Doodles 🖼️

It’s been a hot minute since I shared some doodles, so I felt like a post would be in order.

I’m not above using erasers or cover-up tape to make my drawings better if the first try goes awry. 😉

For my birthday last year, my awesome sister got me a doodle journal. I’ve had lots of writing journals over the years, but never one specifically to encourage my development as a visual artist.

Each page has a prompt. They range from very broad and easy to interpret to real headscratchers that make me amp my creativity and test my sketching abilities, like the day it suggested drawing the final scene from a movie (gulp!).

I spend just ten to thirty minutes on each drawing (the shortest sketch was my Easter tulips), often in-between grading and making a snack or at the end of the day when I’m wide awake but too mentally tired to dig into a draft in-progress.

I find I care much less about whether the sketches are realistic enough to satisfy my inner censors and much more about the fun of using the art supplies.

The slowdown is very rejuvenating on my nervous system—almost like swimming, I can feel the languid time opening up. I was thinking about that a lot this week, as I paged through what I’ve doodled so far and treated myself to a box of soft oil pastels, which are new to me.

This has also given me a chance to practice doodling people, one of my weakest skills. I gave it a whirl on a doodle of a Jane Austen book cover as well as my version of The Bard.

I used a variety of colored pens, colored pencils, gel ink, whatever was handy on these sketches.

Sometimes, I accompanied the sketch with a short sentence or two reflection, almost like a journal, either in answer to the prompt or just a thought on my mind, such as the day it was 18 degrees outside.

Enjoy this medley of doodles from my sketchbook, and may you continue to find enjoyment and inspiration in your own writing and artistic journeys! Create on. 🥳

Thanks for taking a look at these sketches and for all of your support of my books and teaching. Signed copies of my latest poetry book, Does It Look Like Her? , available at my Etsy store: clickety-click. Also, available (unsigned) through Amazon: clickety-click. 📔

This prompt asked doodlers to draw a self-portrait of themselves from another era. I drew myself in an 1860s tintype. My 1860s self is not as smiley. 😁

New Doodles and Reflections 🎉

I felt like doodling some teapots yesterday, and then I sat down and wrote a few reflections that fell out of my head in essay form on the theme. Just fun to share. 🌞

For a few years, I bought a lot of tea kettles. I wasn’t starting a collection; I was gifting them.

If you had invited me to your wedding or to your housewarming party or to a similar occasion in that stretch of time you likely received one of these beauties wrapped in a roll of polka-dot or confetti-print paper. I bought them one at a time, brand new, and with the individual receiver(s) in mind. They were, in that way, personalized.

Sometimes, I picked enamel ones with a spate of blue, green, or red geometric designs or tiny, hearty yellow flowers across the belly; other times, I picked a plain kettle of shiny russet or a penny color; or a glass or porcelain teapot. It depended on the store’s stock and sometimes on my mood or the color combos that seemed to match the friend or cousin or coworker I was shopping for. Some of the kettles came in printed cardboard boxes and some did not. Regardless, I hand-selected and filled-in a personalized message for each kettle.

I always added a box or two of the sachets filled with pocket-square sized, often-flavored tea (orange pekoe, black tea, green tea with mint, English breakfast tea, lemon or another fruity flavor with fun, often alliterative product names) to go along with the gift so that it was immediately useful, immediately (I hoped) a part of the recipient’s daily life.

In my enthusiasm to gift, I could have planned better. Thinking back on it now, I guess I could have/should have asked if they even liked tea. I could have just gone with something on a registry, to ensure they didn’t get doubles and have to return it. I didn’t know if any of my recipients already had kettles. I loved tea, still do, and what I wanted to gift most was what I loved most: the ritual of starting with something basic and elemental and fortifying—water that would also become some steam, herbs—and within just a small amount of time (usually less than 5 minutes) a whole experience: a break, or a companion for the morning, or afternoon, or evening when sleep was futile, was created. Over and over, this comforting surety of rest and fortification.

Most tea is made now (mine included) in a small microwave that gives a tiny chirrup of beeps and then stops. Sometimes, I wait with my eager spoon a few feet from the muted window as my mug spins and spins inside the machine, and sometimes I use that time to fish through my many boxes to find the flavor of the day. It never gets old—selecting the flavor.

I don’t have a kettle at the moment and haven’t gifted anybody one in years, but I still love everything about these simple beauties: their hollowness and their heft; their handle like a purse a great aunt handmade for me when I was a kid that lifts up or can be tucked back, out of sight when not in use; the elephant-trunk curve of the little spout; the dainty lid with its knob that makes an easy lift-and-remove or fit-into-the-groove possible.  They do not require an app to operate; they run on the thought to use them, time, and patience.

Those minutes waiting for the water to bubble are a handbrake—Slow it down, down, and down again. The additional moments of the sachet simmering fragrance also speaks a similar language—Don’t leap ten steps ahead; be here. 

One day soon, I may likely find the perfect one to gift myself. But even if that time is a ways off, there is the ritual of the cup, the water turned to curlicue steam, the flavor. There is the everyday transformation to stillness and reflection: much like words, available for combination, creation, consumption, and recreation. A small part of the day, but one that betters in its own steadfastness, in its own pleasing way. 

Purple gel pen, colored pencils.

Some kettle practice. 😉

My first kettle that somehow ended up in proportions looking rather like a genie lamp! 🤣

Strawberry Doodle and Poem

Trying something new today--a poem I wrote to coordinate with this doodle I made and then colored in this week. 🎉

“Strawberry”

Remember

how Grandma’s lawn

although about an acre

expanded, endless

in bare feet, the orange

tiger lilies that grew almost

as tall as you

wild in a tangle

of July sun

in the far corner

of the garden?

You can return

anytime you like

in your mind’s eye,

even more than

twenty years after

the land, the house

was sold

when you were already

an adult

you keep this

summer, this sweet

strawberry taste on your tongue

as if seven again. Recall

all the days and days

awaiting then

into a new millennium, faraway

feeling as the spangled cosmos.

To 2023! 🎉

I bought this fanciful party horn at a greeting-card store and have lost track of when.

Doodle by yours truly. Mechanical pencil, Paper Mate Flair Medium and Arteza Bold 1.0 mm pens, and sketchbook paper. Digital filter used in larger version seen below.

It doesn’t have a year on it and the store is now out of business. It has golden paper that shimmers and a fluffy frill of ebony feathers that I think gets prettier with time.

It’s a little crooked (in real life and in my drawing) but holds a lot of hope and cheer.

Each time this calendar year we get to start over, to reset, to look ahead in art and in life, and that feels fitting and good. Thanks for all of your camaraderie and support.

Here we go, 2023! To all that we’ll create and experience in the year ahead!

Blog Tour: Review at Naomi Nakashima's helpmenaomi.com 🌟

Pleased to have this wonderful review of my book, From Promising to Published at helpmenaomi.com: clickety-click!

An excerpt: “From Promising to Published by Melanie Faith has landed a permanent place on my bookshelf and will be one of the top books I recommend to my clients who are looking for advice on how to get their book out there.”

Read the rest at: helpmenaomi.com. Also, check out Naomi’s editing and ghostwriting services and her book about self-publishing.

New Month, New Projects Popping ⏲️

Hello, September!

I’ve been thinking a lot about time lately: how we organize it, how we anticipate or dread it, how we save it through the things we make and the things we share, how it is ever-malleable—both jet-speed propulsion and gelatin slow and everything in-between.

So, I made this thematic pen-and-ink drawing. Writing the interconnected and interrupted “ticks” was relaxing. There’s something very meditative about making something by hand, even something imperfect, as this doodle most certainly is. 😁

Also, my new class about writing historical fiction and time-travel stories, Leaping Worlds, is accepting registrations and will start Friday, September 30th. Can’t wait! Clicky above for more deets. I’d love to work with you and a friend. 📝