Oh yea, I’ve always been an illustrator.
Field Notes of Rahgah 20260817-20260823 - Retrospective
The first spread of Field Notes of Rahgah.
The first page is here. Three panels, a soft launch, and a week of practice that picked exactly this moment to wake back up. The panels carry the story now; this section stays what it has always been, commentary on my practice and process. And this first one is pulling double duty: the usual look at the whole week, plus a first-week report on what the new format takes to produce.
On the practice side, the timing is almost funny. The soft launch leveled with everyone: I don’t know when I’ll have content to write about consciousness exploration. The week answered before it was over. A Condition D session dropped me into a two-second scene at full waking-life fidelity: standing at my light table in the office, a blank sheet of Bristol lying on top of it. It was the second occurrence of its type, and both times I’ve landed on the same reading: someone reminding me to get back to work. The Liminal displays stopped dodging me, two playful, hooved forms this time with zero notion of the observer. And a projection attempt took me right over the edge of the daybed and onto the floor, close enough to catch the view of my physical body still in bed before getting yanked back in.
I have a working theory about this gradual uptick in engagement with the non-physical, and I’m not calling it anything yet. But I’ll note the obvious: the vision put a blank sheet in front of me, and by the end of the week the first page existed.
Now, the first-week report. My schedule involves getting up at 4:30 in the morning on weekdays and going on a run or strength training in my garage gym. I was averaging between 20 and 30 miles a week for a couple years, but life has been happening a lot this year, so I’ve cut back to “up to 20 miles a week.” Staying up late on any day degrades my readiness during the weekdays.
I first set out to do tiny illustrations on the daily. Retraining my mind-to-hand connection. Then I cut back to 5 a week. Then I cut back to 3 to 4 a week. My schedule with writing and illustration shifted to: Monday and Tuesday I do nothing, Wednesday I write an essay, Thursday I do nothing, Friday and Saturday Field Notes, Sunday is the retrospective, so it’s less intense on originals, but I still illustrate something (retro publishes Monday morning, everything else same evening). That was working out pretty good, but I noticed I was still drifting to later evenings because I was taking more and more time on illustrations (because I like to do that and it’s important to me).
Enter the first week of the new major pivot: “Field Notes of Rahgah.” I’ve stripped out linocut frame printing, and in turn that stripped out the size constraint, moving away from a card-sized work area to essentially nearly half a standard sheet size. I still keep it under that, but the work area increased and so did my “give a shit” about the work itself. I no longer hand-sign the work, nor do I draw the Field Notes sigil; that’s all done in post now, and it’s all set so I don’t think about it (major win).
What I didn’t have before is work in post. Originally I’d sketch quickly, color quickly, ink quickly, take a snap with my iPhone, adjust it on the iPhone, upload to Dropbox, resize in Photoshop, and publish the entry (writing was already done earlier in the day/evening). Now: thumbnail sketches, sketch the panel, gouache, ink, scan and correct in Photoshop, post-work in Illustrator involving lighting and texture, export, publish, cry deeply because it’s past my late-late bedtime.
This week I intended for 4 panels, the 4th produced on Sunday and published with the retro and full page on Monday. It’s now Sunday, I’m tired, and the early morning rising begins anew tomorrow at 4:30 AM. So, the series now opens with a 3-panel page that I am publishing in this regularly scheduled retro. I’ve begun to adjust my illustration schedule to take some load off from publishing days onto my non-publishing days. I still intend to do 3 to 4 panels a week but am changing the setup to include two smaller illustrations for 4-panel weeks, so stay tuned for that.
At the moment each panel is roughly 4:3 or 3:4 ratio, which is as intended. For 4-panel pages I plan on doing two of that ratio and two of 1:1 to cut down on workload. I think in general this actually works out better, but we’ll see with the upcoming weeks as I experiment. For now, the bottom line is: always 3 panels per week, sometimes 4, full page presented with the retro, which I always publish early Monday morning.
Yes, it’d make more sense and be more conventional to do a “Sunday strip” by moving the retro to Sundays, but I haven’t really done anything conventionally, so my publishing schedule will continue to revolve around family, career, physical training, and my non-physical/metaphysical/non-local/stillness practice. Without those bedrock aspects of my life, the series doesn’t happen; I’m here because of all of this effort and intention that came before I remembered, “Oh yea, I’ve always been an illustrator.”
Just like the old Field Notes schedule and setup, with time, this new pivot will work itself out too, and everything will balance as needed. I trust this process and I trust myself to get it figured out. After all, I’m writing all of this now because of this trust built on hours, days, weeks, and years leading up to everything going on right now.
Back to work.
Through The Week of 20260817-20260823
https://perceptindex.substack.com/p/i-was-too-close-to-myself https://perceptindex.substack.com/p/get-back-to-work https://perceptindex.substack.com/p/a-base-to-soft-launch-from