10 Years Ago

Farewell to April and Hello to May
2025
   I want to go on a rant about the anguish I feel at the rise of AI and the current political climate in the US. But when I started writing said rant, it felt wrong, and I deleted the whole thing. Because I think if you’re loyal enough to my work that you’re here as my penpal, there is no need.
   I realized it is not my job to convince you of the value of traditional art, human art, and stories. It is my job to THANK YOU for being here, to celebrate your presence and your choices, your awareness,your kindness, your empathy. You are a part of the good in the world. Nothing could mean more to me.
   No doubt you already know about how weird it’s getting out there. What we need to do here is remind ourselves that there are so so so many of us (currently 115 just here in this community!) who care and will be a part of the solution. One that involves libraries, gardens, and beautiful diversity. A home for us all, space for everyone. From human to animal to plant.
   My job is so very special. I get to help all of us breathe and remember the good in the world. Rest, recovery, hope. Comfort.
   I actually took a cute little quiz the other day and I was genuinely surprised to get Hope as my Reason for Creating. (I’d expected something like longing/loneliness). But after reading my results, it actually brought me to tears. I truly hope that I DO create from hope. I hope my creations bring you hope. We don’t need any more anguish. Plenty of people are covering the worrying, the raw reality, the awful truth. I am here to dish out the WHIMSY.
   So now that I’ve acknowledged the elephant in the room and explained why I’ve given it a flower crown and fairy wings, let’s do this.
   Anyone want a coloring book?

Coloring Pages on Etsy

In a recent Letter from Love, Elizabeth Gilbert talked about reinvention.

  “I know, I know—it can feel to you like chaos, the number of different lives that you have already lived. And sometimes you even feel shame about all the different identities you have tried on and then discarded. You wonder why your history has been so full of what could look like disarray. And there is a part of you that longs to be stable, constant, reliable. ...Look around. What do you see on this planet that is stable, constant, and unchanging? It’s not the way of things here in this wild realm to be still. Even rocks change their shape, given enough time. ...And is it not true that the most generative creativity that has ever burst forth from you came out of a certain amount of chaos and upheaval and transformation?”

   I too want to shame myself for all the things I’ve tried and then discarded. The only thing I know is that I have NO IDEA what I’m doing. And every time I’ve been sure about something, I was most surely setting myself up for a big old embarrassing correction, because I was surely quite wrong. There was a time in my life when I was using tarot a lot and asking over and over what I should do, what was going to happen, where should I go, which path do I take? And the card that kept turning up was THE TOWER.
   If you know tarot, you know Death and the Devil are not the scary cards in the deck. Death is just something ending so something new can start. It can as easily be the end to pain as pleasure. It rarely, if ever, means a giant boulder is coming to flatten you into a pancake. The Devil warns us when we’re diving into the dark, but that can be by choice, to learn about ourselves. We are not being haunted and have no need of holy water.
   The Tower on the other hand means your carefully crafted sand castle is COMING DOWN. Get ready for everything to be destroyed, flattened, leveled, exploded, burned, buried, shaken up, bye bye. Yeah it’s making room for something new, but you’re in for one hell of a bonfire. Whee!
   It can be as welcome as Death or the Devil, depending on your perspective, but for little old me who just wants to GET SOMEWHERE GOOD AND SAFE and NEVER LEAVE, this card is my worst nightmare.
   But it turned up over and over and over. And now when I see it I laugh (and I cry, it’s a journey, I’m still very afraid lol).
   Because life is the Tower. Life is one thing ending after another, a constant ending and rebuilding and ending and rebuilding. And it sucks and it’s exhausting and it’s beautiful and it’s the point.

   This is a really long-winded way of saying that Google Drive has gone to the dogs and is doing all kinds of stealing and feeding AI (FYI if you don’t know already, all generative AI, chat GPT, etc, involves lots of water waste and usually plagiarism, so please avoid and boycott it) so I had to take all my files off Drive and switch to a different cloud service (I was recommended pCloud) and in the process had to do SO MUCH organizing and going through my laptop, my external hard drive, and Drive to get everything. I found folders of art that I had completely forgotten I had. Everything from blurry dim photos of art I did at 10 years old to scans of the watercolors I thought were my official mature style when I was 20, all of which nobody sees anymore.
   How vividly I can remember my state of mind when I made these! The way that a song or a smell or a taste can pull you back, my art does times ten. And for the vast majority of my life, I was making art because I was feeling some morbid cocktail of: lost, alone, sad, empty, desperate, not good enough, and afraid. I felt like the world was a horrific war zone I wanted to escape.
   My art is still escapism, but I’ve shifted the landscape. Instead of diving into images that feed the hurt and try to draw others into my alienation, I heal them. For years I was trying to match up to artists I admired by basically copying them. I put so little of myself into my work, and I had no idea what that would even look like. I didn’t know who I was, and what I did know I hated. So I drew spindle-thin fey women, aloof and sad and starved. They were everything I couldn’t be, super models with wings, ethereal. I strove for photographic perfection, using colored pencils on toned paper to see if I could make it look just like real life. I fought with transparent layers of watercolors that would go muddy and yet still too faint. It was art out of desperation and not any hope or joy.
   Now I notice I’m frequently drawing squat hairy little critters with softness and wise smiles. And a lot of frogs. My subjects seem to like to be purple and green and brown, lost in bushy eyebrows and freckles. My art now invites you into a place lush with fresh produce, green trees, cozy blankets, friendly bugs and helpful spirits. I’ve left behind the land of judgmental beauty queens and fully embraced the zen of the weird. It’s so much happier here. Everyone is welcome. Have a cup of tea, come and sit.
   (Have you ever heard it said that people tend to draw characters that look just like the artist? ...I draw a lot of frogs now...)

   So here is how it all went.
   I am the daughter of two artistic nerds. My parents met working at the same architectural firm. And being born in 1992, it was pre computers and cell phones and all that jazz. I had books and paper in abundance. Admittedly, I desperately wanted fashion, television, video games, social activities, flirting, make up, and a more frivolous modern life. I wanted to be loud and silly. (I still feel like I am at war with this part of me who wants to collapse into caring about nothing but fashion and gossip.) But my parents kept it away from me, both accidentally because they were so disinterested, and on purpose to encourage me to be creative. Resentfully I fell into doing whatever my older brother did. And my older brother loved to read, to write, and to draw. I listened to him tell me about whatever books he was reading and I tried to be cool and intellectual like my dad, creative and earthy like my mother. I was often very frustrated and felt like I was stifling myself.
   In grade school we did book making projects, and at home I made some glue and staple picture books with the ignorant confidence that I was making the best thing ever. At 12 when we moved from the city to the country I was unable to make friends and fell into deep dark depression. I had no friends, no life, and plenty of time to draw, draw, draw. All I did was write and draw. I became more and more introverted, afraid of the world, and by the time I was college age I was most interested in living under a rock. Instead I went to Grand Rapids, MI and was an art major (largely by force, college was just What One Did at that time). I met a guy who encouraged and shoved me to get out of my shell and started vending at the local comic con.
   As an artist, I started out drawing cats and cute things. I loved cats and pink, I had a very long standing chipmunk obsession. Then at about 10 I discovered manga, and started drawing “anime eyes”. At 13 I discovered Amy Brown and got watercolors and was obsessed with becoming her. I would be a famous watercolor fairy artist. I copied Amy Brown and Jessica Galbareth. Then in crept the obsession with Natalia Pierandri, who helped me branch out into pen and colored pencil sketches, sci-fi and strangeness. In highschool I took private oil painting classes with a local woman, who no doubt found me frustrating because I just wanted to draw FAERIES, not vases and fruit, and I oozed self hatred and insecurity. College was about the same. I finally had unrestricted access to the internet, and branched out, following many artists, both on Deviantart and in the famous art world. Stephanie Pui Mun Law and Larry MacDougall became my idols, and a Russian artist name Anne Weaver. I gritted my teeth through anatomy and life drawing and modern art classes, and graduated. I was then a full time artist, vending at shows, making watercolors like the artists I wasn’t good enough to compare myself to, and starting those photorealistic colored pencil drawings. Depression was still my most constant companion. I never said anything positive about what I made, no matter how many sales and compliments I got.

   After about 4 years of doing comic con, I made some new friends who started healing my little soul. Friends I still have today! They showed me I was actually not the only one in love with fantasy books and cartoons. They lifted me up and loved me, shy and small as I was, and they introduced to Steven Universe and Gravity Falls and Over the Garden Wall. OTGW hit me in a wild way, blowing wide open a door that had been cracked for years. The truth was, I didn’t enjoy making the art I was making. I wanted to make art that felt happy. Simpler, sweeter, more cartoonish, softer.
   So almost immediately after peaking and making what some would no doubt consider the most beautiful and realistic work I'd ever created, I dropped all of it and picked up gouache and I made this:

   It was childish, simple, and it brought me pure joy. I abandoned the dark persona that I’d been trying to inhabit (calling myself the Troll Maiden and attempting to match the vibe of Ravendark Creations, my two previous business names) and I picked up the name Lara Jean Doodles. It was 2017, I had been a professional artist for about 5 years. And I started over from scratch. 2018 I started writing and illustrating kid’s books in my new style. From chaos comes inspiration. My first panic attack in 2018 made me realize that if I died because I was too nauseous to eat, I’d be really sad that I’d never made a children’s book. That was when I originally started Wake Up, Herbert! In 2020 during the anxiety of the pandemic I wrote my first middle grade chapter book, Little Faun.
   The Tower energy has hit me time and time again, and yes, it takes out everything it can. It clears away all the dead and stagnant energy and in its place, wouldn’t you know it, lush and rich new things can grow. Do I still panic and resist every time? Yes. Absolutely. I am human, human, human.
   I am immensely grateful for and proud of that girl who drew and drew and didn’t know and hated and hurt and felt so very sad. She kept going, and now here I am, making what I make all because of her. Her persistence even when it felt meaningless was in fact the very thing that would lead to the skills I have now and feel genuinely proud of, the friends I can’t imagine not having in my life, and the perspective that makes me so much more gentle and joyful. Oh, the places you’ll go, little Lara!
   What's next, I wonder?
   I hope maybe in sharing the many hats I’ve tried, I can encourage you to let yourself try out and discard as many versions of yourself as you want to. We’re kind of here to fuck around and find out, I think. Yeah, we like to believe that the person who lives in the same house and works the same job for 50 years is “doing it right”, stable and reliable and admirable. But are they really? Or are they just stuck, dare I say limited? And as Elizabeth Gilbert said, who would you go to when you’re afraid and lost and hurting—someone whose never left the box they were born in, or someone who has also been everywhere and seen everything they can?

“Whose life has ever turned out exactly the way they planned? And if there is somebody out there whose life has gone exactly according to their well-laid plans, would you even want to be friends with them? ...How could they possibly hold your heart, or understand confusion?”

   Dear pen pals, I will always be oh so understanding of your confusion, because I myself am so frequently confused. Have been confused all my life, am confused right now, and will continue to be so until the day I die. It’s alright. Here, I drew this cute round soft thing with leaves. I think it will probably make both of us feel better.
   Until next time, hoping you are well and warm,
   Lara Jean
 
Quotes taken from Letters from Love by Elizabeth Gilbert