Crab Wasn't Lost

5 things from the studio this week

Can you be heartened by personal and creative growth while acknowledging that the outside world is um… not in a good spot? I’m trying to find balance.

This week for my paid subscribers I decided to share some art work that is between 10-15 years old and wasn’t stuff I was proud of. The work was important and yet not very good. Getting better at <waves hands around studio> everything looks exactly like that much of the time.¹

Here’s five more things from the week that was:

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1. SOME ART MAKING

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Some new habits are beginning to reap some results, both in writing and in art making. There’s so much to gain by just showing up and doing the things, over and over again.

This crab and his trombone are bringing joy to a dreary and cold January.

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Sharing life with you has grown to be super important to me and how I think about my time in the studio. Support for this newsletter through a paid subscription helps me keep going! Paid subscribers get honesty, inspiration, and insights every other Wednesday in a deep dive on something I’m thinking about as an author and illustrator of books for kids alongside a free pastry. They also get to peruse the growing archives for gems like going out on submission and selling that book dummy.

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2. WORK WISDOM

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All art is a work in progress. It’s helpful to see the piece we’re working on as an experiment. One in which we can’t predict the outcome. Whatever the result, we will receive useful information that will benefit the next experiment.

— Rick Rubin, The Creative Act

This approach is not to be trifled with. It’s a dark art within the creative world. A wardrobe you walk through to something more.

Here’s what it’s done for me. If everything is an experiment, risk taking goes up, learning and play are more central, and treating everything as overly precious goes down. I can’t speak to how you work, but for me — this has looked like freedom and growth.

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3. THING I LOVED

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@amymariestad

Amy Marie Stadelmann on Instagram: "Last year, I had the experi…

This comic by Amy Marie Stadelmann about trying to use generative AI for work as an artist is perfect at illuminating a few of the reasons it fails. For one, the distance between prompts and the art it makes is a big enough gap that it requires babysitting:

I had assumed maybe using AI would be like giving art direction to an all knowing robot??? but it was much more like arguing with a very stubborn toddler.

The whole thing is great. Robots can’t do what we do for a lot of reasons², but this is nuts and bolts stuff.

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4. A BOOK TO READ

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If you were to ask me what my earliest memory alone with a book was, I’d point to Ed Emberely’s ABC. Published in 1978 and really distinct from his drawing books, ABC captured my young illustrators mind and didn’t let go. I still think about this book.

So the concept is simple. A series of 4 images across a spread show the forming of a letter of the alphabet. The animal(s) involved start with the corresponding letter. Something about the connection between learning how to write and understanding the connection made it really accessible to me as a child, on my own. I could read it and understand it. The book met me where I was. And the art is stunningly beautiful.

(I’d love the shot to make something like this and I’m breathing that into the ether, publishing gods.)

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5. EPHEMERA, ETC.

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Perhaps one of the great things (maybe the only thing?) about the times we are living through is that it all can sharpen your sense of what’s actually good in the world. The specter of book bans and AI has forced me to really think about what I’m doing in a way that felt less examined than when I started. Freedom and how we treat each other has more value now because yeah, you get it. It’s not easy and I wish things were simpler. But they are illuminated that much more. The contrast has been turned up.

See you next week, friends. Be good.

Best,
Jacob

1. I’m proud of the decision to share. Honesty > Vanity.

2. I wrote about AI a while ago and stand by all of it:

“Surely, AI art will get better at human to human storytelling about the human condition? Re-read that question. It doesn’t even make logical sense that we’d ask computers to do this job. We’re uniquely qualified to make art that helps us connect with our humanness. This authenticity is found in skin and is at the core of all transcendent art experiences. Why would off-load this job to a computer? Can it even do it?!”