's something almost skeletal about them, especially with the crochet texture.

And there's these little flowers, anxious little distractions for when the job hunt got too stressful and I needed a break, where I'm playing mixing lots of different patterns to see what works, and splitting my embroidery floss in half to make it thinner,

and then,

Gosh I'm just so excited to realize I've made so many things in January, and I'm rushing so much to get this newsletter out tonight, and it makes me feel like I'm shouting this in one excited breath.

And then I also did some playing around with oven bake clay, and I made some little guys who I'm quite fond of, all marbled orange and pink.

(Pardon the mess; they've found homes on a very busy trinket shelf. They help pad out this end of the rainbow beautifully.)

I want to get some more clay that's a bit less soft for my next batch of experiments, but I still have a bunch from this package of clay, and it's hard for me to get more supplies while I still have perfectly good supplies (even if the supplies aren't that good and are in fact way too soft for what I want to be doing) so I'll have to find something to do with what I have first.

And then, gosh, I did some writing which might actually be sharable once it's finished. I'm making it in the format of interview transcriptions, which feels like a great way to bridge my desire for more narrative forms of writing with my innate preference for crafting in-world documents. Maybe, maybe. Don't get your hopes up there. Or like, if you do, let me know? I'm shy about my writing.

I'm racking my brain but I do think this really is everything I've done this month. Oh, and some art therapy, which is great, but that's therapy and I'm not going to go sharing it online. That would defeat the whole point I think.

Okay, um. I'm thinking more about porting this whole thing over to a blog somewhere, but the couple responses I got from y'all were quite in favor of keeping this as a newsletter. I'll definitely try to keep the mail-out side of it, whatever I decide to do here. My year subscription to Shopify will be up at the end of this month and I don't think it makes sense to keep paying for this website when it's not really making me any money. But then, I do love having my own website. Just on principal. It feels neat. I'm hoping that things will chill out a bit in my personal life and I'll have the time to sit down and really make some decisions soon.

I'm really, really, really hoping things chill out in my personal life. Goddamn.

Let me know if you have any recommendations for simple website builders. It'd be nice to have a little gallery and a blog and a newsletter in one place.

Okay okay I think that's everything. This was very stream of conscience, and much more fun to write than I expected. See ya next month! Yay!