Long-time readers may remember back when I wrote a long post explaining why I am not “going for it”, including an extended analysis of how abysmal the chances of “making it” are in creative fields and how crappy our social system is in terms of livability for us not-rich folks. Although, I suppose I did have the qualifiers, not going for it* *full-time† †yet.

So what gives? Didn’t I say that for me creative freedom is the most important thing in my art? Did I get so sick of ordinary day jobs (for many reasons) that I decided making graphics and content for corporations was worth it?

No, creative freedom is still essential to me. Though, I might do some selective collaborations/commission work if it aligns with me, we’ll see what comes up.

But I’ve been on (and am still on) an earth-shattering spiritual journey since last summer, and am finding myself called to leave the normal career grind to have more time for my spiritual and creative practices (in that order).

—you know, my debilitating, and terminal, food and contact allergies and intolerances, which I’ve had and which have been worsening at an accelerating rate over the last two decades, have almost entirely gone away over the seven weeks since I made this decision to change course...

Anyway, I know I’ll be writing and arting more to share about my spiritual journey in the future. For now, though, I’ll just say that I’m very excited for this new phase.

Today’s newsletter is all news from my art side as I’m announcing this new direction, but moving forward I will keep Zeno’s Arrow mainly about my comics-related activities and Way Lee Art (my new art business) will cover my art-related activities.

1. Check Out My New Art Website!

2. Sign Up for Occasional Updates From My Art Side

3. My Art Is In the Artist Trust 40^th Anniversary Benefit Art Auction

4. Do You Feel Lucky? Try to See My Piece In the 4Culture Art Carousel

Till next!

Check Out My New Art Website!

So what does this look like for me going forward?

I’m still in my day job at the moment. I plan to start phasing out of it this spring.

As for what I’ll be doing creatively, as I mentioned in my last post, since finishing The BOOK of DEATH Haiku Comics, I’ve been focusing on my on-location watercolor painting and life drawing/live sketching. The artistic practice is something that I constantly have an artwork I can go out and do, since there’s lots I want to work on in terms of the expressive language of color and improving my skills. So that’ll be the ongoing base of my artistic work.

I will be trying to exhibit at art walks and in galleries and cafes, vending at art and craft shows, and selling original artworks and prints and cards of my original works. And if collaborations come up that are in alignment with me, I may take on some of those projects, too.

And the comics will come in whenever I have crystallized ideas that really grab and inspire me. Like with my first three comics projects. As little money as there is in art, by comparison there’s none in comics (unless you are very lucky). But there’s an expressive range and power unique to comics, and it can share ideas that you can’t do with just one image. I know there are more comics/graphic story/illustrated text projects in me or that will be coming through me.

Anyway, I’ve launched a new standalone website to share my art with the world!

See my art galleries at www.waylee.art.

Sign Up for Occasional Updates From My Art Side

I know I know, another newsletter. But comics and art attract very different audiences, so I’d better just send separate missives for each. I can promise I won’t send many emails for Way Lee Art, though. The reason I sent Zeno’s Arrow newsletters with any frequency was generally when I was serially publishing one of my comics projects. And waylee.art is a website, not a newsletter like Substack. I’ll probably set up the blog on the website to share more immediate updates, if you’re curious. But then just send quarterly newsletters that bring together the highlights of what’s going on with my art.

You can sign up for my art mailing list at the bottom of the waylee.art website.

My Art Is In the Artist Trust 40^th Anniversary Benefit Art Auction

One of my Blue Period pieces (Leschi Marina) is in Artist Trust’s 40^th Anniversary Benefit Art Auction!

Artist Trust is a great organization that supports Washington State artists with grants and art business resources and trainings. I’m honored that one of my artworks was selected to be in their auction.

Tickets for the event are now closed...but if you happen to be going, you can see my piece in person there! And me, actually, I’ll be there, too!

Do You Feel Lucky? Try to See My Piece In the 4Culture Art Carousel

“Do you feel lucky?”

‘Cause sadly I wasn’t the four times I tried to go see my artwork on the screen at 4Culture’s Art Carousel.

Another one of my Blue Period pieces (Swansons Nursery Cafe) is in the rotation on the screens facing the street in their building in Pioneer Square, downtown Seattle.

If you do go, it should come up on the screen on the right-hand side. But I recommend contacting them the day you want to go to ask for precise times of when the artwork you’re interested in seeing is going to be on screen. The slideshows on the two screens just cycle all day, and they have the order on a list—but the extra problem is that the slideshows don’t necessarily start right at 7am every day, so you actually just need to ask them the day of.

But by the time I figured that all out, I’d already sunken so much time trying and failing to see my art on a digital screen in the winter cold that I didn’t feel like spending more time to see a digital version of my art on a screen.

Anyway, I’m still slowly looking to do a show at an art walk or cafe…when it happens I might share here (don’t want to spam), but definitely at Way Lee Art.

Sounds like for new/emerging artists like myself, art walks and cafes/businesses are the place to start. And there might be a significant lead time required between reviewing requests/applications and when an artist is actually showing, so since I want to do my show next year, it’s probably time to start working on the framing and venue details. Stay tuned!

Here’re the next three in my blue series:

Back before the pandemic lockdowns, Leschi Marina was where I learned to stand-up paddleboard (SUP). I was there one-to-two times per week in the summer of 2019 learning with the Club SAKE SUP boarding group. I was hooked at the time, and had endless appetite for SUP boarding. Once lockdowns hit, I ended up getting my own board so that a few friends and I could keep paddling. Not so much these days, but do still enjoy the very occasional paddle.

It was fun going back this time to draw/paint. Capturing reflections on water is always a fun challenge and satisfying when it works out. I also liked observing how the masts all tilted in different directions.

Georgetown Steam Plant is filled with giant, heavy machinery, mysterious and fascinating features built into walls, lots of pipes running everywhere, and loads of atmosphere. I happened to visit the week before the sketch outing for a different event, and was excited to go back to draw/paint. The place looks like story setting. I knew I wanted to draw the towers and catwalk, and to render a lot of texture with my linework to imbue my piece with moodiness.

Ballard’s farmers market is a busy attraction every Sunday. This was done in the afternoon, as the market was clearing out, which is why I had a little more space to see down the avenue and draw. The street, Ballard Avenue, runs through red brick-paved Old Town Ballard, making the farmers market even more charming.

A quick note before we get to the sketches. I’ll be posting less frequently for a while now that I’m done with another book project.

I’m now working on all the behind the scenes stuff related to getting my work out there: submitted The BOOK of DEATH Haiku Comics to a couple publishers (very low expectation, but you never know); am in the process of getting it printed since Short Run Comix Fest is coming up and I hadn’t considered submitting it to publishers until the end of the summer; applying to other fests.

And beyond that, I’ll start working on the research and writing for my next big comic project. This is going to take some time (and I want to slow my pace for a while to recover from the Blood/Death1 blitz anyway), so while that’s going, I’ll still be doing urban/life sketching as well as short comics projects.

I do some very loose, silly comics for DUNE comics nights sometimes, too. I’ve shared them at my BlueSky account (@zenosarrow.net), but they’re so casually done that I’m not sure I want to put them up on this website/in this blogsletter. I dunno, what do you think? Check them out:

Murder on the Dance Floor

“Small things so sad that birds could land” - Lump, The Presidents

Would they besmirch the honor of the rest of the website? Or would you like seeing those as posts? Maybe they could stand as a mass share like I do with the sketchbook shares. I guess essentially that’s what they are—comic sketches.

Speaking of sketchbook shares, let’s get to today’s!

The Sketches

Today, I’ve got tons of people sketches for you, done from life, at a festival and on buses and beaches.

Enjoy!

But I’ve also got a few updates for you, so here’s what’s in today’s blogsletter:

• I’ll Be At Short Run Again This Year!

• Last Fest for the Summer Went Great

• Blue Period Ink Drawings Part 3

Alright, let’s get to it!

This ad-free and plain ol’ free publication runs on the positive vibes coming from readers like you. Subscribe to send me more positive vibes.

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I’ll Be At Short Run Again This Year!

Save the date, everyone, ‘cause I got accepted to table at Short Run 2025!

Short Run Comix Festival

FREE admission!

When:

Saturday November 1, 2025

11am - 6pm

Where:

Seattle Design Center in Georgetown, Seattle

Last Fest for the Summer Went Great

PhinneyWood Comic Book Show a couple weekends ago was the last summer fest for me this year. It went great! Even though it was the first time the organizers ever put on the show, it was well run and had good attendance with a healthy amount of interest in buying indie comics.

It was interesting and a little funny seeing the demographics shift with the time of day. Remember, this was a Saturday event that opened it’s doors at 11am (actually guests started filtering through around like 10:30am before the official start, but doors were open because we vendors were getting or already got set up). For the first hour, before noon, it was mostly seniors from the neighborhood, but after noon the crowd shifted to a younger demographic.

Sales started a little slow but by the end of the event, it was in line with other events I’ve tabled at. Thank you everyone for visiting my stand, checking out my work, sharing your excitement, subscribing to this blogsletter, and buying my books!

Blue Period Ink Drawings Part 3

Ok, on to the blue!

Today, I’m sharing three more scenes from Seattle and the surrounding region. The Seattle chapter of Urban Sketchers sometimes hosts outings outside of Seattle, so this quarter some of my drawings are from farther afield.

I feel like I’m now hitting my stride with this brown and blue ink series.

This marks three quarters of my blue period—one more and I’ll move to trying to put on an exhibition. If you’ve got any guides you can share or tips about how to do that, please share! Or thoughts about venues in Seattle that this series would do well and find a good audience in.

The iconic Paramount Theater downtown. I like how the blocky weight of the building contrasts with the curves of the Paramount sign and airiness of the clouds in the sky behind. I resisted pulling out my straight edge despite all those straight lines on the building because I want to develop a looser approach. I already got to take a crisper approach with some of my drawings earlier this year, and now it’s time to push the expressiveness more.

I really like the echoed angles and swoops of the roofs in this piece, sweeping you from the upper right to the left, then sliding your eye back the other way with that lower roof on the left, down to the tree and the people on the grounds below. The avenue between the buildings is open to your eye and invites you in, and then you reach the child pointing up at something, leading you back up the curve of the barn roof again.

Also, I love what water-based media can do for clouds.

Third Place Books is such a good book store and, well, third place. I hadn’t been there in many years, I don’t know how many it’s been that long. Seven? Ten? More? But the Lake Forest Park store, where I did this drawing, is now 25 years old.

Anyway, I feel really good about how this drawing came out! Many dense, repeated forms particularly in ambiguously lit environments like tables in a cafe or restaurant or bookshelves in a bookstore, I find to be difficult subjects. But I also like to keep pushing myself and my abilities, so I opted to take a trawl through the bookstore to try to find a view that inspired me.

And I did find a view that caught my eye! Actually two from the same vantage point, and after doing a quick value sketch of both, I went with this view.

I’m pushing my materials some more, and finding uses for my different pens. I’d refilled a Pentel Pocket Brush with brown ink, and am finding it useful to expand the marks I can make with the waterproof brown ink.

And being patient and drawing in all those books and book covers really paid off in creating that dense feeling of the clerk being bounded by books, like she’s in a cavern of books lit by torchlight. (Don’t light your book cave with torches—too much risk of it all going up in smoke, not recommended.)

Send positive vibes

That is a stretch of a joke title referencing the The Fast & The Furious sequel, 2 Fast 2 Furious, because this is the sequel to my first post in this series, “In My Blue Period”. Hey now, there’s an internal rhyme on the “Period” with “Furious”! Thanks for going with it. ;)

I’m about to get into some nitty gritty technical issues with art materials, so if you just want to see the pretty blue artwork, skip ahead!

I mentioned last time that I think I want to put on a small exhibition (like in a cafe, low key) of this series once I’ve done enough to present a cohesive collection. A concern that’s come up is I realized that the fact that I’m using water-soluble ink means that the ink is sensitive to fading in sunlight (the ink is “fugitive”).

One issue with that is that I’ve seen people online say that that means it’s not fit for selling. On the other hand, I’ve also seen a printmaker say that it’s totally fine as long as you’re not misrepresenting things. This latter position seems sensible to me. There’s plenty of artwork in museums that will fade with exposure to light, even artificial light. And museum glass is UV blocking to protect the art, so it seems like the point is rather that people just need to be aware of an artwork’s sensitivity and to protect it accordingly. I’d be curious for your thoughts on this, if you have any!

Another, related concern is that even if my art weren’t for sale (though, I think I would have them available to purchase in the event of putting on a show), I’d still want the pieces not to damaged or to fade during their time on show. Cafes often have large windows and potentially even direct sun exposure on parts of their walls.

So, I plan to replace the panes of whatever frames I use for the art with UV glass. This should protect it while it’s on display, as well as for whomever buys it with the frame.1 If they reframe it, they’ll need to take heed.

So, I got a small piece of UV glass from my local framers to test the inks I’m using in these artworks for lightfastness, with and without the protection of the UV glass. I’ve set up two pieces of paper with Iroshizuku blue ink (water-soluble), De Atramentis document brown (waterproof), and Pentel permanent pigment black (waterproof) markings on each. The papers are taped to a window that gets a lot of sunlight, one with the UV glass between it and the sun, and the other without.

I’ll share back the results much later this year after enough time has passed to see differences emerge—it should take months.

Anyway, today I’m sharing another three scenes from around Seattle this spring, continuing with my (brown and) blue ink approach. I’m really enjoying these!

There’s an Indian bistro tucked away under the lonely halls of Wallingford Center in Seattle. The historic building used to house many small shops, but gradually hosts more vacancies in the wake of the pandemic. The lonely atmosphere of the bold banner in the quiet basement caught my attention, along with the waxy floor reflecting the lights.

One of my favorite things about Seattle is that there’s so much greenery integrated throughout a very urban city. (We are the Emerald City, after all.) This drawing I did at U Village, an “outdoor mall”. As I wandered the walkways looking for a composition, the architecture-y views around the shopping center weren’t grabbing me. Then I saw this little path through a small stand of trees, with the parasols peeking through the gaps. I went lighter on the ink wash this time to let my line work shine.

I did this drawing the Friday before Mother’s Day. It was a warm and sunny spring afternoon in Old Town Ballard, and plenty of people were enjoying the air, stopping by the tea shop pictured here (Miro Tea) and the cafe next door.

Two mothers who each were visiting their sons from out of town separately stopped by to chat with me about tools and methods while I was working on this because they were urban sketchers, themselves!

The good news is this suggests that if I live long enough to retire, I will not be one of those old men who have no friends.

I’ve been looking forward to sharing these artworks with you because it feels like I hit a new level with my urban sketching late last year.

Several things came together over the last year that have resulted in my current approach feeling very well realized. These include:

1. Achieving a high enough level of skill with my linework, rendering, and tone.

2. Developing a approach to handling figures quickly and simply that looks good to me.

3. Finding and figuring out several tools and material choices that I really enjoy, like the brown ink with fude fountain pen + water-soluble blue ink in brush pens.

4. Deciding I’m going to sit and spend time on one, more carefully done piece instead of quickly sketching either more compositions or more details.

Of course, there’s always more room to improve, and different ways of working to pursue.

But speaking of that blue ink—holy cow, what a gorgeous ink. You can see it at full saturation in the pieces below (in the first one, above, I only used it diluted in washes).

The ink is called tsuyu kusa (dew grass) from the Japanese company Pilot’s Iroshizuku line of inks. I got it from an urban sketching friend who brought it to last fall’s “Gab and Grab” event, where people bring art supplies they no longer need for others to “grab” (while everyone “gabs” with each other). Everything that isn’t claimed after the event is donated.

I felt like the archetypal skilled artisan in a story who is given rare materials and says, “I can make great things with this!”

You’ll notice that apparently, I’m in my “Blue Period”. I’m going to stick with the blue this year and try to make it out to an urban sketching event every month so that by the end of the year, I’ll have enough pieces with a generally cohesive look and theme (these sapphire blue environment drawings) to be able to put on a small exhibition in a cafe.

If I can make all that happen, I hope you can see the art in person, and regardless, you’ll hear about it here.

In the meantime, here are a few more watercolor sketches of birds. I work digitally to create the final pages of my comics, but there’s something nice about creating with natural media, learning the particulars of how the tools and media respond to different ways of using them, and coming out at the end with a physical object to behold.

Doing these helped me work out getting these soft, detailed effects with watercolor.

Theses smoldering wings turned out great. But then I wanted to achieve a more water-like effect.

So that’s how we got to…erupting water-bird? Amoebird? You pick the name!

“This one’s for the birds.”

Today I’m sharing three iterations on a bird painting, where you can see me trying different things and learning more about different techniques to work with the medium, watercolor in this case.

Some artists get obsessed with a subject and just paint/draw it over and over and over again. I’m not like that—kind-of the opposite, actually. I love ideas but then once I’ve understood something or have given it expression once, I generally want to keep moving and exploring different territory.

That said, there is great value to trying the same thing over and over again. Not literally the same thing, though: each round should ideally give you more lessons learned that you can keep playing with and building or branching off of. By locking down one major parameter or set of parameters, you free yourself from having to spend time and energy problem solving around that/those parameters and can focus on other aspects of what you’re working on.

Edgar Degas was one such, very famous, obsessive artist. Here’s Degas:

“One must do the same subject over again ten times, a hundred times. In art nothing must resemble an accident, not even movement.”

However, I just flat out disagree with the second sentence of his quote. It’s just straight up wrong. There’s no “must” in “art”. It’s funny how there’s so many quotes throughout history of different artists saying that art must be this way or that way, or defining art to be this or that. And they all differ.

I love when art looks like somehow an accident resulted in this beautiful work.

And that interest of mine is actually why I set aside my inclination to keep doing different things1 to instead do some iterating on one subject. I’m going after approaches with water-based media that create images that look like paint splattered on the paper in the shape of X. Like a bird emerged from a splash of paint and a slash of the brush.

Alright, let’s check out the birds.

It seems like crows are a common subject of the kind of fluid water-splash aesthetic that I love. And in the same vein of me setting aside my impulse to keep doing different things, I also accepted that there’s nothing wrong with me wanting to paint awesome splattery crows, too.

Ok, Take 1 ended up looking kinda like a pigeon due to how I handled the value rendering, heh heh. But setting that aside, I got to see how some of the wet-in-wet painting played out and liked how the brushy-ness of the stroke came out in some places.

This gave me direction for how I wanted to approach Take 2. Let’s have a look:

Ooh, nice, this one came out tighter, with a better handling of how much detail to render for the look I’m after. I also got to observe how the paint handles working into different stages of wetness/dryness of the paper. But what if I want to render a little more and not just have mostly silhouettes? Also, let’s play with color.

With how Take 2 turned out, I’m ready to move to proper watercolor paper on Take 3 to see how it behaves.

Very cool! This one kept growing on me. A lot of different kinds of cool brushwork results. Love the vibrance. I also moved away from “crow”, specifically, with this one, which is why the second sentence of this post says “bird painting”, even though the first two were crows.

There will be more bird (and other) painting iterating.

I started this sketchbook back in 2018 and just filled it up this week, so it’s been six years between when I started and finished this sketchbook.1 This one was almost entirely for urban sketching. I’ve cycled through a lot of different tools and approaches, so there’s a lot of evolution to see in these pages and learnings to share.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about this vid if you have any. Maybe it’s too long and you’d prefer shorter clips?

[EDIT: I was wrong! There’s an option for viewers on their phones to view it with the vertical video full screen. Forgive me Substack gods, for doubting you.] Hmm, a shortcoming of Substack’s is that it doesn’t seem to be able to handle vertical format video…or at least I haven’t been able to figure out how to get it not to stick it in a horizontal format with blank blocks on the sides.

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Last Day For Sketchbook Giveaway

And while we’re on the topic of sketchbooks, just a reminder that if you’d like a chance to win a watercolor sketchbook, today’s the last day to make sure you’re a subscriber and leave a comment on this post to enter!

Behold, their furbaby glory. You can find the cat, Aaron, on Instagram @aarontheheartcat (and a pic of Maple, the dog, there, too).

For these sketches I was working with two brush pens, one filled with pure water-soluble ink, and the other with the same ink very diluted with water. I played around with different ways of working with them.

This was fun getting a feel for how the media behaved. I think the big issue I had, though, was feeling like I wanted more water/ink flow at my command than was available in the brush pens. So, that points to a workflow of doing studies this way but still taking it back home to work with more volume of fluid and maybe bigger brushes.

I like the impressionistic feel of these.

I like how the wet-in-wet worked out especially with that last one above.

This one I went more minimalist in suggesting Aaron’s form with a lot of negative space.

Maple was trickier to sketch than Aaron since she moved a lot more, haha.

With this painting I took on the challenge of a visually dense, busy scene in the foliage of some of the trees and plants at the Ballard Locks. I also took my new field easel out for a spin to start this piece with plein aire painting.

Scenes with a lot going on visually are difficult because you have to find ways to simplify things for your painting or else get bogged down in rendering all the detail, which is slow and also puts you at greater risk of getting lost in your treatment of level of detail, values, and colors.

Definitely hit the “ugly phase” with this one after the one hour done on site. But I think I managed to address a lot of the issues when I came back to the painting another day, back at home, and feel pretty good about it, especially how the dark leaves and flowers warmly overhang the front plane of the painting.

I started trying gouache recently after working in watercolor for my landscape painting for a couple (sparse) years. The ability to paint opaquely makes the medium much more forgiving compared to watercolor, where you really need to be deliberate about the order in which you do things.

Gouache is actually just watercolor with white added to make it opaque. What’s awesome about this is that you can actually just work with watercolor and mix in white when you want to paint opaquely, giving you access to both worlds with the same set of paints. I learned this approach from Nathan Fowkes’ Landscape Sketching Course at Schoolism, which also helped me to loosen up with my painting.

But at first I struggled with the gouache: the colors I mixed were wet and glided too much when I wanted them to scumble, and with the wetness they sometimes also had undesired transparency.

Fortunately, I had a technique breakthrough while working on copying1 a portrait by John Singer Sargent, one of my favorite painters.

The thing is that coming from watercolor, you might be used to working with more, well, water in your brush. It gives you luminous colors with the white of the paper shining through, and allows you to mix colors by glazing. But on the flip side, even the residual water left in the bristles after pressing out water against the side of your water cup is enough to dilute all the paint you mix, leading to the excessive wetness I was experiencing.

This may seem obvious, but to keep the paint opaque and able to scumble, when you wet or rinse a brush, dab out excess water on a paper towel before you start mixing paint. That will pull out more water after pressing out what you can from the bristles against the cup wall.

And with that realization, I was able to control the texture and color of the paint much better. Hope that’s helpful!

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Happy Palentine’s Day from Sherlock and Watson! Share this with a pal!

Here’s a making-of video:

Wikipedia is telling me that Palentine’s Day is actually “celebrated annually on February 13, but can be observed on February 14 as well”. It seems like the point is better made if it’s on the 14th.

There’s something to be said here about the diminished status of friendship in our culture compared to romantic relationships, despite its centrality to well-being and life outcomes. But best leave it to others who actually have thought, researched, and talked about it, like on this great Ezra Klein podcast episode interviewing Rhaina Cohen about her forthcoming book, “The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life With Friendship at the Center”. I’m looking forward to reading it once the library gets it as an e-book.

Why, yes, I am single, how’d you know? ;)

Happy celebrations, y’all.

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