Sketchbook Dump

from january to november 2025

I generally have three sketchbooks running concurrently: one for drawing in transit, one for watercolor, and one for pencil drawings. This dump is the transit one: small, messy, gestural, anatomically incorrect, stream-of-consciousness, quite literally bumpy.

I called this sketchbook my “garbage dump,” so there’s lots of garbage in here. This was intentional—you have to make the garbage to get to the good stuff!

(But also I’m not including the pure garbage, like pages full of circles and lines and swirls and boxes. This is still a slightly curated selection.)

The stickers on this cover (except the yokai in the middle) are from a pack I made with Jacky Winter Group last summer :-)

Does anyone have thoughts re: my adderall question? Genuinely curious (for any stimulant tbh). Anyway, I like how I rendered the girl’s backpack and her thumb. Generally, I try to have economical linework, but sometimes I can’t tell if this style is a crutch or a genuine preference.

The comic is a true moment from teaching. The Obama meme happened to me. I think 8:30 am classes are zany and loopy and surreal—I personally can’t remember almost anything from my own 8:30 am college classes, I am so sorry.

I drew this on vacation with my family in California! They wanted to go on a hike, and I said no thank you and plopped myself in the dirt. A lady came up to me and talked to her dog about me (but also at me, through her dog)…? How does one communicate in a situation like this? To the woman or her ventriloquized dog?

A sketch from the same vacation and the same hike (my family left me alone for a pretty long time). I drew this scene a few times and ended up with this composition, which I quite like. I ended up using this sketch as inspiration for an editorial illustration I made for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

My partner. This one (flatteringly) looks like him. I’m always shocked when a portrait actually ends up looking like the person I’m looking at. I particularly like what I did with his eyelashes!

Löng neck. He hates this sketch (he’s vain).

More of him. He’s in this position 15 hours a day doing god knows what on his laptop. More importantly, I did an amazing job with my feet here.

Drew this while we had a “listening party” for our first ever episode of Melting Into Air. It was extremely hard for me to focus, so while the left side of the page is pretty accurate, the right side is a bit of a perspective disaster. I think I just really hate drawing across the gutter!!

I love my egg-head girl—she’s crying!! She’s me!!!!

Literally me

Out of ten or so hand sketches, this is the only one I’ll unashamedly claim as mine.

I had to quickly make a spec dummy book as a demo for my class, so I decided to make one about Thumbelina. Still love these sketches—still haven’t rendered my dummy book.

Some messy drawings. I made these half-asleep.

That’s a wrap! I plan to use this newsletter more frequently and more casually than my previous letters. Stay tuned for more from me (and some stronger sketchbook drawings that I still need to scan).

And let me know if I should render any of these sketches into actual drawings :-)

♡ ‧₊˚ ⋅ ౨ৎ ‧₊ .ᐟ

Marcie