2026

2026.IX.4: I'm finally and fully in the throes of this critter monk project. It has almost entirely taken over my artistic output. The last three years in general and this one in particular have been utterly miserable and unrelenting as far as things happening in the world and their effect on my mental state and my only recourse has been to draw hundreds of funny little critters in robes to distract myself. As of September when I'm writing this I'm already well on track to beat 2020 as my most artistically productive year, if I haven't already, depending on how one weighs sketches and other less polished art.

I developed a few habits this year that have significantly contributed to my increased artistic outpute. One is that I finally started keeping a sketchbook by my bedside that I require myself to fill at least one page of every night before going to sleep. Whether due to grad school trauma or worsening ADHD or some combination of the two I pretty much entirely lost my ability to read for pleasure over the last decade, which was a major hit to my ego as a former bookworm, but I've found that having something to do before bed that doesn't involve screens is still a great way to calm my brain down. To that end I've already filled hundreds of pages with sketches and doodles this year, many of which got developed into the art below.

Related to the above, I finally started buying cheaper sketchbooks that I can actually use to sketch and doodle and fuck around in. One thing that's held me back for years was my habit of only buying really nice books to draw in that I felt pressure to use every page as preciously as possible and treat the whole thing like a fancy little portfolio book. I still do most of my finished art in fancy multimedia sketchbooks but having actual sketchbooks was a game changer and my art's improved significantly as a result.

The other big habit I got into this year was at least once a week going to a nice cafe with my lovely partner and spending 3 or more hours working on our respective art projects together. It's remarkable how much more productive you can be when not at home surrounded by all the usual distractions!

One last somewhat significant development this year is sometime around late April I finally started experimenting with using thicker nibs when sketching with ink or outlining polished art. This is mostly done with a Kakimori nib my partner gave me, but also just random old chunky dip pen writing nibs. As someone who's been obsessed for 20 years with using only the finest nibs and pens and brushes and trying to draw everything as neatly and precicely as possible, it's honestly really freeing to finally just lean into the chaos a bit and work a bit more energy and weight into my art. Not that I've stopped with all the fiddly crosshatching inside the chunky outlines, but still.

As I write this, I'm about halfway through the critter monk zine I've been threatening to make for a couple years now. Of course, since it has been a couple years, I now have something like 80+ pages worth of art, so it's either going to be an extra thick zine or I'll split it into a couple volumes, with more to come in the future, I'm sure.