Sketches, Doodles, & Cetera

Discover an enchantingly simple bookbinding technique using just a twig, rubber band, and paper!

I stumbled upon this rustic zine-making method at my local library and was immediately charmed by its accessibility and organic feel. Perfect for nature journals, mini art collections, or personalized gifts, these twig-bound booklets require no special tools and can be completed in minutes.

As creative entrepreneurs, we often share our Tax ID numbers with clients, vendors, and platforms—but using your personal Social Security Number puts your identity at risk. The solution? An Employer Identification Number (EIN) acts as your business's SSN and creates a protective barrier between your personal and business identities.

I'm back again after another great Victoria Johnson class, this time on the theme of creating collections.

The idea of an illustration collection is that you work on multiple pieces around a single theme and with a similar color palette. This helps make the creation process a bit smoother, since you have set yourself some limitation in the beginning, and it can also make it easier to sell multiple pieces of art to the same customer, since they tend to go nicely together.

I recently took an online course to create some holiday themed art, called Create Christmas by Victoria Johnson. This was such a fun class, full of talented and creative people. The class is set up in a three week structure, with each week having a theme and a color palette. So each week, I would pull out all of my sketching tools in that color palette and explore the theme in my sketchbook. I absolutely love the sketchbook spreads that resulted from these experiments. It was really interesting to me to see how keeping to a specific theme and color...

Every year, I see MerMay drawings in my Instagram feed, and I always want to participate, but I always think of it too late. So this year, I made sure to be more mindful of it, and I had a ton of fun drawing mermaids.

I've been working on figure drawing lately, and I'm struggling in particular with shoulders and necks, so I thought this would be a good way to focus only on the part of the anatomy that I'm struggling with and leave the rest up to my imagination.