Ouroboros

This past month has been a blur. I chose to take a break from creating new licensing work for eight weeks as I embarked on a 200-hour Yoga Teacher Training. Eating, sleeping and breathing yoga for the past six weeks (I’m almost done, but not done yet!) has been an intense but incredibly restorative experience. I do plan to teach! Having multiple income streams is pretty typical in this field, and I’d like one that gets me away from the computer and does some good for the world.

Sheesh, do I miss drawing right now, though.

Meanwhile, I’m preparing my quarterly newsletter of more recent work. And in the newsletter I mention this blog. The ouroboros of marketing keeps on rolling along. Many illustrators don’t love marketing themselves—and I’m no exception—but it helps me when I mentally reframe it as “proof of life.” I’m here! I’m working! Hello! How are you?

Take it easy if you can. I’ll see you next month!

How to Make a Custom Cut Paper Card If You Are Short On Time

The RISD Alumni Association coordinates a mailable art exchange each year, and I participated for the first time. I’m going to walk you through my process!

One of my goals for 2025 is to be less busy. I’m failing miserably at that. I noted this when I signed up for the art exchange. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.

From the start, I knew I wanted to make a cut paper card. Every three years or so I wonder if I should buy a Cricut. This project sparked one of those moments, but I defeated thoughts of the Cricut yet again. I stumbled into a few shortcuts that let me make something that I hope will be nice to receive, but that didn’t suck up a whole weekend.

This was the winning sketch. Honestly, I wasn’t settled on if this was a sunset or sunrise until I started working in color and decided that the sun was actually a moon. The part of my brain that sketches does a truly terrible job of communicating details for the next phase of the project. Somebody should file a complaint.

There’s a lot of excess around the edges because I planned it with a bleed. Am I going to add a version of this to my licensing portfolio? You bet.

One of my creative directors (my four-year-old) suggested “bunnies” for the card theme, and why not? They’re a Valentines-apropos symbol of fecundity and jeez are they cute. So I made a page of sketches until I landed on one that didn’t feel too sappy. To streamline things, I worked the colors digitally. In Procreate I snapped a photo of the sketch and got to work. Easy: each digital layer will be a cut paper layer.

Then I’ll just…buy a bunch of paper? I’ve decluttered hard and that feels counterproductive. Ah! I’ll grab some watercolor paper and paint sections in the colors I need, then print the outlines and use those as a guide to cut the watercolor paper. Ugh, crumbs, that’s going to take forever.

AHA! I’ll just print the digital file layers and cut those out. The colors will also be just right. Lauren, you genius.

I moved the layers around onto two 8.5”x11” layouts to print at least a bit economically. Note that I chickened out of hand-cutting every tiny star.

Everything got placed once before I started gluing to make sure I understood where things overlap. Despite this, I forgot a few times where things overlap.

With the print-outs in hand, I prepared for a whole lot of X-Acto work. I got the cutting done in under an hour because I was able to focus. My husband shares my studio space when he works from home. “Do you mind some noise if I watch recorded meetings?” he asks. “Don’t you own headphones?” I gently prompt. “No,” he answers without thinking. “Are you lying to me or do you not realize you own headphones?” I ask with as neutral a voice as possible. “Oh. I guess I can go get those headphones I have for my iPad,” he realizes for his own health and safety.

Because this is a print-out, the ink sits on the top layer of material. As you can see, anything not cut 100% straight leaves a visible white edge of the paper below. I used colored pencils to touch some of the edges up.

Even though I’d finished the design only the day before and this is quite a simple composition, I had to check against the digital layers to ensure everything gets put in the right place. Work with the brain you have, not the brain you want.

For the most part, I’m pleased with the cutouts. Ideally I’d have used paper that’s dyed all the way through, but in the interest of frugality and environmentalism I’m using up the really unnecessary paper samples that Canon insists on sending me when I order ink. They make it really hard to toggle that offer off. In the past few orders I’ve remembered to un-check that option, but I’m still working through three old sample packs.

My plant tweezers got recruited to hold tiny pieces while gluing the detail work.

The eagle-eyed among you may notice that there were drifts of flower petals whooshing by the bunnies in my digital version. With the depth and texture of the paper, they didn’t feel necessary in the physical version. There’s plenty of interest! Or was I lazing my way out of cutting and gluing a ton of fiddly petals? You may have also noticed that I didn’t even print the petals layer, as if this were planned laziness.

OK, the petals were worth adding

They say art is finished when nothing can be added and nothing can be taken away. I struggled through a spiral of internal conflict. I wrote most of this post. Then I got working on the petals.

Voilà ! This was a nice excuse to do something fun.

Lauren

Avoiding AI Results In Reference Imagery

While I’m sure there are myriad good outcomes of recent digital innovation, in my daily life it seems like so many things are getting crummier. A major tool being enshittified is image search results. I was recently chatting with Eloise Narrigan and Jessica McGuirl about this and they’re facing the same hurdle: What used to be an incredibly convenient way of finding reference photos is now a careful game of I Spy. “Is this a photo or is it the uncanny hell-scape of an algorithm’s imagination?”

My feelings aren’t just a knee-jerk reaction to the fact that computers are coming to take my job. They’re based on a general fear of misrepresenting things. Sure, my illustrations aren’t 100% true to life—I take huge liberties for style, mood and clarity. But I like be informed by a starting point based in reality. I’ve devised a series of AI avoidance techniques that I’ll share here.

Ways to Avoid AI In Reference Searches

1. Get a filter. This only works if you’re using a Chrome-based browser and Google for you image search, but you can install a browser extension that will flag AI results. The one I’ve been using is callled, appropriately enough, “Google Search AI Image Hider.” I’ve been using it with good success!

2. Search for videos, not still images. While this isn’t fool-proof, I find it much easier to spot fake videos than fake still images. Bonus: if you’re getting reference for living creatures, you can pretend you’re doing life drawing.

3. Check your sources. Is the image hosted by a reputable publisher like PBS? National Geographic? It’s probably fine, and they’ll let you know what type of imagery you’re dealing with. But stock photography sites? They seem to be 95% AI trash at this point.

4. Search on Pinterest. It’s not totally AI-free, but it’s less poxed than most search engines. [edited in March to correct: Pinterest is getting AI-inundated quickly]

5. The library! If you have the time and energy, please hit up your local library for some books.

Things That Break My System

Rainbow Pencil Skunks

A rainbow pencil will make anything look an awful lot like an Indian giant squirrel.

Occasionally there are things that I can’t visually nail down. The Indian giant squirrel has been vexing me for a while. It seems like most pictures of these creatures are color-adjusted to make them appear more blue/purple than they actually are. Maybe I just need to take a trip and see them for myself. If you’ve gazed upon their glory in person, please email me to let me know just how psychedelic they look.

Thanks for hanging out,

Lauren

Illustrating in the New Year

Studio Refresh

My workspace is usually pretty tidy, but rarely this tidy. I’ve been paring down my traditional media to just the things I know I’ll use. It’s nice having a blank slate to work at!

Things were quiet in the studio at the end of 2024 as I juggled co-running a cooperative preschool, tending to an ailing cat, dealing with the holidays, and managing everything else that’s on my plate. However, I’ve still been sketching plenty and cooking up ideas in the background.

Here’s a tiny peek into my current sketchbook. I follow the Julia Rothman technique of making a “more of/less of” list for the year instead of a setting concrete resolutions. This approach is forgiving and—I find—more achievable than traditional resolutions: you make a list of what you want more of in the next year, and a list of things you want less of. On my “more of” list was definitely “bird drawings.”

Drawing Local Birds

Colored pencil explorations of birds that visit my backyard. The first book I read in 2025 was Amy Tan’s “The Backyard Bird Chronicles” and it's been a wonderful reminder to draw more from observation. These guys are from reference, though!

Ballpoint Pen Geese

Does my portfolio need a goose-based pattern collection? Maybe. Maybe.

Hello, World

If you abandon Instagram (which I did), where do you go?! I’m not dealing with TikTok. My LiveJournal has been retired for decades. So I decided to go old school and post blog-style updates here each month. Frankly, this is much more sustainable than my initial idea to send more frequent newsletters. Those can remain quarterly, thank you very much!

Each month I’ll share a peek at what’s going on in my sketchbook and studio and post any fresh work that I’m especially proud of. I’ll keep it short and sweet!