Little Drawings of Chickens

Here are some little drawings of chickens.

And now, some weary journaling.

Every day, I’m surprised at just how sticky burnout is. I read about it plenty and understand, at least cerebrally, that it’s this indefinite blow to my mental health and productivity, but I can’t help but continue to operate under the delusion that I am surely somehow exempt. I’m also a little weary of complaining about it so much, but I’m honestly still not sure what to do about it. Every single project feels irrationally daunting.

My newsletters, Patreon and Ghost, are some of the few places I really look forward to posting, but I find myself posting less and less frequently because I build up a sense of preciousness about it. “Oh, it’s this special treat for me. I should save it for a rainy day. But I shouldn’t post too much because what if I inundate peoples’s email inboxes with things that aren’t that important. But if I post too little, people will think I’m neglecting them.”

So much of the way I interact with my work feels bogged down by the expectation of constant availability to other people, which is something for which I’ve found I lack the mileage. I’ve told myself I’m on vacation, and I set up an away message in my emails. I’m trying really hard to reclaim my work for myself. I want to experiment and learn new ways of working and expand my visual toolkit, which is difficult to do when making graphic novels. It’s an enormous demand on my time and requires a certain amount of controlled visual stagnation in order to keep the pages legible and consistent for readers in one sitting. I’m constantly working in service of other people, which is part of the job, but I’d like to keep some of me for me, and that’s becoming more and more difficult to accomplish.

My working solution is to fight the urge to overthink my posts and my projects. I’m going to post things as I make them. They will probably be messy and inconsistent, thematically and aesthetically. I’m going to post about work that excites me and then you will get to see me clumsily scrap those works for parts and see what I come up with. 

I think I was laboring under the notion that this place needs to be where my best work goes, that everything needs to be polished and pristine. But I also think that’s not what draws people to supporting artists’ pages. You should get to see my behind-the-scenes processes. I should be posting a series of terrible drawings so you can map my journey to something that actually really satisfies me. Even typing this is making me feel more emboldened to post more.

So apologies in advance—I will post more, and it will be messy and unfussy. Heck, my proof-reading will be worse. My text posts will meander like never before, and if you thought I loved run-on sentences before, just you wait!

Thank you for being here.

And I’m going to keep posting my little paintings of chickens.

 (This is a drawing of the coop my partner and my dad recently built for the hens. It's big and beautiful, and I love it. Once the weather gets warmer, I'll spend a little time out here drawing the hens.)