Open Studio, is the free edition of this newsletter. It’s where I share updates in freelance illustrator life. Things I’m reading and working on. It’s like you just walked in and found me working. Welcome!

Obligations and Opportunities

I’ve recently come through some crunch time deadlines on a couple of books, getting sick in the final day of one of those books. I’m better now, and already I have a number of open tabs to work through.

This juggling of open tabs is one of the features of freelance work.

It takes a kind of tunnel vision to get through a picturebook especially the end stages, and the light at the end of that tunnel can be overwhelming. I was coming out of my cave and the vastness of things that needed to be done seemed to stretch into infinity.

To get a grips on what I had to do, I got a last sheet of paper and began to CAPTURE everything that needed to be done.I realised that what needed to be done fell in a few categories.

And more broadly they categories turned out to be Obligations and Opportunities.

Obligations were all once opportunities that we decided to pursue, and they can bring a lot of reward and satisfaction.

Opportunities are rolls of the dice.

And artist are inherently a kind of gambler. As I look at my lists it’s clear that I cannot pursue every opportunity or atleast not all at once, and definitely not all right away. I also need to manage my obligations to get them done in an organised fashion.

I guess being a freelancer is all about taking risks in a managed way.

Concretely that means deciding to do one thing at a time and ignoring everything else.

I think that’s the hardest thing about the job, deciding what to do and doing it. If you decide to pursue too many opportunities you spread yourself thin. If you decide to hyperfocus you risk being stuck or becoming redundant.

The guidance I might offer in making decisions about what to do is to understand the 80-20 rule. The idea that 80% of outcomes come from 20% of activities. And as much as possible strive to work on those 20% activities.

Because the reverse is also true, 80% of activities produce 20% of outcomes, and if we focus on those activities we get diminishing returns.

In this newsletter, I try as much as possible to point out those 20% activities that produce those 80% results.

I challenge you now to spend at least 20% of your days, weeks and months, pursuing opportunities

Reading List

One type of opportunity or 20% activity is reading. Because teams of experts spend hundreds or thousands of collective hours of effort to bring you something that you can consume in minutes a day. The thing to be mindful of and to make reading most effective is at the end of every reading session, write down one action you can do based on your new found knowledge. These are the books on my reading pile.

Art Life Practice

My favourite kind of books are the ones that tell you what action to take, and Art Life Practice, the guided sketchbook is exactly that kind of book. If you’ve never kept a sketchbook before this is a great way to start. The book is a jam packed introduction to making art delivered in bite sized prompts. It’s complete in the range of activities it covers.

I definitely will be using this in my daily practice when I don’t know where to start. As I do I’ll share my progress.

Real Artist Wear Black

“Art School professors and peers, family members, critics, galleries, random strangers — people say and do dumb stuff that can completely stop artist in their tracks”. Things like ‘Real artist wear black’ or ‘you should never paint again’ and ‘serious artist don’t have day jobs’.

, calls out all the bullshit, but also guides us on what to do instead. Instead of bullshit Danielle shares hard earned wisdom presented in a fun accessible style. In her book Real Artist Wear Black, and other lies about being creative.

Don’t Call it Art

I used to think of ’s Steal Like An Artist as a Trilogy, in many ways it has been the guide book for my own career. Don’t call it art comes at the perfect time, an inflection point for me and it’s chapters are presented as 10 ways to create like a kid again.

One of the chapters in the book is ‘borrow a kid’. I don’t have to borrow a kid because I have one, but however you get one making art with a kid is such a great way to learn.

Today we made whipped paint art, and even as I’m writing this she’s drawing a little cake next to me using that care free expressiveness that children have so naturally!

Updates on the newsletter

One of my obligations in writing this newsletter is to drop a new 5 day project every month. I’m behind on that as I’m working to organise the newsletter, another obligation in itself.

But I have a project coming up for you!

And it’s called, Drawing 100 faces: a Ten Minute Artist project. I had so much fun with the recent artgym workshop where we drew characters, that I wanted to extend it.

So over the next 5 days, I’ll be progressively guiding you through drawing 100 faces! If you’re new here, this would be a good place for me to tell you what you get as a paid subscriber.

1. As soon as you subscribe you get a new email everyday that will equip you with everything you need to start a daily 10 minute drawing practice. Including a new prompt daily for 15 days and a private community to share your work.

2. Every month you get a new 5 days project to help you keep the habit growing.

3. You get access to the entire project library of previous projects.

If you struggle with keeping a consistent creative practice (we all do), this community is the solution!

Subscribe now

One final Opportunity I have, is a chance to meet you in person in remote and rural Monsaraz, Portugal in 2027 as I host a 5 day retreat. In it I want to walk you through the process that starts with ‘ugly’ sketches in a sketchbook all the way through to a final illustration that tells a story.

I’ll be spending the rest of the day writing a post to tell you as much as I can about the retreat.

And in the coming week, I’ll be turning these ugly sketches into books!

Okay, you’ll here from me soon as I guide you to draw 100 faces in 5 days!

I’ve been meaning to write, but I’ve just been so busy.

I’ve finished one book, and right now I’m about to finish another in quick succession. So my days have been spent working through page after page of illustrations. When I sat down to write today it really felt like I had nothing to write!

It’s easy for me to write daily, but once I drop that, any other cadence is a slog. This is why I’m such an advocate for a daily practice of making something, the longer you stay away the tougher this stuff gets.

To get the creative juices flowing today, I started by folding paper..

I folded a sheet of paper into four, folding paper commits the paper to the task, it’s an easy way to start. On the sheet of paper I drew comics in the usual way. And here I found myself back in the flow. I wondered what useful think I could share with you, and I thought of some notes I took from a recent Andy J. Pizza podcast about getting the creative juices flowing.

“The acquired taste is so essential to your unfolding as a creative”

He was talking about how it’s essential to consume art and develop an acquired taste.

If feels unnatural at first, even fake or pretentious to read something or engage with art that is outside of your norm. But that inauthenticity IS the creative journey. Andy asked this question:

What is the last piece of creative work that lit you up?

And to be honest it was difficult for me to come up with something, my best answer would probably be a Youtube video by Yes Theory! Or the book about their journey.

I don’t know if that qualifies as real Art though. Maybe I should watch a classic movie or read something fiction. In the mean time, I read some Peanuts comic strips, that lit me up.

How are you doing, let me know in the comments, I’ve gotten a lot of mail from you and I haven’t been able to respond to everyone individually, I hope I will get to do so soon.

For now, I would love if you shared the last piece of art that lit YOU up? And what art experience you might seek out next.

I’ve been doing a kind of free-writing exercise on at off.

I call it start with an image. What I do is i find an image from a magazine, collage paper, or sticker book, and stick it in the middle, and write around it. What it does is turn the page into a kind of terrain that the words need to navigate. I find the extra effort and the strangeness of the exercise occupies the monkey mind enough, that it forgets to censor and criticise enough that the writhing just flows.

In today’s example I used an image from ‘The Eclectic World of Julia Rothman: Sticker Book’ I use to work from a different book where I cut out the images, but I don’t know, there is something so satisfying about choosing and using stickers

Here’s an idea of what I get to choose from…

I’ll be honest, when I learned they were making a book of Julia Rothman drawings as stickers I was so jealous! I was also covetous, even now as I’m writing this, my 5 year old is going on and on reserving stickers for herself.

So imagine my delight when the publisher reached out to me to ask if I would like a copy to review! I think I would not be happier if they asked my to collect my own drawings to be turned into a book. It’s funny how happiness works.

I got these books in the mail, days later, courtesy of the publisher.

The sticker book is like a curated sketchbook, collage paper and sticker book in one. It’s a beautiful usable artifact. And a book of wrapping paper is pure genius, first because Julia’s art elevates any gift, and second because a book is a genius way to store wrapping paper, if you currently store any wrapping paper, you’ll know what I mean!

You may have guessed by now that I am a Julia Rothman fan, I’m also a fan of sketchbooks and icons, so it’s just been wild to get to share her work with you!

Deadlines, I have them…

And oh so many of them! I’m on the home stretch of a couple of books (please recommend some good podcasts and audio books to listen to while I work)

I went to bed last night so exhausted, but also satisfied, it’s one of the greatest pleasures in life to go to bed exhausted doing something you love.

I’ve long days ahead colouring spreads, this is the fun part, it’s also lonely. It makes the time I spend with family so valuable. Also the time I spend writing things like this.

I’m planning a retreat, in real life

That is exciting, it’s like planning a holiday that some of you will take with me.

I’m calling it ‘Drawing playful picture stories’, the idea being that illustrations are picture stories whether it’s a postcard, a comic or a picturebook spread, pictures do the heavy lifting to tell a story.

I want to create an experience where participants tell a picture story with a character in different formats, I want you to experience this Medieval village in Portugal through the eyes of a character we’ll create together.

The retreat will run for 5 days and the 3 modules I’m covering are:

1. Discovering Story Moments, which is all about working with a sketchbook and moodboards

2. Bringing Characters to life, which is about techniques that you can start using at any level

3. Telling stories with pictures, the nuts and bolts of creating a picture story image

I’m going to use the opportunity of working with a group in the same place and time to do a lot of collaborative workshopping, but also give participants a chance to work on their own.

I’ve written thousands of posts and ‘known’ some of you for years, I’m really looking forward to the chance of meeting you in person and create some art together. I’ve also planned 2 unique keepsakes one that i will prepare for you in advance and one that we will produce together with no extra time.

And I’ll be offering each participant 1-1 office hours.

That’s the gist of it, I would love to hear your questions and thoughts about the content I have planned.

Finally, can I introduce you to who’s been a part of the community for 6 months, showing the results of her using the Ten Minute Visual Journal Method my free 5-day mini course to starting a creative practice in 10 minutes a day.

What are you working on? Write back!

Open Studio, is the section of this substack where I invite you into my life as an artist, illustrator and substacker. What I’m doing, what I’ve learned and what I’m thinking about. It’s also a way for me to process the weeks gone past and what’s coming up.

Open studio is free for everyone, so if you enjoy it please consider sharing it.

Share

On Sharing

It’s difficult to figure out exactly what to share.

There are things in early discussions that are really exciting that might not make sense to share until the ‘right time’, and others that may or may not happen. Then there are delusional ambitions which are also better left to talk about once they happened.

So I won’t be talking about those.

But I will say that after working almost exclusively on kids books for the past 5 years, I have been looking at other markets and I have been sending work out, and I have gotten a good response. I think deep research helped with that.

I’ve also had a couple of people reach out to collaborate on things, in person things, and it was good timing because I was ready to say yes to both.

On Picture Books

This week I finished the rough sketches for a book, I’m working through books at quite an intense rate now. On one It’ that last leg, where we’ve worked through thumbnails, roughs, and even samples for coloured spreads, so it’s really plotting through to finish colour on all the spreads. Another is waiting for feedback, and a third is at the beginning, text just finalized and thumbnails starting.

wrote a great piece on cheers and grumbles about picturebooks where she likened making picturebooks to a conveyer belt and I 100% agree with that analogy.

You’ve got to do some little bit of work and put it on the conveyer belt, pick up another piece do your bit, then place it back on, and on and on, and it’s years from start to finish. And if you stop putting stuff in the beginning of the conveyer belt, you’ll only notice the impact years ahead. The same holds through that if you keep putting in stuff at the start of the conveyor belt, you can expect good things to come from it indefinitely.

Jane also pointed out that the ratio of things that come to fruition is about 10%.

Now if we take that as fact, it’s something to grumble about, or something to work into our process.

I think where it gets hard is we sometimes expect things to come more easily than they actually do. There actually is a treshold where the time and effort return a result. Do we really want it that bad I suppose is the question we ask ourselves.

Where am I at on Picturebook? I think I’m starting to optimise for fun and ease. I think what we find easy and fun is a clue to what we should be doing with our time. I’m not saying every moment and aspect of everyday needs to be fun and easy. But it needs to balance up.

So with Picture-books, I’m balancing that out.

And to me that means when picking a subject, pick the one that’s fun to draw. When creating a character or designing a page, doing it in the most fun way. There are like two voices in our head sometimes, one says it should be done this way, the on the one says, wouldn’t it be fun if….

You actually get to choose to listen to the second voice.

Substack

I do a few things on substack.

This years with a closed group of 12 people, and I are leading a group through an end to end process of building a picturebook dummy, we call it . It’s a huge lift, but it helps us carry ourselves and the group to actually get a dummy done!

Then with we have a community that comes together to practice drawing in a very purposeful way at , this week we made comics, by digging up ideas and turning those ideas into a little comic strip.

Over here at I give ya’ll’s a project every month and this month’s project was also about making comics. Making comics falls under the category of authored work, and speaking of conveyer belts I’m in the early days of producing authored work and finding markets for them.

July Cohort

I have a flagship program on this substack called Gameplan: how to be an artist. It’s for people who want to start (or start again) either making art regularly for fun or even for profit, and it guides you through a 60 day journey, step by step with as little as 10 minutes a day.

Hundreds have gone through the program and we have a new cohort starting on Monday. July 6th. If you want to know more toggle on July Cohort Preview here.

I might be exhibiting at the Kuala Lumpur Art Book Fair, with a long time collaborator, it’s just for fun, we’ve sent in a n application and if we get in, I think I’ll produce a Zine.

Thanks for Reading,

Hello Artist Friend,

I’m doing this new thing here where I’m inviting you into my world as an illustrator, and I guess … writer, on substack. Just off the bat I want to say that I’ve been doing some fun things with paid subscribers on this substack, but this letter is not about that, I’m really trying to make this feel like you’re over at my place and I’m telling you what I’m working on.

As I do so I’m going to imagine you have questions, and those questions would be formatted like this…

Is it true that a huge publisher reached out to turn one of your substack into a book?

Where did you hear that?!, maybe… but if it were true, then maybe we’d be I’ll be talking to them again soon, about some positioning stuff and the market in general. And I imagine in that hypothetical situation, that it has been fun learning about publishing from the perspective of an author and not just an illustrator… but in any case, if such a thing was happening, I’m sure I would let you know as soon as I can.

Okay, let me say a couple of things about…

Making Comics

I don’t know if you know, but I never set out to be a children’s illustrator.

I actually set out to make comics for a living. But somehow it occurred to me at least for the moment I could probably find the most ‘success’ illustrating picturebooks, and so I took that most obvious path. I’ll talk about that path again later, but for now, I just want to say… that I got 3 of Lynda Barry’s books this year.

And I’m currently working through this one like it was a collage class. ( which is one way you can use the book)

I do it as part of my practice, normally early in the morning.

Recently when I lead a group of people through a program for building a daily program, some struggled to relate all the daily practice stuff, with the work of being an illustrator.

The mundane way I think of that is, the daily practice is like going to the supermarket to get the ingredients, for making, the thing.

It’s not a perfect analogy, but if someone is asking from that perspective it works.

Another way to think about it is like an athlete training for a competition, and the practice is the training, that informs the competition. My goal in working through this book is not to make any thing, at least not in the immediate future, but it’s to help me develop as an artist.

There are little things from my practice that end up being useful in my work almost immediately. But most importantly it rouses this love of making, and gets me into the state that is required it seems to make good work.

Lynda Barry talks about being doing a physical activity in a certain state of mind and that is what this book is about, a practice…something to do.

If you want to get started on a personal daily practice in ten minutes a day, I have a method that gives you a real bang for your ten minutes.

Couple of more things I would say about making comics.

1. If you’re a paid subscriber this month’s project will be about making comics, 5 days of comic related 10 minute prompts. Look out for that.

2. I’ll also be leading a work shop with About comics over on July 1st!

3. I’ll share my woken as I work through this pool in the Open Studio (this space)

Okay, jumping around… have you been watching

The World Cup?

I got a stack of illustrated copies of a book I illustrate about the life of Lionel Messi.

10 , five minute bedtime stories in one book and a perfect introduction to the sport. The book also features nonfiction sections where different aspects of the game are interested. If that’s your jam, guess what, it publishes TODAY!

My favourite part about doing this book was all the research and digging into the ten stories. The book contains over 100 pages and was made of sweat and tears.

If you do get it, enjoy!

Other than making comics, I have been working through Mike Lowrey’s getting paid to draw class. And what I enjoyed about it was of course the opportunity for personal interaction, but also getting a glimpse at how different illustrators put together an art career.

I’m at the 5 year mark of my own career which has been very focused on Children’s Books, and I would say, perhaps I miscalculated…

I couldn’t have known better, but really depending 100% on Children’s Book illustrations to make a living has its drawbacks. I’m proud and happy about the stack of books I have had the opportunity to work on, but when I look at other full time illustrators.

Particularly those who support families or even themselves, they do a diverse range of work.

And while I am not looking to slowdown working on books (I’m working on 3 as we speak) I am looking for different streams of income as an illustrator. This is an exciting switch for me.

Right now I’m doing the background work in my personal practice, but also the more mundane tasks of researching and outreach. I was on the hot seat in ’s Pro Chat last time around, and the group helped me think through some of this too.

If you’re a professional creative and want to hang out with ‘your people’ I highly recommend this community, I think some of the cool kids from substack are going to be in the next one which is this Wednesday.

How do I wrap this up?

I hope you like this format, I’m sure it’s going to be different every time as i try to figure out what works. I’m getting quite happy with how this substack is shaping up over the past 5 years.

I’m grateful for the people I’ve managed to help through my writing, and I’m grateful to everyone who’s popped in. Oh oh, I know let me show you something I’m working on….

This is a rough from a book I’m illustrating for an American publisher. It’s been a blast working with the creative director on this project.

One thing that was great is we spent 90 minutes talking through some early thumbnails, which saved so much back and forth email time. Moving forward I’m going to make that step a requirement with all my clients.

It turns this lonely profession into something that feels a lot more like a collaboration. I wish I didn’t have to go but I do.

I’ve got so much more to say… I feel like I’ve turned a page on this adventure, see you in the next one.

Oh! The question I had about being an illustrator was how to get to the next level and I guess the reason no one could answer that for me is, that it’s actually a question I need to ask myself, what would be the next level for me…

5 years ago the answer was to be a published illustrator with 10+ books, today, I need a different answer, a bigger identity, one that incorporates the Children’s illustrator, but is more than.

Maybe I can talk about that identity in the next newsletter, I think it will go off on a weird tangent.

If there’s anything you liked about ‘Open Studio’ or this newsletter in general please let me know in the comments!

PS: if you want a July Cohort Previewof How to be an Artist: Gameplan which can toggle that on here, to get those emails (some people love those emails while others hate em, so I’m making them optional ;)

In an interview someone asked.

What does losing feel like to you …Kobe Bryant ?

“It’s exciting.

It’s exciting because

that you have different ways you can get better

you can figure out and take advantage of certain weaknesses that were exposed that

you need to shore up right?

So it was exciting

Meaning

It sucks to lose right

But at the same time, there are answers there.”

This Commonplace notes are free for everyone. Paid subscribers get a new 5-Day project every month. The first one introduces The Ten Minute Visual Journal Method, and it’s FREE

Subscribe to get the Ten Minute Visual Journal Method in your inbox for FREE!

The Commonplace is a public notebook — quotes, observations, and half-formed thoughts from my reading life. No practical advice. Free for everyone. The index lives here.

”…fundamentally the commonplace method is a system for collecting quotations and other bits of information for personal use” -

A Commonplace practice produces a personal collection, in the past this has been books, scrapbooks and albums.

The specific unit of information or scraps might be thought of as an intermediate packets a term coined by Tiago Forte that refers to building blocks of information for future work such as essays, books, presentations etc. (for our purposes we’ll just call them notes)

The common place has been used to collect quotes, newspaper clippings and is the predecessor of more visual forms of scrapbooking. I’m particularly drawn to one Anna Jameson’s method of commonplacing where she wraps quotes with her own thoughts. Here is an example courtesy of Jillian M. Hess in ‘How Romantics And Victorians Organized Information.

I READ in the life of Garrick that, “about 1741, a taste for Shakespeare had lately been revived by the encouragement of some distinguished persons of tastes of both sexes; but especially by the ladies who formed themselves into a society, called the ‘Shakespeare Club.” There exist a Shakespeare Society at this present time, but I do not know that any ladies are members of it, or allowed to be so.

— Jameson, A Commonplace book of Thoughts

One of the core features of a commonplace practice is the index, which gives the creator or collector of the notes the ability to access their notes when they need them.

It’s also a difficult thing to keep updated. In this digital version, I’m going to attempt to keep an alphabetical index of links.

This Commonplace notes are free for everyone. Paid subscribers get a new 5-Day project every month. The first one introduces The Ten Minute Visual Journal Method, and it’s FREE

“Thus, contents of commonplace books became increasingly specific and personal rather than generally applicable” -

This (Easter) Sunday afternoon, on the 4th April 2026 my office studio is transformed into a study.

And sandwiching a nap, I wrestle from my arm chair, to my daybed to my desk with Jillian M. Hess’s book. “HOW ROMANTICS AND VICTORIANS ORGANISED INFORMATION, Commonplace Books, Scrapbooks, and Albums.

As I read the history of the practice, it occurs to me that our human need or desire to organise information could only ever lead to the invention of something like the Large Language Models, that serve as a kind of collective commonplace book. And making general knowledge universally available to anyone with a browser window and the ability to type or speak a prompt.

This access and excess of general knowledge, makes specific and personal knowledge all the more valuable.

In the Commonplace section of this substack, I am collecting or ‘commonplacing’ this specific and personal knowledge.

This is the ‘dead stock’ that while valuable has yet to be transformed into a ‘saleable commodity’. Here’s the trade, I offer this commonplace to you freely, and your attention compels me to make the entries at least comprehensible.

This post will serve as the index for this section.

I’m aware that most indexes fail, still I will give it my best go by tagging posts and indexing the tags. (Thanks to For the suggestion)

Index of Tags

Note Taking