The Philustrator.
Field Notes from 20261108
Spread 10 is done. I’ve changed and slowed my pace several times since starting this series, and this was the second week of one panel for it. Before I wrote this, I was at my desk sketching out a page in the new format, because the story needed to move forward and out of single panels, and I had zero motivation. I’m done. I’m not feeling it.
I have to be honest: I’m burned out after this one. I started Field Notes of Nobody’s Ghost as a story that unfolds panel by panel, no planning, to see where it goes. It goes about ten spreads. Over time it devolved from storytelling into preoccupation with process, schedule, and technique. I was no longer excited by the story, and so it collapsed on itself.
I don’t want to pause Nobody’s Ghost, but I also absolutely do. Maybe I don’t need to be so dramatic about it. Keep Field Notes, keep the one line, pause the storytelling (which won’t be hard since it’s been essentially paused on its own…) for now and focus on craft, on getting better, on doing something I look forward to. What I do know is that I like the main character, the “nobody’s ghost”. He’s not really going anywhere; he’ll show up again through my sketching and exploring.
I didn’t drop my creative work, and I didn’t close Percept Index. I made a hard pivot away from a series while keeping my commitment to the work. I’m still writing, I’m still illustrating, every week.
The drawing won’t stop. The creative process is too important for me, for this instrument, the body; however, guiding it is the difficult part. When creating originally gets tougher and tougher, this instrument falls back on the bank of stuff it can practice from. That’s the honest truth. It’s a loop that has often put the brakes on everything. The larger loop is a long break, a return to creative work, repeat.
The last break was the longest. I’d still do something in a short burst, usually in spring, after a winter of loathing everything. This time I didn’t just return, I returned hard. I stuck with it longer than anything I’ve done, and I’m still very much in it. Percept Index is that creative return and the longest project I’ve ever done because it’s larger than pictures.
This time my return was through writing, and the illustration followed. That’s the right order, a fractal of sorts. The project needed to begin as a written expression and remain one for a while, and so it did. In my experience, writing comes before any successful illustration. I know because I did the reverse until Percept Index was born, a long time banging my head against the same spot. My creative expression was always rooted in writing and storytelling, but I’d always get distracted by colors and shine.
Cartoonist is what I’ve always wanted to be known for creatively. I looked at it from the consumer’s side rather than the artist’s. The irony is that this angle is the opposite of what I’ve always known as an artist: story and writing before the visual work. If you can’t write, no matter how good your skills are, you’ll flop. That’s why you see duos, writer and illustrator. I can write; I begin there naturally. Yet here I am again, a little better than before, here nonetheless.
This year was about developing my own voice, and I see it as hit and miss. Some of it was absolutely needed and positive: daily sketching, gouache, ink, and finally Procreate, which I’ve wanted to work with for years. I’m also constantly studying someone else’s work, watching others put out solid work after solid work while I tread water.
Moebius is one of my all-time greats. Another Planet is a creative masterpiece of telling a story without words. It’s also not my work. Imitating it, or others, is not my voice, it’s a cheaper version of someone else’s. Then I look at R. Crumb, another great, especially his sketchbook work. He didn’t give a flying fuck whether his lines were straight, crooked, or wobbly. He simply just produced.
Where my creative work stands, I am not ready to author a graphic novel, a short series, anything with significant time and planning devoted to it. My hand is not at a place where it can take that on. More exploration, reinstating a hard cutoff for any single piece, and better content is the right move for me at this time. Ironically, the first sketchbook piece like this from a week ago was more fun to make, even if no one really liked it.
When I’m nearing burnout, not only can I sense it but I start looking at any excuse to stop, and they aren’t hard to find: the hours, the lack of sleep, a readership that moves two steps forward and one step back. Yet it’s important to remind myself that I did this to begin with because I wanted to.
I do feel bad about letting down the subscribers who perhaps joined for the story I’m suspending, but this isn’t about subscriber count. I never want to continue doing something I loathe, something that takes time from my rest and from everything else. I don’t want to stop the creative work. It’s important. I don’t want to continue the current trajectory either, because it will only take more and more time. I needed to let it go, and so I have.
The honest stance is just that, honesty. One drawing per entry, twice a week, and the final product is the final product. If something pops out of that on its own, great. If I grow stronger in my creative voice because of this principle, good. The bridge between the writing and the illustration is what needs to be built, the part I ignored or couldn’t quite clearly see.
The sigil remains. It was made for Field Notes, and Field Notes remains, and the meaning behind it stays unknown to the reader, as all sigils should. All I can say about it is that it’s not a curse, quite the opposite. There, a vague and general clue. The artist mark next to it is my own, and the date completes the colophon. That’s one of the most concrete pieces from all of this that I can take as a product for myself.
Being a cartoonist, or having an active serial I can be proud of and look forward to producing, will perhaps come downstream of the practice itself. That’s the other bridge, the practice. It began going inward, expanding my consciousness, the root from which all of this has sprouted. That’s what’s most important to me, most interesting to me, the current under all the creative work I’ve produced since I began adding it to the written record.
I labeled the record Field Notes because what I was doing, what I am doing, needed a name. Illustration, series, whatever visual no longer aligned with the written entry felt wrong and awkward. I had good reasons and intentions behind that situation, and I’m leaving it knowing more than I knew before. About myself, my process, what I’m comfortable with, what I am willing to walk away from when it no longer feels like I am.
I am staying true to the practice I stumbled on, the one that strikingly described what I was already doing and led me to find out even more about myself. So in the spirit of the tietäjä, the Finnish knower, I am dropping what doesn’t work, what’s not true, and keeping what is.
Percept Index is.
Field Notes are.
Write before illustrate.
Begin verbal, end imaginal.
I wanted my mind-to-hand connection to return, and look what I did to make that happen: Field Notes. I drew 174 times (those are the ones I published). I’m not walking away from any of that, I’m realigning it with what matters to me.
Like I wrote last week: I’m not lying to myself, I’m not lying to my children, and I’m not lying to you. That is closer to my source than any of this, honesty.