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January 2026 I have been thinking a lot lately about how much I love books. Which I'm sure is no surprise to you pen pal, since I do talk about books quite a lot. Most of my time these days is heavily dedicated to them in some way or another. I’m either working on my own book, the chapter books or the picture books. Or I’m working on a book for someone else, doing a read for a friend or a cover for a client or illustrations for a client. Or I’m working at the used and new bookstore in town, talking to customers about what we’ve been reading lately. Or… I’m reading. I have never counted how many books I read in a year before. I know that 2025 was a very reading heavy year. I managed 55 books (I read a few more after sending my last newsletter), and that’s a lot! I’m sure I was reading only 12 a year or less for most of my life. Especially when I was in school still. It’s hard to imagine that for more than a third of my life I really was not that interested in reading, and I didn’t start branching out of my silly little YA Fantasy corner until I was nearly 30. I didn’t decide to focus my energy on storytelling and illustrating until 2018. It’s amazing how something can go from being on the sidelines to being your whole world! I remember distinctly the first books that made me actually want to read. (Granted, my dad read the Lord of the Rings aloud to my brother and I at least twice in my childhood, but I didn’t totally pay attention most of the time.) In grade school my classroom had a tiny book a bout the life of Annie Oakley, and for some reason I read that repeatedly. That’s the only book I remember caring about. I was entirely disinterested until I was nearly 12, and I was give two Advance Reader Copies by my grandmother. One was book 2 in the original Warrior Cats series by Erin Hunter, and the other was The Treekeepers by Susan McGee Britton. I usually didn’t even read the books I was given, but for some reason this time I did, and I think it was because of the cover art. I really, really liked both—both the cover art and the story within. I then was recommended the Black Cauldron series by my older brother and I DEVOURED it. And then the doors opened to me and I actually wanted to read. I got lost in the weeds a bit with my teenage years, falling prey to the Twilight fandom. But I kept my head above water with other gems like Gunnerkrigg Court, all the Tamora Pierce books, finding Jane Austen charming, and eventually creeping farther and farther afield. I still prefer to read fantasy and scifi, but I’ve read a much wider range than ever before. Books are just amazing. They can take you places and teach you things and hold you safely when the world is too much but also take you out into it at the same time. They can be sacred or ridiculous. Humans can do a lot of weird and uncool stuff but MAN did we get it right with books. And books lead to libraries! And how magical and amazing are libraries, am I right?  Well, anyway. All that to say I’ve got a BOOK RELEASE COMING UP SOON! More of a re-release. A project I didn't plan on starting and COMPLETING in 2025, but hey, when inspiration strikes, I go with the flow! In about two months, I have updated Be Kind to Me to match my current skill as an artist, and I will finally have it available, cheaper and easier, through Barnes & Noble! No more overpriced copies only on Etsy or at shows, oh no. It will even be for sale at my local bookstore. Expect a launch email coming soon! I have been wracking my brain for how I can offer some kind of bonus to all those who’ve already purchased the book. I’m really sorry to say I can’t think of a good way to do anything, other than to say THANK YOU and I hope you’ve enjoyed it and I hope you aren’t too mad at me for not just making it really good to begin with. It was my first ever self published book and I went small on purpose. I have grown, and the new Be Kind to Me is a beautiful reflection of that.  I recently learned that this is a real thing that your brain really will do to you. We are wired to seek out what is familiar, and to associate that with “normal” and “safe” even if what you’ve lived with most of your life is a house on fire. I’d heard of this and thought it sounded ridiculous, even performative. Surely these people know better and are just… looking for attention or something. They’re somehow doing it on purpose. Right? ...Right? My personal never ending demon has been my self hatred. Its been present and noisy and non stop since I was very little. It put me in a never ending state of distress and freeze and anxiety. Thanks to LOTS of teachers and hard work and hard lessons and therapy and brainspotting, I don’t feel that way so much anymore. In fact I feel a significant amount of affection and care towards myself. This is VERY new for me, like, it really shifted in early December. It is almost surreal. So surreal, in fact, that I found myself struggling with *intrusive thoughts* almost immediately after. A big thing I’d been concerned about finally worked out, and I was suddenly faced with NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT. Everything going on (in my immediate personal circle) was quite manageable or even just good. I felt calm and grounded and safe and cool with myself and… that was the most alien feeling to my nervous system. Still IS alien. So what did it do? It started reaching for SOMETHING, ANYTHING to freak out about. Imagining accidentally cutting my fingers off with scissors, telling me my electric blanket was going to electrocute me, fixating on scary news stories about people getting attacked and telling me to be hyperventilate at bedtime, giving me the stomach-drop sensation, especially when I was trying to eat. When I described this to my therapist she actually laughed. “I’m not surprised,” she said. “You’ve been so disregulated your whole life that being regulated too weird.” She assured me it will level out, and the grounded safe feeling will become normal to me and my body won’t chase the high of anxiety to feel the old “normal” again. I just have to give it time, and in the meantime make comics about the old me so I can meet its hunger for PANIC with humor and compassion. I am grateful for my growth, but man, human beings are strange indeed.  My word for the year finally came to me. I know it’s the trendy thing to do right now, to pick a word that’s your mantra or theme for the year. I wasn’t going to bother, but I had one jump out at me. I’ve been OBSESSED with the music of Doe Paoro, and one of her albums is titled Soft Power. I like that concept a lot. To me, that means being like a cat. Obviously literally soft. But also cuddly, sweet, patient, all the wonderful soft things cats are. But cats are also deadly. They are the models of boundaries. They tolerate no nonsense. That’s the energy I want to bring into 2026. Not to be overbearing and domineering with power, but soft, willing to stand up for myself, independent but loving. Soft power.  Are you taking my advice from my last newsletter? Are you giving yourself a time of rest? I hope that you are. I hope you’re letting winter be winter (if you’re a northern hemisphere dweller like myself) and that you are allowing for as much hibernation as you can get away with in this crazy western capitalist culture we live in. (And don’t forget, if you didn’t get a chance to read the last newsletter, you can find it on my website in the blog section.)
I recommended reading lots of books and playing Animal Crossing. Hoping you are well and warm, Lara Jean
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Farewell, 2025! I’d like to invite you to join me in participating in the new year very differently than the typical modern western culture demands. Instead of racing into the start of 2026 like a gun has gone off and now you have to RUN, as if this is the time to push push push! Resolutions! Pressure to be your perfect self! In the darkest coldest part of the year, start doing ALL THE THINGS BETTER!—I have a different suggestion, hear me out... Maybe we should take a clue from ALL OF NATURE AROUND US and treat the new year like EVERYTHING ELSE ON (our half of) THE PLANET does in winter. Release and rest. This is a time for reflection and letting go of things that no longer serve us. Don’t overwhelm yourself with new habits, don’t start a thousand new projects. Give yourself an opportunity to rest. Shed your old tired leaves, lay down your burdens, reflect on what you’ve managed to achieve and whether through in the spring and summer and autumn that we’ve just left behind. Celebrate wins, learn from losses, and TAKE A BREAK. You can still do a little dreaming, think about what you’d like to start fresh with when the weather shifts to spring. SPRING is the time for starting new habits. We have the energy of the earth behind us. (Assuming you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, if you’re not, reverse accordingly lol). This isn't my idea alone, I have seen a lot of people starting to talk about this. It's such a good idea. In the spirit of this, I’m going to reflect on how 2025 went for me with no pressure to set intentions for 2026 that I start blasting away at January 1st.  At the start of 2025 I had set a couple of goals for myself (like a fool, ignoring the fact that it was winter and I was not going to want to do anything for months and months, and then Unexpected Things would happen and I’d end up going on a path unplanned). I wanted to: 1. Finish all the illustrations for Little Faun 1 2. Finish writing Little Faun 3 3. Make progress on illustrations for a new kids book 4. Be able to do 1 unassisted pull up 5. Travel to Europe to visit a friend in France I achieved 0 of these goals. YAY!!! I still have 3 or 4 unfinished Faun 1 illustrations. Faun 3 has been in rewrite purgatory all year and I’ve REALLY struggled with it. And I didn’t do squat on my own kid’s book… actually I remember now that I started an illustration and it’s like… 25% done, tucked away somewhere. Pullups are really heckin difficult, and some days I still can't do it unassisted. My passport has not been touched since I got it 3 years ago or whatever it’s been, and my France travel money fund has been raided multiple times for things that were definitely not traveling to France. Most recently, going to cut a Christmas tree. Those things are expensive? If you’ve been reading my newsletters you know that a lot of 2025 felt icky and heavy for me. I had an awful heartfelt struggle with some big grief and despair at the state of the world. The spring was non stop rain, the summer oppressively hot, humid, buggy. September and October were the ONLY months of good weather we had all year, not an exaggeration. I felt Seasonally Depressed all summer. Not the concoction for Getting Things Done. There were a lot of events I overreacted to, handled with not a speck of grace, or panicked about needlessly. Old habits haunted me. When I could have gone with the flow I flailed. When I could have been working on things I read books or spaced out or sulked in my chair. I watched too much tv—and not even anything NEW. I just rewatched Star Trek for the upteenth time.  THAT SAID, I count this year as a big win. Why? Well, first off, I CAN do one unassisted pull up. Sometimes. In fact, at one point I was able to do 3 in a row! I have it on film lol. But fun fact, fitness isn’t linear for me, and if I don’t sleep well or the sun isn’t out I am not as strong. However I have consistently maintained my routine of working out! I show up every week, I am enjoying it and it’s good for my body. WIN. Second, I may not have made the progress I’d hoped on my books, but I DID make progress. Faun 1 only needs 4 more illustrations to be done. At the start of the year I had only 3 illustrations finished out of 15! And I know that Faun 3 is going to be so much better than it was when I finally sort out this rewrite. It needed it. And these things take time. Faun 2 is written and edited and I’m really happy with it. Progress was made, WIN. Though I didn’t make a new kid’s book, I did finally get to celebrate the release of the book I made with my friend Rebekah. I was able to put Wake Up Herbert on Barnes & Noble. I started reworking illustrations from Be Kind to Me for an update version coming… soon? I made a grand total of 15 pet portraits, along with quite a few other pieces for clients, and I’m starting work on a new kid’s book for a client this month! I successfully participated in Artober and along the way felt like I saw improvement in my digital art that I’m excited to bring to future projects. AND LOOK AT ALL THESE PAINTINGS I MADE JUST FOR FUN   I see growth in these compared to what I was making in 2024! Two of these originals are sold and three of them I'm so proud of I'm not willing to sell them (yet). I mostly busted out art at the start of the year, but that’s okay! Life is waves, life is seasons, life is up and down and rest and then rush. It’s all alright. I had some really great shows and a couple kinda lame ones. I know that though I might not have been as productive as I’d hoped, I still made progress. Win. I read a total of 45 books so far this year. (I also want to note that I read my own books several times over in the editing process, so I feel comfortable rounding that up to 50.) I’ve never actually counted how many books I read in a given amount of time, but I think I read more this year than I ever have before in my life. Helped along considerably by being an employee at the local used and new bookstore. It was so good to have a safe place to escape to in the middle of all the crazyness this year. And some of them were really incredible books that have become new favorites.  I’m currently in the middle of reading The Galaxy and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers, and I’d guess I’ll finish at least that before the year is out. I went a little nuts with collecting books this year, thanks to my bookstore job and the discovery of Thriftbooks. I could not be happier. Here are my favorite reads from this year! NOT in order of appreciation, these are all pretty tied. 1. Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers (This one I do want to note that I reread the whole Wayfarers Series and it is in my top ten most favorite book serieseseses of all time.) 2. Guards, Guards! by Terry Pratchett 3. The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune 4. Gentle Chaos by Tyler Gaca 5. Leech by Hiron Ennis Gosh, I just love books SO MUCH. I was also lucky enough to get to see the Blue Ridge Mountains, visit Ashville NC, and I stood for a moment in 3 states at once (Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma). So technically I went to 4 states I’d never been to before. I’m up to 16/50! Kinda cool, even if a few of those I barely saw (standing with a toe in Oklahoma for 30 seconds doesn’t really count). Maybe in 2026 I’ll finally make it to the West Coast. Did I make it to France? Obviously not. I’ve still never been overseas, or really seen the ocean. But I still traveled! How lucky! Even trips to dumpy weird places can be eye opening. I had a lot of little local adventures with my friends, too. I spent a weekend in a treehouse with two of my favorite people. What could be better than that?  Best of all, I think this year I made some big steps to becoming a better friend to myself. I’ve been fortunate in having the help of some really wonderful people (therapists lol) and something has shifted. It’s subtle, but I think I like little Lara a whole lot more than I used to. What an incredible win. I spent plenty of days pouring sadness into my journal, lost and in the dark. Feeling hurt by all the things going HAYWIRE in the world. What a time to be alive. Pretty sure humans have been saying that since we could say anything to each other. I see so much happening that makes me want to become panicked and hateful, but that’s the very thing I’m seeing happen that’s causing all this madness. So I stay whimsical! I stay hopeful! And yeah, sometimes I’m very sad. But I get to share that sadness with friends who feel with me, and I get to use it to fuel my desire to lift up others with some cute little art. New music I fell in love with this year: Bonny Light Horsemen Golden Sun Revival by Trilling Dragons I do have hopes for 2026. I’m going to spend the next few months daydreaming about them and eating lots of soup. When the time is right, things will start happening. What’s meant to be will be! And wouldn’t it be great if Little Faun 1 could finally be published? And Be Kind to Me Revised could be released? And maybe I could finally see a tide pool, do a mural, or something so wonderful I haven’t even though to dream about it? What can you release that didn’t go like you’d hoped? What unexpected joys can you celebrate? What goals were achieved that you can enjoy the fruits of with gratitude? What flopped that you’ve learned from? This is what winter is for. Now tuck yourself in with a good read or a good game and I’ll see you in 2026. Be well and be warm my dear pen pals, thank you for being with me, Lara Jean p.s. Another goal I had for this year: finish this work in progress in time for my newsletter. Oh, well. It will happen in its own time.  Welcome November! 2025 Hello my darling digital snail mail pals! I hope you have a nice big cup of a warm drink and you’re feeling cozy. October has come and gone! In Tennessee this time of year is when the color is at its peak, and I’m looking out my window at a brilliant yellow maple as I type this. I have pumpkins on my front porch and hot tea in my mug. And a blanket over my shoulders and a heating pad under my butt, because old houses with beautiful big windows are not very warm when the temperature goes below 60F. As much as I look forward to walks in the silent, leafless woods in the coming weeks, I do dread the endless chill. But each season has its perks, and the awesome thing about this time of year is I sleep GREAT. I could sleep from sunset to well after sunrise. After a summer of restless tossing in our warm drafty house (75F is not an ideal sleeping temperature) I am a baby bug in a rug. Snug. Under 5 blankets. I made a lot of little doodles this month! As I said in my last newsletter, I decided I’d do another drawing prompt list challenge. I didn’t try and do every single day, and I skipped quite a few towards the end because I was busy with commissions. It was fun! I made some pieces I really enjoyed, and I feel like it was good practice with the medium that is Procreate. I found some new ways to approach how I make my digital art. Practice is like… really helpful? So here it is, the full collection of Artober drawings! I now have a whole section in my website dedicated to artober art! Click the button to go browse! To any of my artsy pen pals who did not do artober in any way or did a couple and then got overwhelmed and feel disappointed or ashamed: please be kind to yourself. In fact, if you were feeling overwhelmed or disinterested or stressed and you listened and you backed off and let go and did the pressing things instead, you should be so proud of yourself. Learning to listen to your body and know when something is too much is a valuable skill. Sometimes just doing the adulting and resting is all you can do. It’s really okay if you didn’t have the energy to draw every day. I didn’t either. Even I felt a little ashamed of myself seeing the artists who actually made a real paper and paint painting EVERY SINGLE DAY, but that’s when I pull out the old phrase “nobody ever grew or healed from shame” and focused instead on what I DID manage to do. Like the laundry and the dishes and my job. I’d like to extend a heartfelt thank you to The Glaze Project. Because of Glaze I could post my work without feeling sick about it. What is Glaze? It’s a program that applies an invisible filter to your artwork. What we see isn’t changed, but what AI sees ends up like tv static. It means my work can’t be ground up and spat out and recreated without my consent by AI. It’s completely free, too! There are people out there fighting the good fight, friends. Don’t lose hope. I also had the chance to make a LOT of pet portraits! THANK YOU for your commission purchases! I adore all of your pets. I know I say this every time but I just LOVE painting pet portraits. And if you want one for a gift, I’ve got openings and there’s still time! I can even do digital and Animal Crossing style portraits. (On that note, who else is feeling a resurgence of Animal Crossing yearning with the announcement of the update???) I can FINALLY share with you that a project I did last year is available in print! I illustrated a book for a client, and it’s now out on Barnes & Noble. This was my first ever full picture book client, and it was a blast to work on. How could a Halloween themed book not be fun?   Happy highlights of the month: Tybalt falling out of the cat tree because he was having Too Much Fun. Twice. (unharmed). Tybalt bringing me the BIGGEST praying mantis I have ever seen (also unharmed). Mimsy getting very demanding for snuggles because of her tiny chilly toe beans. Lots of small gratitude for sunshine and blue skies and good friends, and therapy. Rewatching the BBC Narnia series that I watched probably a million times as a child but hadn’t seen in 20+ years. WHAT A HOOT.
Big highlight: I got an immense amount of smug satisfaction out of canceling my Spotify subscribtion. Mwahahaha. The app I switched to is called Qobuz, and I have zero complaints! They pay their musicians, they have great streaming quality, everything I listen to is there, and the subscription price was actually cheaper than Spotify. And the CEO is not currently a… well, you know. There’s even a feature in the app where you can pay $5 one time and it transfers over all your playlists and liked songs for you. THE POWER. You actually don’t have to give money to monsters. I know that the days are not only getting shorter and darker literally, but also feel that way emotionally too. It’s really hard to have the right words to say about it. And I do want to keep my newsletter a bright relief from the relentless negativity and fear out there. So I’ll say just this: Consider doing something very small and very local if you are feeling icky but able. Something like a food donation or even $10 to a local food bank. I've seen my local community doing a lot of this kind of thing and it makes me hopeful. It can be a text to a friend. Maybe host a dinner party. Ask for help, and be willing to accept it. We build community both by giving AND accepting help. If we always refuse to take help, we isolate and alienate. Nobody needs that right now. Tell your friends you love them and see how they’re doing. You might not be able to hold the whole world together, but you can definitely help hold up those closest to you. That’s HUGE. What’s your library up to? When’s the last time you went and took some things off the shelves? Fun fact, they get funding based on use, and use counts as: they had to put a book back on the shelf for you (so just take random books down and put them in the return cart), you used the wifi (you can bring your laptop and do your homework or scroll through tumblr), you reserved a room (for free) and had a club meeting (for book club, silent reading, a craft day, a parallel play date, a writing group critique, D&D, etc), you took out a book and took it home and returned it (even if you didn’t read it), you rented a movie or a game or a tv show, you used their services to get an audio book. Did I mention it’s all free? Pretty small stuff with a huge impact. Not overwhelming, no need to strap a sword to your belt and rush out into the fray. Small deeds are really great, actually. So if you’re able and doing them, thank you. You’re my hero. Until next time, hoping you are well and warm, Lara Jean Welcome October! 2025 I am not immune to a good pumpkin. I love pumpkin pie, I think the autumn aesthetic is cute. Why not? Why not enjoy as many things as we possibly can? Autumn used to hold a lot of heavy worries for me, since it used to be when I had to go back to school (stressful) and it meant winter was coming (seasonal depression, head colds, and in Michigan just cold, cold, cold) but things change. It became the season of the Renaissance Festival and Comic Con when I lived in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and now it’s the season where you can finally go outside again soon here in Tennessee. October is the month of the drawing challenge originally made famous by the inktober craze, now morphed and co-opted by many names like drawtober and cozytober, etc. (Also alas yet another… individual... kind of made an ass of himself and a mess of inktober so we try not to use the name anymore.) Basically artists lose their minds trying to do a drawing every day around a daily word prompt. I believe I’ve participated maybe 5 times? Six? It’s a bit hard for me to keep track…  This year I’m giving it a go again! In all honesty I get partly motivated by shame. I see ALL THESE ARTISTS DO IT, so I should be able to, too!!! I must try to be as good as them! Though I have no idea how some of them make an actual paint-on-paper-painting every day. I’ve had to turn it into my own version—I pick a prompt list, I do everything in procreate, and I start the week before it starts (if not sooner) so everything is done ahead of time. And I skip days, allowing myself weekends off where I just don’t do prompts that I can’t come up with anything for. It protects my sanity while still getting me a bit shaken out of my ruts. I’ve been beating my head against the same project for months now, trying to force myself to work only on the stories about Faun. But I don’t feel inspired anymore. Taking a break to draw “grandma strawberry” and “sleeping mountain” from the list by artist Kawafi for their kawafitober feels really good. It’s a pain in the butt to have to Glaze every piece before posting for my peace of mind, but here we are. (Glaze is a free program that protects images from being readable/digestible to AI.) I’m also preparing some original paintings on wood for my upcoming shows this month! Saturday October 4th I’m in downtown Clarksville TN for Artsville, and Sunday the 19th I’ll be at the Wilma Rudolph Event Center for the Halloween Market! September went fast. I know, the horrors persist, but let’s allow ourselves some small spaces where they are not what we focus on, eh? The horrors persist, but so do I. So do you. Bravo. And there are little wins and big wins too, if you look for them! Lots of little joys. Speaking of joys, I have another friend to introduce you to this month. Ash Elizabeth Art  Though I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting Ash in person, I very much count her among one of my good friends! We, cool kids that we are, met via tumblr years ago, and became snail mail pen pals as well as artist buddies. Yes, some people really do still send each other paper letters. You should try it, it’s good for the soul. Ash has created a cozy little universe that is a balm in these trying times. She paints wee little animals who would feed you and house you and read to you till you fell asleep safe under a quilt. She also crafts beautiful tiny clay things, books, cookies, mushrooms, you name it, it’s tiny and you can wear it on a chain. I’ve been obsessed with miniatures since I was miniature myself (in fact I once stole a tiny book from Frankenmuth when my parents told me I couldn’t have it because I was a goblin of a child and I needed it). And if you’ve ever loved pigeons, you’ve found a friend in Ash. How could you not love pigeons???? The world is in desperate need of creators of whimsy and cozy peace, and Ash is out there making it for us. Take a look!  When did you start out writing/drawing, have you been drawing forever or did it find you later in life?
 How would you describe your work style? Steady? Sporadic?
 What fictional character do you identify with the most?
What’s brought you the most joy lately?
Please have a look at Ash’s SHOP and give her a follow. As always, the best way to support artists and small businesses is to DONATE, to BUY, or to SHARE!!! You know you need something tiny that sparks joy in your life. Gentle reminder again that we’re nearing the zone of holiday gifting! I won’t be able to take on last minute projects, so if you wanted a pet portrait, a family portrait, or a custom piece to gift it’s important to contact me before mid November. After that I can’t promise I’ll still have time or availability! I hope to see some of you at my coming shows! Thank you for being here friends, I hope you enjoyed my friend’s art as much as I do. I hope we’ve brought just a little bit of joy to your day! Wishing you well and warm, Lara Jean Here’s a peek at my wood slice art!  SEPTEMBER. FINALLY. Already? 2025 It is both amusing and embarrassing every single time the weather changes for the better and I’m Suddenly AY-OKAY. In a sudden miraculous shift, Tennessee has dropped the haze of constant 95F and 90% humidity that hit in mid May and it’s been 80F during the day, 55F at night FOR OVER A WEEK and I CAN BREATHE. Everything is fine. What was I so freaked out about all year? *remembers AI, tariffs forcing all the artists I follow to shrink their business, climate change, inflation, impending big life changes* ... Ah… yeah, that. So things are still scary, in the grand scheme. But I will lean into and take all the soothing I can get from having the windows open and needing a sweater to drink tea outside on my porch at 8am. It makes my capacity to handle it all expand significantly. I’m just a little animal, after all, though my big noisy brain tries to convince me otherwise. I tell myself I should be above being affected by the weather. Ha! And yet a 70F day with a blue sky cures me temporarily of just about everything. So cute. So humbling. In August I spent 10 days in Michigan expecting a blessed break from the heat, and instead, just in time for the week I was there, I got:  I've had bad luck with travel weather this year. My visit to Michigan in LATE May when it decided to be frigidly back in the low 40's instead of spring, my trip to Missouri where it rained and rained and threatened tornadoes, my camping trip to the Blue Ridge Mountains where it also just rained constantly. Well, at least I still managed to get in one swim in Lake Charlevoix. Maybe it can be enough until I get to try again next year. I was so hopeful that after being away from my routine I’d feel a renewed sense of productivity, but I came back just as stuck in Getting-By mode as before. Alas. I'm sure I've already said it and I'll say it again, 2025 has been such a hazy blurry fog, I can't seem to make myself focus on anything. Every day I've just watched myself somehow spend the whole day not making anything creative happen. It's this surreal, out-of-body passive gloom. I know how to be productive, I've done it before! And yet I can't find the energy to lift my lazy bones. There doesn't seem to be a point to trying. And I thought I'd finish another children's book this year. HA. Maybe my productive season will be fall/winter??? One can only hope. I have always hated winter and been a pure summer girl, but this year I can’t WAIT. I want everything in Tennessee to die so I can go outside again. And in the meantime, I’ll play Dragon Quest XI, Pokemon Friends (I finally got a bulbasaur plush the other day, so that's an achievement), read book after book after book, listen to What’s All This Then while I do the dishes, and keep practicing those pull ups. Kozz Draws! This month I am bringing in something new! (Well, new-ish, I did INTERVIEW REBEKAH when PENNY AND THE POCKET DRAGON came out.) (Which you can get in HARDCOVER now!) (So actually not new at all.) Since I'm not making any art and have nothing to show you (LOL) I’m interviewing an artist I love so I can share them and their beautiful creations with the world, starting with another one of my long time friends. I met Erica (who I struggle to remember to refer to as Erica because in my head she is just Kozz) somewhere around 2014 or 2015. A big grey area in my memory, as I was not very happy in those days. I’d graduated college, and my partner at the time was also a fantasy artist and much better at Meeting People than I was. I got to be along for the ride, for Artprize and Grand Rapids Comic Con in Michigan. Erica was one of the many talented people my then-partner gravitated towards, and BLESS HER she let me quietly co-opt her and make her one of my favorite people on the planet. She was with me through some really weird and difficult times, and those kinds of friends are the good, sticking kind. On top of all this she’s a crazy talented artist, too. I always want to describe her art as Deep Sea Fantasy Lisa Frank, but I feel like that still doesn’t cover what she creates and I’m not sure everyone understands it as the high compliment I intended it to be. What I love most about Erica is that, from my perspective, she has never let not knowing how to do something (yet) stop her. She dives into projects and experiences outside of her comfort zone for sport. With all the colors of the rainbow. And glow in the dark paint. This human never stops drawing. Ever. I used to find it infuriatingly envy-inducing, and sometimes still do. She’s a comic artist, a needle felter (feltist? feltsperson?), a cosplayer, a writer and an illustrator. She’s great to talk to about books and movies, she’s so very, very kind, so funny and so warm, and I’m really glad she and I are past the 10 year mark as friends, because I read that means they're usually a friend for life. Yay! I’m 99% sure she was the one who told me I would really like Over the Garden Wall, which I’ve said before was a huge catalyst in pushing me to shift into the style of art I make now, the style that suits me and feels like my real home. So we have that to thank her for, along with too many other things to count here. I treasure every moment we spent laying on the floor drawing together and being excited about Steven Universe. I say the time we met was a grey spot, but it had its bright moments too! Erica, I don’t call you anywhere near as often as I should, thank you for listening to me whine for ten years, let’s have a parallel play date soon.  What is your favorite medium to work with?
 Favorite animal?
 What fictional character do you identify with most?
 What has brought you the most joy lately?
 Huge thank you’s to those who reached out for commissions last month! As always, I am SO VERY grateful for your support of my work, and I am smitten with every single one of your darling pets you have me paint.
Until next time, I hope you enjoyed my friend’s rainbow world as much as I do, Lara Jean   Hello August! 2025 How's everyone doing? We hanging in there? Yes? Good. Have a nice cold glass of water and take a breath. Better? Wonderful. After camping for 5 days with no signal in the Blue Ridge Mountains, I came home nervous I had moldy clothes and trench foot (I had neither) but also with a STRONG desire to delete instagram from my phone. I've already done this with facebook, though I haven't deleted the profile I never check it anymore. As a business owner I tell myself I "need" to have a social media presence. But do I? I have never been any good at getting online shop sales, my audience always seems to be small. At the end of the day what am I doing on there other than prostrating myself begging for attention and seeing things that make me jealous/stressed/insecure/upset? (And, yes, the occasional really funny video of someone making a ditty to the chime of their washer and dryer.) For now instead of deleting I've gone with just having self control, and I'm pleased to report I've barely spent more than ten minutes on social media a day since returning from the mountains. It was unsettling how SCARED I was that I would MISS THINGS. I can't check up on my THINGS!!! Who will validate me for the giant bowl of basil I harvested? NOBODY??? But once forced to let this go? Wow. Relief. I've still been foggy and frantic, don't get me wrong. It's still 95F every day, 90% humidity, there are still plenty of worries floating in my head. And I've been incredibly unproductive as an artist--no writing, no editing, no progress on book goals, barely painting. Most of what I've managed is some little sketchbook doodles. Slowly, slowly, I'm coaxing myself into starting a new children's book. I'm making the sketches. I'm a snail in molasses. Deep breath. More water. It's okay. I did very much enjoy listening to the very start of the D&D podcast Dimension 20 Fantasy High while I played around with this painting. I don't practice backgrounds as much as figures, and with no clear reference photo I struggled! But the goblin is so cute.  Last month I walked you through the steps I take to create a painting. This month I'm going to go into detail about what brands and materials I'm using! This is in part to celebrate finally finding a brand of paper I REALLY like! But also I know sometimes if you're eager to make art, knowing what materials you need can be a daunting hurdle. What other artists do can seem like magic, and I want to offer some clarity. When I started out in 2007, there weren't as many online resources as their are now, so it felt like everything was this big secret. I'm so grateful to all the artists who so generously shared their "secrets" so I could learn, and it is my pleasure to offer the same to any artists following me. (*Please note, I'm by no means saying I've found the best ways and tools, this is just how I do it for now.) So without further ado, here's everything you need to know about what I'm using to make my art.  Paper: -For sketching: Strathmore brand sketchpads. I keep a small 5.5x8.5, a mid size 9x12, and a big 18x24 inch on hand. I sketch sloppy, I erase a TON, so I never draw right on the watercolor paper. I'll transfer a sketch from sketchpad to watercolor with a light pad. -For painting: Fluid 100, cold press watercolor pad, 140lb or 300lb (refers to how thick the paper is). I really like a toothy (rough, like sandpaper) paper without too much texture (like little waves on water, I like little to no waves) so that I can do lots of detail without it being lost in the texture, but it's still absorbent. This paper is the best I've found lately. I keep a 12x12 and an 18x24 inch pad.  Drawing: -Mechanical pencil, 0.5mm F graphite and a 1.1mm with softer graphite. (I use the 0.5 size mostly because I found that adorable cat pencil and it only came in 0.5mm.) -Staedtler permanent felt tip is the marker I'll use to trace a sketch before transferring from sketchbook to watercolor paper, to make it more visible and refine shapes -Micron 01 archival ink felt tip for occasional details Painting: -Winsor & Newton Designer Gouache. I've tried other brands and dislike all of them very much. W&N seems to have good pigment, great texture, and the designer gouache can be reused like watercolors once dried. You can get acrylic gouache or a jelly gouache, but I personally much prefer the designer kind. -Brushes: I got THIS set because I wanted a fatter handle to reduce hand strain. Turned out not quite what I'd hoped for exactly, but in terms of range of sizes and brush quality they are just fine! I usually browse a craft store and select brushes based on good handle color and fun shape. Mostly I use round brushes, but I highly recommend some flat and funky ones!  I use Procreate, either to edit a finished gouache painting (adding watermark, adjusting the scan hue/saturation to match the real thing, editing out cat hairs, cropping for print sizes) or for creating a full piece. I'm weirdly purist and either use just Procreate for a painting or just gouache. My iPad is the iPad Pro, 12.9 inch 2nd gen. I've been extremely happy with it! I never used Photoshop or any other digital art program, and Procreate was so friendly and accessible for a self taught digital artist. An incredibly useful tool for expanding my comfort zone. I like to use it for making color tests for gouache paintings and trying things that scare me, drawings I know I'll have to do badly for a bit so I don't waste expensive watercolor paper and paint. Brushes used: Stucco Oberon Water Brush 6B Pencil Narinder Pencil Oriental Brush Charcoal Block Dry Ink Hard Blend I also bought 2 brush packs to supplement the ones that come with Procreate which I really like: -Watercolor Maxpack Max U Waxy Pencil -Schrill Art Big Stew Waxy Texture Pencil Coarse Texture Pencil Ginger Skin Waxy Dense Pencil Both come with near a hundred brushes, of which I use... only the brushes listed (yes, I don't even use the watercolor brushes from the watercolor pack shhhhhh it's fineeeeeee). I prefer a limited number of brushes that are as close to natural looking tools as possible. I want TEXTURE. My favorite thing is when people are looking at all my prints at a show and can't pick out which is digital and which is gouache. I like to sketch in either the 6B Pencil or the Waxy Dense Pencil. I block in backgrounds with Stucco, add far away details with the Waxy Texture Pencil and MaxU Colored Pencil Waxy, then I add closer details with Oberon. (On several of these I edited the brush to allow them to go bigger.)  Here's where I work! I am not a minimalist. You can see here that I've got a basic desk, a couple of easels (one from Michaels and one larger I inherited from my architect parents), a light I commandeered during my manufacturing job days, my scanner, and tons of notes to myself and art that I love. Other tools: -Light Pad/Table: A most handy dandy gadget. A daytime window does the trick in a pinch, or any clear surface with a light behind it (glass table, piece of plexiglass and a lamp, etc). I am spoiled with my Art O Graph light pad, and grateful to be so. -Scanner: PlusTek brand. It’s an older model, I’ve had it for maybe 10 years now. They are expensive, especially for one that size, but a must for getting good reproductions of my art. I still have to do some fiddling to get the scan to match the original. There's probably a trick to it that I don't know. -Printer: I have a very cheap HP printer for printing random documents and sometimes sketches I've done in procreate I want to paint in gouache. For all my art prints, I use IPRINTFROMHOME. They offer a paper sample pack of all their print surfaces, tons of sizes, and I don’t have to lose sleep, hair, and time over messing with the infinitely infuriating process that I hear is printing. Win win. If you want to start using them, please use the link above and MENTION MY NAME and YOU get a discount!!! I even use them for ordering photos for my photo album. Useful Programs: -Affinity Publisher: For building and editing PDFs, one time purchase not a subscription. I believe it was about $60. I don’t use anything Adobe. Who can afford that? I've probably only tapped into about 5% of what this program can do. -Paint: I sometimes use this to resize scans and to add a watermark before posting them online. Very oldschool of me, I know. -Libre Office: FREE alternative to Microsoft Suite. Highly recommend. -pCloud: Not free alternative to Google Drive, offers a one time purchase package instead of a monthly fee. It backs up all my files and auto syncs folders on my computer to the cloud. If you can afford it, a great tool for your peace of mind. And they seem to be morally sound and not implementing any shady things, like giving themselves permission to access anything you have saved there and feeding it to AI like Google Drive does now.  Other thingsss:
Ruler (metal with cork back), Exacto (for putting a little fear in you), studio cat (for distractions and adding cat hair in paint for seasoning), snail paintbrush holder (for pure joy), circle template (so you don’t have to find the exact right sized cup or bowl every time you don't want to paint a background and just want a circle), Prismacolor colored pencils (I don’t use them much anymore but they’re the best colored pencils I’ve ever used), so many notebooks and pens for journaling and scribbling ideas, masking fluid (this is a tricky little substance I frequently forget to use, but can be handy for blocking off areas when painting-- just don't leave it on the paper more than a day or two or you will rip the paper when taking it off!) a doorway pull up bar (for frequent breaks to dangle for 30 seconds and decompress your spine) See? No magic anywhere! Just time and patience and some fun tools. Are you feeling inspired? Do you have grabby hands and just really want to get some fun toys to play with? Well good! Drink some more water, grab some paper, and have fun. Play around and find what works for you. At the end of the day you can use whatever tools feel good to you, even if it's a ballpoint pen and a piece of lined paper or the back of a receipt. We all start somewhere. The key is to start. Have any questions? Feel free to email me or send me an instagram message. Wishing you a little creative joy, Lara Jean July 2025 Summer arrived like a hammer here in the United States, especially the south. A hammer with a flamethrower. After weeks and weeks of haze from the fires in Canada and quite a lot of rain here in Tennessee, we have had crisp blue skies and every day in the mid 90’s. July can be a hard month, since it starts with a literal bang here in the US which can be incredibly stressful for people and animals. I'm guessing dear pen pal there's a good chance it felt extra offensive this year, since we're not particularly in the mood to celebrate being American right now, especially with traumatizing explosives that damage the environment. The irony, right? I see you, I feel your frustration and your sadness, and you're not alone. I hope everyone survived and was safe. We made it past the most challenging weekend! The only thing I’ve done lately that really felt good was sitting with my feet in a chilly creek with a couple of friends and our water bottles. I’ve had a heavy, sleepy haze over me so far this summer, not at all what I’d hoped for. Though I'd achieved my goal of 1 pull up and even managed 3, I now for some reason can't even do one. My body feels weak, no matter how many rest days and how much sleep I give it. This time last summer I was a force to be reckoned with! Solar powered, fully charged, writing a thousand words a day, wrapping up illustrations for a client, just all systems go. About all I’ve done this month is consume books. 25 so far this year. In the last month, exclusively candy books. Books with no nutritional content that I eat in one sitting and love, though it’s not very good for me and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else. My series of choice has been the Mercy Thompson books by Patricia Briggs. ZERO nutritional value. I have to forgive myself over and over for not being as productive as I’d hoped. I close all the blinds and keep the AC at 77F, while prostrating myself in gratitude for our reliable power grid and the fact that we do have central air. What a miracle. I put ice in my matcha and reapply deodorant 3x daily. This too shall pass, some day I’ll feel productive and inspired again. Until then, I’ll keep identifying bird calls with my Merlin app. If you'd like a little something easy you can do that will help, feel good and not scary, here is a LINK to email your representatives about keeping public media via NPR's website. It fills it all in for you, auto sends it to the appropriate party, all you do is input your email and address. You do not have to figure out what to say or who to say it to. I promise this is an easy, practical act, and though small, it makes a difference. What I have for you this month is a little walk through of a painting I did at a most languorous pace this month. Early June I was a vendor at Nashville Comic Con, and was noticing that people seem most drawn to my paintings of tea parties and my new paintings don’t sell as well. I decided I’d make a new tea party painting! I drew the sketch at the show.  I usually start with a light pencil sketch in my sketchbook, then I either go over it in darker pencil or ink before using a light pad to transfer it to watercolor paper. (I think next month I’ll walk you through all my materials in detail, so you’ll get to know specific brands!)  After I’ve got the sketch on paper, I either dive right in or sometimes do a color mock up in Procreate. This time I just went for it. I paint with designer gouache!  There are always cat interruptions. (Yes, I have a desk I have started to use more often. And yes it is my own fault for painting laying on the floor.) It takes me anywhere from 1 to 10+ sittings to get through a painting. Three hours is a quick painting, usually spread out over a few days. The big complex ones take much longer, and I’ve never actually tracked just how long. I don’t sit for long stretches very well, so I’m always up and down and doing maybe an hour at a time before I have to go do something else. This little one took me at least 2 weeks to get through, despite only taking maybe 3-4 hours of actual time.
I had some cat contributions and some accidents in the white area, not ideal. But for making prints, totally fine! I’ll now scan it and upload it to Procreate. I don’t do a ton of editing, just a quick little clean up and then it’s ready to go! 
Definitely my kind of tea party right here. Bring your frog to tea!  Prints are available on Etsy! Original painting is available as well. Please email me if interested.
I hope you enjoyed seeing my process! You can look forward to a detailed breakdown of the materials I use next month, if that’s something you’re curious about. I hope everyone is staying cool, staying well, and finding little things to delight in! Lara Jean June 2025 I had the guts and the foolishness to enter Beautifully Bizarre’s annual art contest. In doing so, I was signed up for their newsletters, and recently received their feature on the work of artist Michael Parks. As I looked at his paintings, I was amazed not only by what some people are able to do with oils, but also by the haunting familiarity of it. I knew I’d never seen it before exactly, but something was ringing a bell. I was so taken with his work that I really wanted one of his art books! They’re all out of print now, but good old Thrift Books had my back and I lucked out and got a copy of this volume.  When I saw the cover online, my jaw dropped. THIS was why I thought I’d seen it before. I was right, I hadn’t actually seen his art—but what I had seen, and stared at for hours and hours, was this painting by Amy Brown.  In her book Amy Brown talks about being inspired by artists like Brian Froud and the writing of Charles deLint, but to my recollection she never mentions how often she borrowed poses from the paintings of Michael Parks. This is in fact the most liberating and wonderful thing I’ve ever discovered.       Both Amy Brown and Michael Parks create uniquely recognizable art—it is theirs and theirs alone. They both have immense bodies of work that, when viewed zoomed out, could not be more different. (I've picked out some of their most similar paintings, but browse their galleries individually and you'll see what I mean. Michael is very surreal and Amy is so whimsical.) They’ve both had successful careers in their own way! But they often repeat a pose or a theme, like multiple studies of the same fantastical photograph. Are the faeries of Amy Brown any less wonderful for standing in the EXACT SAME POSE that Michael Parks used? For occasionally occupying the same mysterious warm stone castle in the sky? Who did it first? Were they both looking at some classical painting I don’t know about? I’ve been reminded of a wonderful realization I had in college when studying the classical masters. Over and over we were shown paintings of the same theme: Bible fan art. Yes, I said it. Jesus as a baby, Jesus on the cross, Jesus performing miracles, Mary holding the crucified Jesus. Over and over and over. The bowl of fruit. The King. And often times we were told that one artist had painted while looking at another artist’s sculpture or fresco. They all used each other’s work as reference, and often created much more similar paintings than even Amy and Michael. We celebrate all of these artists, though. We don’t criticize them for “copying” or being unoriginal. They’re the masters, learning from the art and the world around them. I often get asked “Where do you come up with all these ideas?” at shows, as if I just sit in my room and then out of nowhere I suddenly envision a wizard frog striding off into the trees. Maybe somewhere out there are artists who work like this, but I have a confession: this has almost never been my process. I have nearly always started with looking at a painting that made me go WOW I WANT TO DO THAT. I would copy things my brother drew, the styles of other artists, from Lisa Frank to Stephanie Pui Mun Law. I wish I could be more spontaneous with my inspiration, but it’s often quite direct. This used to be something I shamed myself for. (Confession: I still do this.) I was not a “Real Artist” I was a fake, a copier. I was always stealing from someone else. Did it even come out a perfect copy? Of course not. It ended up with just a little bit of me in there, every time more and more, as I started pulling from more and more varied artists who I wanted to be like. And sometimes that’s just how it goes! That’s how, little by little, you become your own artist. I am a dash of Amy Brown and a heaping spoonful of Lulu Chen, mixed with hints of Brian Froud, Hayao Miyazaki, bits of many others, and something unnameable that might just be me. If you’d left me to sit in a blank room my whole life with no other art to look at, I probably wouldn’t be an artist. Maybe I’d draw swirls or stars, copy the landscape to the best of my ability, but nothing like the paintings I make today. I’ve had the benefit of some incredible teachers, the experience of seeing so much art that made me wonder if maybe I could do something like that too. My chronic perfectionism makes a lot of rules for me. I HAVE to do this and it HAS to be this way. There is so much beautiful, expansive permission in realizing that these rules are absolute hogwash. You absolutely CAN kind of copy something you love. Bring a bit of you to the table along with it and that’s how artists have been doing it for years. Knowing that Carravagio and Amy Brown did that too puts me in better company that I’d realized. If you’re feeling the need for a little jump start to your own creativity, take that as a sign of being human. Delight in it. And maybe check out some of these artists who have, over the years, shaped me into the artist I am today. I now follow over 1000 artists over various social media platforms, many of whom are absolutely awe inspiring in their talent. I could go on for days about artists like Taryn Knight, Laura Bifano, Anna Laura, Arthus Pilorget, Puuung, Josie Wren, it never ends, the talent in the world. I am always reaching to match them and to bring my own voice closer to the front. It’s a journey I’ll be on the rest of my life! AND SO. I hope that when you look at my art it is hauntingly familiar, and yet something entirely new! And on that note, I DO have something entirely new for you! We've seen a lot of other people's art in this newsletter. Here's what I made this month. This painting took many many hours, and it was so much fun. I actually drew the sketch for it in 2021, and was too intimidated to finish it! I knew to do it justice I wanted to paint it big (12x16 inches) and had a distinct lighting envisioned and that was scary until recently. But with a little time and a little practice... or a lot of time and a ton of practice... anything is possible!  I hope you leave feeling inspired and maybe a little more free. Let what speaks to you speak. Just copy the dang thing and enjoy the process.
Hoping you are well and warm (but not too warm, of course), Lara Jean 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? 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   If you've been reading my newsletters this year, you already know a bit about my history with Rebekah. For any newcomers, fear not, I'm happy to repeat! I had the great fortune of meeting Rebekah in college in 2011ish in Michigan. She was in my ceramics class and I thought she was so cool I actually invited myself to her house, which as the mortifyingly shy introvert I was at the time, should tell you everything you need to know about how cool I really thought she was. And still do. More than 10 years later (how???) we are writing buddies and art buddies. I have her to thank for the chapter books I've completed. Every artist deserved a Rebekah in their life; she is my beta reader, my hype groupie, an honest and helpful critic, and a sympathetic ear when I'm overwhelmed. And on top of all this she manages a beautiful circus of a household full of fantastically feral children, coaches other writers, weaves baskets, grows a massive garden, makes bread, creates tiny ceramic snails, and writes and illustrates her own work, including graphic novels. (HOW???) When I talk about Penny I tell people I begged/insisted she let me illustrate it, and she says that she was the one insisting, so it was a magnificently mutual decision that I needed to make art for this adorable story. Our inner middleschoolers who just wanted to publish a book with a friend are giddy and gleeful to present to you our first collaboration. THAT YOU CAN BUY NOW, TODAY, AND SHOULD! So here are the questions I had for Rebekah! I definitely recommend you give her a follow, check out her work, and send her so much admiration and support. She deserves it all.  1. How long have you been writing and drawing? When did you know you wanted to make a go at it professionally? Ah, let's see, a long time. One time I turned in a math test with zero questions answered and the page full of squids. I failed that test. And that class. But they were good squids. So I'm not sure I ever really sat down and decided I wanted to make a go at it professionally but math sure wasn't going to be an option. 2. What's your favorite art medium? Or do you prefer writing to arting? I think my favorite medium is story and I'm just trying to learn how to use words or pictures well enough to tell them. I would prefer to be able to draw 1000x faster than is humanly possible so every story I come up with could be a graphic novel. Alas I'm very slow. 3. Tell us about Penny!!! Penny! Penny and the Pocket Dragon is a story I told my daughter. It's about a little girl who ends up with a very small (and very grumpy) dragon. It's a goofy fairytale with too much alliteration. There were multiple versions of it over the years and eventually I wrote one of them down. When it was finished it was clear that I'd actually written a story that existed in YOUR world of adorable mythical creatures and that you needed to illustrate it. So I begged you and you said yes and we lived happily ever after. 4. Tell us about The Girl the Ghost and the Giant! The Girl the Ghost and the Giant is the first story I turned into an actual book. It's a folk tale about a giant who has to be killed to stop a harsh winter, but of course the legends are never quite right about the monsters, are they? It's strange, because when you publish you're sort of putting out a younger version of yourself, because usually there are several years between when you write the thing and when people read it. So it very much feels like letting people read my middle-school journal. My art and writing have changed a lot since then but I also wouldn't be the same person if I hadn't written that book. 5. What project can we look forward to from you next? Besides Penny and the Pocket Dragon? What more do you want than tiny dragons in glass jars! Let's see, I have a really short book about Michigan salamanders that is *mostly* done. I like salamanders. I'm working on a comic about an Indian Boarding school in Michigan that I'm really proud of. And eventually I'll be publishing the middle grade series that I've been working on for forever. That's probably the one I'm the most excited about. It's a series about a kid named Toby who's family are cryptid conservationists. So his family travels the world taking care of monsters. There's lots of sibling drama and awkward teenagers and it's my favorite thing I've written. But boy do series take a long time! 6. Your top five favorite books! If you can. An impossible question, I know. That... is a rude question. only five?! Okay... I think I'll go for the top ones that have been the most influential, in no particular order.
Fictional character I most identify with... hum. That's a great questions. Probably Jill from the Silver Chair. I'd risk getting eaten by giants for a hot bath. 8. A piece of advice for aspiring writers and artists? Keep going! Spend more time working on your story than planning or talking about it. Take your story seriously enough you finish it, but not so seriously you can't take constructive criticism to make it better. 9. If you could be a salamander, which kind would you be? I would be a cave salamander because it's quiet and then I'd be bright orange with spots. 10. Where can we follow you? (Below are links to her website and instagram!) You can follow me into a swamp. Or on Instagram and Bluesky. Bonus question: Will you let me illustrate another book of yours, please? (Correct answer: Yes.) Yes, but after you publish at least Faun 1. |
AuthorI'm Lara, illustrator and writer behind Lara Jean Doodles! Archives
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