Fun in my pants.

dannygregory16 Comments

Like most 21st century bipeds, I love my phone. I remember back in the ’60’s when we had to carry around a computer the size of a Buick in order to get spam. Now I just reach in my pocket, and there’s the world — and I don’t even wear cargo pants!

pumpkin-latte-widgetWhich brings me to irony. Earlier this year, I published a book which suggested that when you have downtime — while waiting for the light to change, the elevator to arrive, the doctor to read your x-rays, D.J.Trump to say something reasonable — instead of reflexively reaching for your phone to check Facebook, you might pull out your sketchbook and do a little drawing.

Now the publisher of my book has placed temptation in everyone’s way.

For the month of January, Art Before Breakfast* will be on sale for just $2.99. That’s the ebook version. The version you can download to your phone and carry around with you everywhere. That means that rather than doing a drawing, you can spend your downtime thumbing through my book and reading me exhorting you to do a drawing.

Sigh.

room-service-widgetIt’s not all bad though. The book is full of inspiring thoughts, encouraging advice and suggestions on what and how to draw, paint, and make the world a lovelier place. So with any luck you’ll download it and eventually get around to making some art. No matter how busy you are.

This offer ends on Jan 31. Then the world returns to normal.

 

*This link is to Amazon US but it’s on sale on in virtually every store that sells it worldwide.

More inspiration: from me and others

dannygregory2 Comments

House of Muses just published an inspiring bunch of suggestions from various creative folks. Including me.

Inspiration Tuesday: Michael Nobbs

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My pal Michael Nobbs suffers from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and yet is a creative and productive artist. We had a chat recently about how he does it and how we can all use his techniques to get more done each day.

Michael is also a teacher in the newest kourse at Sketchbook Skool. If you would like to more tips, suggestions and perspectives from him and our other new fakulty, check out Expressing at SBS.com.

Happy New Kourse!

dannygregory13 Comments

One of the many fun parts of my job is that I get to meet cool people and work with them on films about their art. We have long in-depth conversations, I’m allowed into their studios, hear their ideas and histories, and watch them make beautiful things. Today, after several months of traveling and filming, I get to share those experiences with you and all the other people who enroll in Sketchbook Skool.

The real idea behind SBS is that each week’s klasses are an opportunity to share that experience of hanging out with fascinating creative people for a day. Each Friday, you watch a dozen or so films that capture all the aspects of this experience. The result is that you learn some new techniques and tools but also that you are inspired to make art of your own by rubbing up against other great creative spirits.

The new kourse we are launching today is called “Expressing.” It’s about how art conveys not just pretty pictures but deep feelings, information, experiences and sentiments that can’t be captured just in words.

Here’s a little taste of what the kourse will be like. I hope you’ll join me in the audience for six weeks of art, inspiration, wisdom and fun. Roll film!

Click here for more information about Expressing

Here are some of the wonderful people who Koosje and I have brought to join the fakulty:

There’s Felix Scheinberger who I first met several years ago when I was working on An Illustrated Journey. Felix is one of Germany’s top illustrators and an art professor in Berlin. He’s the author of one the most inspiring watercolor books in my library with the deceptively prosaic title, Urban Watercolor Sketching. His work is witty, expressive, a little grotesque, and watching him work makes you itch to grab a brush and join in. I recorded a great conversation with Felix a while ago and you can watch it here.

I have known Michael Nobbs for even longer. I think we first start corresponding more than ten years ago when he was first starting to draw and joined the Everyday Matters group on Yahoo!. Michael has Chronic Fatigue Syndrome but, in spite of that, he has a strong creative habit and has published a lovely book on drawing and created a daily podcast and a special, subscription based creative community, called sustainablycreative.com. He is an inspiring and lovely fellow and shares my passion for tea drinking.

Penelope Dullaghan is another of my old pals and I featured her work in An Illustrated Life. I met Penny when she was getting ready to quit her career in advertising and step out as in independent illustrator. I love her work, her bravery, and her long-term creative community project, Illustration Friday. Her weekly creative assignments have encouraged thousands to draw regularly and many of them have gone on to become professional illustrators too. I think she’ll be equally inspiring to the folks at SBS.

I met Jill Weber when she illustrated several books written by my old friend, Julie Salamon. The Christmas Tree was a huge international bestseller, then they went on to write Cat in the City (which includes a character based on my late wife, Patti) and their newest, A Mutt’s Promise. Jill grew up in a creative family, then went to RISD, worked in the New York publishing world and lived in Bohemian SoHo in the ’70’s, then moved to a self-sustaining farm in New Hampshire. She is full of wisdom and stories and talents and we captured many of them in our films.

Sabine Wisman is Dutch, a writer who started to draw and soon became a full-time illustrator. I love the way she combines simple line work with witty text. She packs a lot of meaning and feeling into light whimsy. I look forward to learning how I can make my own work more effortless, clear and direct.

And the final teacher is my partner and pal, Koosje Koene. KK is going to focus on lettering and how to make it a part of your journal pages. I think this is a crucial lesson — I see all too many beautiful drawings and watercolors in peoples’s sketchbooks that are marred by hasty captions that seem like afterthoughts. I love the way drawings and calligraphy reverberate off each other and Koosje is a master.

Anyway, this is a long, round-about way of telling you that our new kourse is finally ready for you. You can sign up right now and the first lessons begins on Jan 15.

Happy New Year! See you in klass.

The Louvre vs. me

dannygregory12 Comments

According to WordPress:  “The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 900,000 times in 2015. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 39 days for that many people to see it.”

Presumably, some of those people were just here to visit the gift shop or to read my post about the Mona Lisa and comment on how it is smaller than they imagined.

WordPress might have found some better and more apt analogies to really give this crucial data relevant meaning. I’ll do it instead. A quick Google search and I discovered that the number of my blog views equaled that of :

I am not sure if there is any overlap between these various populations, but I imagine there are at least a few Father Christmas impersonators with no back hair who love Khloe and Kendall but contracted the runs from eating a deep-fried corn cob and missed a few of my better posts.

If so, they can read them here.

The Resolution Solution

dannygregory23 Comments

As the last pages are plucked off the calendar, it’s time to feel the pleasure of accomplishment and the pressure of regret. Regret at the things one intended to do over the year past but lacked the stick-to-it-iveness to, well, stick to it.

The waning days of December are a time of familiar patterns. Chestnuts, figgy pudding, wrapping paper cuts, family squabbles, and vows to launch the New Year with fresh and transforming habits. Gym owners rub their hands with glee at all the self-deceivers stuffed with goose fat renewing their dusty memberships, full of the great and ephemeral intentions. Would-be artists line up at the art supply store, baskets loaded with sketchbooks and palettes and workshop catalogs. Blog keepers vow, once again, to truly stick to their publicly announced pledges to post five times weekly.

Let’s zoom down from the heights of generalization to survey this particular oath breaker. Why is it so hard for me to adhere to my own intentions? Why do I still steal the occasional late-night tablespoon of Ben and Jerry’s? Why do days, weeks even, pass without my cracking the cover of my sketchbook? Why do I still gnaw my cuticles in the darkness of the movie theatre?

Let’s get more specific still. Rather than a blanket condemnation of my many shortcomings, let’s focus on my blog keeping and try to extract some lessons from its intermittence that might apply to other habit breaking.

  1. Time and place. When I am successful at regular writing, it’s because I get up early, pee, then sit right down at my desk. Before breakfast, I am done and posted. I don’t allow myself time to question whether or not I should bother to write today. I just get up, pee and write. I’ve said this here before — habits are easier to establish by tying them to a ‘sparking event’. In my case, peeing.

  2. Inventory. To lubricate this dry start, I think about what I want to write days in advance, then jot down a word or two that might be the basis for a post. When I sit down, bleary eyed, I have a grain of sand to drop in the oyster.

  3. Structure. I have a loose agenda for each weeks’ post. On Monday I write about things that have inspired me from the previous week, Tuesday and Thursday I freeform things like this, Wednesday I find or make a video, Friday is some sort of instruction. It’s not a rigid structure but it gives my ideas a trellis.

  4. Temperance. Certainly not drinking too much is a good idea, but what I mean here is that if I temper my ambitions, I am more likely to keep producing. For instance, I had a vague notion about what to write here today, but soon my ambitions swelled and I imagined writing a really long posts with scores of ideas, research, quotes… and the thought of all that work made me want to just crawl back in bed. Instead I said to myself, just write a paragraph or two and try to encapsulate the idea. Even though now it appears I am writing much more than that, I couldn’t have started with such a hike in mind. Just planning a slow jog to the curb to pick up the paper is a more fruitful place to start. Underpromise, overdeliver.

(Incidentally, long bits of writing are not an indication of industry. I find it a lot easier to go on and on than take the time to go back and prune. By now, you’re probably feeling the consequences of my editorial laziness.)

Before I commit myself to any new regimes in early 2016, I will think about how to help myself stay true.

  1. What are the sparks that I can connect to the habit to reinforce it? For example, if I want to draw every day, I should put a sketchbook by the coffeepot and draw the view out the kitchen window each morning as it perks.

  2. What sort of preparation can I make to make the new pattern easier to adhere to? If I want to avoid eating carbs, maybe I should start by clearing the pantry of cookies and the freezer of Chunky Monkey.

  3. What sort of structure can I give my habit so it isn’t just open-ended? If I want to go to the gym several times weekly, I can put a recurring appointment in my calendar and make sure nothing else gets booked at that time. And I can add details to those appointments, thinking through what sorts of exercises I want to do on any given day.

  4. How can I set realistic expectations? I can come up with reasonable goals that won’t be a barrier to my getting going — like drawing for ten minutes or walking for twenty minutes or not drinking caffeine after ten a.m. — goals that can then be inched forward over time as I adjust to the idea of the privation or activity.

In sum, I can be like a good parent. I can provide reasonable goals, set myself up with clear and achievable markers of success, be supportive and understanding without being either a wimp or a tyrant, and remind myself that failure is not catastrophic but just a detour from a path one I still return to.

Let’s do great things in 2016 but in a reasonable, supportive, human way. And let’s start by giving up regret.

Inspiration Monday: Fäviken

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Magnus Nilsson is a chef in a remote part of Jämtland. His restaurant seats only 14 people each night but it is regularly voted the best in Sweden and among the top two dozen in the world. I’ve never been to Magnus’s place or even to Scandinavia but it has a rare grip on me these days.

I first learned about Magnus in the Netflix series, Chef’s Table (I keep recommending this series here on this blog but no one ever seems to comment on it. Your loss; I think is is so inspiring for artists of all palates and palettes.) but have enjoyed a much deeper dive into his mind since buying his first book, Fäviken. I’ve been meaning to write about it here for several weeks but have waited because I can’t easily distill its pleasure into the few paragraphs I allot myself here.

Magnus, like many of the finest chefs, is an artist. But his art is not in virtuoso classical cooking or conversely in wild experimentation. Rather he is an artist who celebrates a deliberate, careful observation of the world around him and creates work that makes us experience life more vividly.

His restaurant typically serves up to thirty courses per meal, courses made up primarily of ingredients found in the surrounding forest. He uses burnt stumps, sheets of moss, and last autumn’s leaves. Most of his game he himself hunted and recently. His beef comes from old dairy cows, hung and aged for many months. He raises his lambs alongside his children, then weeps as he slices their wooly throats (the lambs, not the kids).

His dishes include:

  • A little lump of very fresh cheese, floating in warm whey with one petal of lavender
  • Very light broth of pig filtered through moss
  • Leeks picked just minutes ago, sheep’s cream whisked with mead, grated cod’s roe
  • Pine tree bark cake, pudding of milk and cream, acidic herbs and frozen buttermilk, grated hydnellum suaveolens
  • A tiny slice of top blade from a retired dairy cow, dry aged for nine months, crispy reindeer lichen fermented green gooseberries, fennel salt

Does this sound precious and effete? Not to me. Hearing him speak or write about his process is to realize what it means to be 100% in tune with one’s surroundings, to appreciate the bounty of the surrounding land, to recognize the difference that a few minutes makes to an ingredient’s flavor, to be absolutely present and to believe in doing things well or not at all.

…is the guy just an anal, Nordic lunatic?

My favorite page is called “Giving a Carrot the Attention It Deserves” and covers how to grow the right variety for your climate and soil type, what the weather should be like when you pull it, how to correctly pare one’s fingernails before handling the carrot, how cool the rinsing water must be, how to hold the carrot when rinsing, the right type of peeler to use and how old it should be, the right angle to wield it, down to which way to lay the peeled carrot on the plate. I first read this page, out of context, and thought, is the guy just an anal, Nordic lunatic?

But when I read it again, after reading all the pages that preceded it, I realized the purpose of his obsession. It is about care, about doing things the right way, about recognizing the essential, a kind of honor that Hemingway would have recognized. Doing things right is very hard, but the purpose is not to be exclusive or judgmental. It is to celebrate life by living it well. And it is to show the rest of us that each day can be gulped down whole or savored thoughtfully.

He concludes this page by saying: “The questions you must ask yourself about every detail are these: does this make the end result better, and do I have the time and capacity to do it at the moment? If the answer to either of these questions is no, do it in a different but equally thought-through way that better suits the needs and possibilities available to you. The important idea is not always to do things without compromise, but with thought-through attention and decisions that lead, little by little, towards creating a better result.”

The recipes in this book are uncookable unless you have 10,000 acres of Swedish wilderness and a very special mind. But I can taste their wisdom on the page, can learn from their philosophy, and apply it to the bowl of Raisin Bran I’m about to make. And the drawing I’ll do right after.

Thank you, Internet.

dannygregory22 Comments

A dozen years ago, I started this blog with my first silly post. Since then I have always had a place to go to share how I am feeling, what I am learning, and what I am doing. I do have a few relationships that have lasted longer than that — but not many.

So thank you, Internet, for being there to listen and provide me an endless creative workplace.

Before I met you, I knew of two other people who, like me, thought it worthwhile to record their lives in words and pictures between the pages of a book. One, d.price, I met in 1998 or so, through a Xeroxed ‘zine in the magazine rack in Tower Records. I wrote him a letter, dropped it in the mail, and we became pals. The other, Hannah Hinchman, I found in a second-hand book store. She was far too intimidating for me to approach and I didn’t correspond with her for at least another decade. Then the web finally happened and I set up the Yahoo group, Everyday Matters, and soon I found many new friends who also kept illustrated journals, people around the world to inspire and educate me.

So, thank you, Internet, for giving me a creative community to support my passion for drawing.

(this is currently my favorite video and I run it all my waking hours)

It’s cold out today and the streets are jammed with frenzied shoppers. But I don’t have to leave my cozy spot by my virtual fireplace (thank you, YouTube). With a couple of clicks, I can buy anything I need and have it delivered to my door.

But here’s the thing — the easier it is to buy anything, the less I actually want. I want to streamline my life and reduce it to a couple of pairs of well-worn jeans, some t-shirts, a sketchbook, and my laptop. I don’t need or want to own much more — knowing it’s within reach means I’m fine just leaving it all at Amazon.com. So thank you, Internet, for make me want less — by giving me more.

Two years ago, I stopped going to a big brick building on the shores of the Hudson River each day and started working on the Internet instead. I met my partner-to-be Koosje Koene and we started Sketchbook Skool. Now tens of thousand of people come to learn and create in a schoolhouse built of ones and zeroes that stretches from Moscow to Capetown, from New York to Walla Walla. My coworkers live thousands of miles apart and commute each day via keyboard and mousepad. Thank you, Internet, for the best workplace I’ve ever had.

Internet, you bring me lunch, pens, ideas, and cat videos. You’ve let me express myself, find people who are interested in what I make, tell my son I miss him, and learn why my dog drags his butt on the rug.

The world is far from perfect but I am hopeful about its future because if all 7,389,160,216 people on this planet (thank you, Google) can experience 1/10 of what I have online, we can look past our differences and start to work on solutions. Together. Thanks to you, Internet.

A Christmas Karol

dannygregory17 Comments

For the last few months, I have been engaged behind-the-scenes in new and exciting things at Sketchbook Skool. Koosje and I have been joined by several fantastic new staff members and together we are rebooting the ol’ Skool for 2016.

If you like the sort of things I write here, you’ll like what we are planning to do at SBS. It’s not a run-of-the-mill art school, nor is it like the many platforms that seem to be popping up to offer online courses. Sketchbook Skool is first and foremost a creative community of over 10,000 people around the world who meet to encourage and inspire each other.

Our plans for the new year revolve around building and engaging this community. That means new kourses but also things like webinars, ebooks, drawing projects, visiting artists, real-world get-togethers, and many more free forms of inspiration. We are reinvigorating Q&Art, our YouTube chat show. We also hired an amazing new editor for our blog, a former senior editor at Oprah and author of a dozen books. And we have a new COO and marketing guru who is streamlining our operations and making things run so, so much more smoothly.

Our reorganization means I have more time to do fun things like write blogposts and books, give talks, and make videos. Like this one — to announce our new year, conceived shot and cut in two days in NYC and Amsterdam. I hope you enjoy it and will join me at SBS in a few weeks.

Zork!

dannygregory17 Comments

Many moons ago, my late wife Patti and I started playing a simple, text-based video game on our first generation Apple IIc. ‘Zork’ was an adventure into an underground world where we had to solve puzzles and battle evil forces in a quest for some thing or other. Imagine Lord of the Rings, only in glowing green letters on a small black screen.

We became pretty obsessed by this, our very first video game, and many a night, one of us would wake up at 2 am and say to the other, ‘What if we took the left hand tunnel, climbed the rope, and used the rusty screwdriver to open the golden cask?’ and we would pop up, throw on our dressing gowns, and scurry off to to try this new strategy — usually ending up groaning with failure and collapsing back in bed hours later.

Every night, we would try and die. Try and die. Try and…

The next year, we continued to find ourselves popping up at 2 am — but now it was because Jack had been born and he needed something in the night. What was it? A bottle? A fresh diaper? A blanket? A song? A cuddle? We would work through different combinations of strategies (first the bottle, then read ‘Goodnight Moon’, then bounce him up and down. No, try it in reverse, etc.) until we found something that worked and we all went back to bed.

Jack’s first nickname: Baby Zork.

When Jack was seven, he got his first skateboard. He would run to the park with it each morning, practicing Ollies, trying to hop up and down steps, grinding, bailing, tripping, slamming and wiping out. Day after day, he would work and work and bring home bruises and scrapes. But Jack was determined and, slowly he went from a complete lummox to a reasonably rad rider.

When Jack got new video games, he thought nothing of investing weekends, evenings, holidays, hunkered down alone or with friends, working through level after level, trying and dying. Ask him why he put so much work in to it, and he would look at you aghast. That was the point, to try and die and try and die, until eventually you mastered the game.If you didn’t die, you couldn’t fly.

Neither Patti not I were athletic in any way. And yet we had this boy who pushed to overcome his genetic disadvantage to ride a skateboard, play soccer, basketball, football, whatever his buddies were into it. He never achieved the highest heights but he never really cared. It was fun.

Similarly, despite the obvious fact that nobody in our family could even carry a tune, Jack learned to play the guitar, then the drums, played in bands, had fun making music with his pals. Did it come naturally? Not at all. Was he planning on music as profession? Fortunately, not. Did he seem in any way ‘talented’? Uh, no.

Sure, Jack had friends who went on to record albums, play in clubs, achieve the heights, but Jack was just happy for them. He felt in no way like his time behind the drum kit was wasted. Playing music was just a new set of problems to crack, another fun thing to do. As was soccer, Call of Duty, cooking lasagna, and writing computer code.

Life is Zork. Your job is Zork. Your relationship is Zork. And learning to draw is Zork. You’ll make horrible blunders, create ugly things, waste paper, take wrong turns, cringe at your mistakes. Maybe you have a ‘talent’ for it, probably you don’t. Whatevs.

What matters is the journey, exploring the wrong paths, going on misadventures, tripping upon discoveries, learning from mistakes just so you can make fresh ones. Trying and dying and flying — and dying again.

That’s the game we are all here to play. Please enjoy it.