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.

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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