Wonderful friends who show up consistently and with so much love. Walks with Micaela, a surprise birthday picnic, “to make you laugh is a gift,” time with Liz and Madeline and the Mitchells, dinner and breweries with (and cookies for) Joanna, celebrating 25 years of friendship with Ani, continued weekly craft nights with Viv. Reminders that I matter and I am loved and I can lean in and ask for help. Among Us. Brigit’s bachelorette and wedding. Traveling: Mexico and Tunisia. Dinner in a cave. Sweltering heat. Beach days and freckles. Kelibia. Native animals: wild cats and dogs and coatimun ..read more

Every year, Tammy Garcia hosts the Index Card a Day (ICAD) challenge. Here are a few of my favorite cards I created this year; see my Instagram for the whole set ..read more

As an artist myself, I care deeply about ensuring that other artists — painters, writers, dancers, musicians, etc. — get the proper credit they deserve. In the digital era, it’s become incredibly easy to share artwork without credit. But either by good intentions or by passing it off as your own, you are stealing away the recognition an artist deserves for hours and hours of hard work. Some may not actually know how to do the research needed to find the source of artwork or what artwork-sharing etiquette looks like. But lucky for you, it’s easy! Here are tips for finding and crediting artists ..read more

Every artist, in some capacity, wants to be seen. As artists (and as humans) we ask, “Look at how I view the world. Look how I express myself. See me. Acknowledge me.” Any visibility, though, comes with vulnerability — to criticism, to analysis, to heartbreak. I love that the word courage comes from the Old French corage, meaning Old French “heart, innermost feelings.” See encourage/encouragement, too: it ties together courage (in the root) and hope (in its meaning). Heart originally meant soul, will, or courage (even though it’s derived from Old English, not Old French). Think of “take ..read more

I first discovered the idea of using books as an creative medium back in high school. I was in Ms. Madsen’s art class, and I still remember picking up and flipping through Bev Brazelton’s Altered Books Workshop and feeling the simultaneous excitement of and hesitancy about using paint and collage in a perfectly good book. It felt forbidden — how often have we been taught not to damage books but to treat them with utmost care? It seemed wasteful. But Bev’s book.. it was a spark. Since then, I’ve spent hundreds and hundreds of hours reading books and blogs and scrolling social media accounts, se ..read more

If you follow me on Instagram, you know that I’m a little over two weeks into this year’s ICAD challenge, Tammy Garcia’s annual index card creativity extravaganza (learn more about this two-month project here). Today, I’m throwing it back to a few years ago, my second time around with ICAD, when I threw all the rules out the window and stumbled on a loose, intuitive, energetic mixed media process that I loved. I always wanted to know what my “style” was, but it took letting go and playing for me to discover it ..read more

Somewhere between weeks 12 and 14, I decided that I would wrap up the COVID & HOBBES project when I had completed 100 days’ worth of collages. When I began — on March 16, three days after the coronavirus was named a pandemic and the first day of many, many days of working from home — I anticipated doing two week’s worth of Calvin and Hobbes remixes. (Ha!) Looking back, these little daily snapshots really do capture what it has been like to process something so big and overwhelming and scary and uncertain. I think these final two collages sum 2020 up entirely: it’s a year that is both wor ..read more

Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 Week 4 Week 5 Week 6 Week 7 Week 8 Week 9 Week 10 Week 11 Week 12 Week 13 ..read more

Ten years ago today, on April 28, 2011, a friend of mine took her own life at the young age of 23. In her honor, I’m reposting what I wrote after I learned of her death and sharing resources for mental health crises. I knew her in high school. She was in my grade, only a few months older, beautiful, outgoing, and confident. She had a clear and smooth singing voice. I admired her. I envied the way she carried herself and how she seemed to have life so organized and all figured out; I wanted the stability and assuredness she possessed. We were very similar in some ways: we were creative and rom ..read more

Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 Week 4 Week 5 Week 6 Week 7 Week 8 Week 9 Week 10 Week 11 Week 12 ..read more