Teresa Watts

Dark Emu (2014), Bruce Pascoe

2026-03-11T13:35:35Z

Aboriginal people in pre-colonial times engaged in grew and stored crops, made complex fish traps, sometimes lived in villages with large buildings, and cultivated the land in a way that allowed them to thrive in some of the most difficult places to live. I don't think I was ever taught this in history.

Pascoe references writings and drawings from early colonialists, supported by modern evidence and research, to suggest that Aboriginal people were not strictly hunter-gatherers. While some of the accounts of colonialists aren't necessarily the most reliable, there certainly are a lot of them that paint a cohesive picture, supported by modern research.

It's noted more than once in the book that although the Aboriginal people were considered technologically inferior by the invading Europeans, there is a lot that can be learned about living more sustainably in Australian environments.

Cézanne (2010), Parkstone International

2026-03-11T13:35:35Z

A short and accessible book about unappreciated-in-his-time 19th century artist Paul Cézanne. I'm not terribly familiar with art history and it was nice to get this taster in an easy to understand way, whilst still introducing me to ways of discussing art that I don't currently have the language for.

UXC

2026-03-11T13:35:35Z

Here is the reference image we’ll be using for this workshop (photo by Jassir Jonis via Unsplash)

Upside down version:

Version with guide lines that you can toggle:

If you want to learn more:

Anya Brock - I did her botanical painting workshop recently and it inspired me to do more blind contour drawing!
Sketching Now - Liz Steel's Foundations course goes into detail of different ways of seeing, and how to capture a reference with and without guide lines. Amazing sketchbook work drawing from life and on location.
Stephanie Sheppard - I learned the comparative measurement stuff from her, she sometimes runs workshops.
Drewscape (Youtube) - a quick primer on contour drawing, also a great sketching channel with chill vibes.
Sticc and Thicc life drawing - drawing from life is the best, and if you liked the chill vibes my class you might like this one. Runs twice a month.

Warning if you go to look at my art - there is some (illustrated) nudity from the above life drawing sessions with a nude model!

Posts

2026-03-11T13:35:35Z

Category	Title	Image (Local)	Summary	Date Posted
Sketchbooks	Sketchbook 14	!sketchbook14 5.jpeg		11 March 2026
article	Little automations for a calmer week		Weekly meeting summaries to help my plan my week	19 February 2026
	Letters 16		(Lunar) New Year resolutions	19 February 2026
Art	Workshop with Sue Hibbert	!IMG_8824.jpeg		1 February 2026
Art	Self portrait in gouache	!self portrait - 1.jpeg		18 January 2026
Notes	Build tools using AI			2 December 2025
Writing	Switching from Kindle to a Boox Go 7 e-ink reader	!IMG_7617.jpeg		26 November 2025
Writing	My planning, writing and sketching tools - 2025			23 November 2025
	About			20 November 2025
Letters	Letters 15		What is “real” art anyway	6 November 2025
Art	Even more life drawing in watercolour	!IMG_7514-e9068564.jpeg		30 October 2025
Art	Painting botanicals with Anya Brock	!IMG_7601-f2dcb9fb.jpeg		26 October 2025
Art	Peachtober digital sketches	!IMG_0366.jpeg		16 October 2025
	UXC			15 October 2025
Letters	Letters 14		I’m wise now, apparently	7 August 2025
Writing	Travel sketching kit			6 August 2025
Sketchbooks	Sketchbook 12	!IMG_7443-8f01a31c.jpeg		6 August 2025
Notes	Sewing patterns for a chill wardrobe			30 July 2025
Art	Life drawing the male figure	!IMG_4498-5bbf1280.jpeg		30 April 2025

Getting the best out of Focus modes

2026-03-11T13:35:35Z

I’ve been trying out iOS focus (there’s a great comprehensive rundown of how focus modes work on Hulry). These different modes on Apple devices can be customised to change things like what kind of notifications get through, what apps or widgets display on the Home Screen, and a few other things to help you focus on what you’re doing. As much as that is possible when you’re surrounded by devices. Mine are synced across my phone, tablet and laptop.

I'm well aware that strategies like this for curbing phone is similar to organising all your junk rather than facing the fact that most of it should go in the bin. But I have found that this nudge has played a part in having a more considered approach to how I use my various screens.

Here’s what my setup looks like:

In general
I have learned from experience that having social media or work related apps on my phone is simply too much temptation for me to "just check quickly" at completely the wrong times. I use different devices for different activities, and try to set up my focus modes to support that. I only get push notifications from my calendar app, chat app and SMS because I don’t have anything else I need to pay attention to immediately. I like using art I’ve made as wallpapers, with different ones for different modes.

Work

When I’m working, I have app notifications turned off and only my calendar widget with upcoming work meetings on my phone home screen. I don't have any work related apps on my phone in general, so I don't have a reason to be on my phone and try to keep it as boring as possible. This one switches on for my normal working hours, and switches off when I’m having a lunch break and can check back on any personal chats or emails.

Fitness

I go to a gym at my local shops, so in this mode I have a Home Screen that has a widget to open up my exercise plan in Notion but also one to display my grocery shopping list and library app. This one is location based, so it triggers when I enter the area and off when I exit it.

Swimming

This is literally because I need to scan a QR code when arriving at my kids swimming lessons, and it’s easier to have a location based focus mode to have it on my Home Screen than remember to bring the card.

Evening

After the kids are in bed, I have a precious hour or so to myself. I’m trying to gently nudge myself to paint or draw during this time, so my Lock Screen background is a painting I did, and I don’t have any widgets displaying upcoming calendar events so I’m not pulled into thinking about work.

Do not disturb

Pretty straightforward, I used this default focus mode long before trying any other ones. Notifications are silenced and phone calls blocked aside from immediate family members. There are no apps on my Home Screen at all. The wallpaper is a photo of a sunset to remind me that it’s time to sleep. I know there’s a default sleep mode but this works for me.

This one turns on automatically at 9:30pm until 6am, although I can trigger it manually if I don’t want to be disturbed by my phone at another time. If I'm still on my phone, iPad or laptop when this mode switches on, it's my signal to pack up and get ready for bed.

So yes, all of the apps are technically still easily accessible if I really want to get to them. And I did have to do some of that decluttering initially to get to a place where this is useful. This is not so much digital minimalism as calm technology, being only what I need it to be in specific contexts and otherwise just getting out of my way and letting me get on with things.

Letter

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

Hi there,

Art

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

UX Camp Perth 2022

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

I’ve had a long time between sketchnotes at conferences (although I have still been sketching!). Having two toddlers and a global pandemic can do that! But I was really determined to make the most of UX Camp Perth this year, as an awesome local conference that I was lucky enough to get a last minute ticket to attend.

The unconference format is always an interesting one, and I find it leads to an agenda of speakers and topics that you might not get in a more polished (and expensive) conference. That reduced formality really lends itself to greater connection and more fun!

The pitching was intense, with a huge 42 pitches. I thought I’d sketch the first few, and somehow ended up doing them all. There were so many great ideas that I hope people will hold onto if they didn’t get a chance to present on the day.

Sketching and how to win at pictionary

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

I always find it interesting when people say that they’re “not very good at drawing” – I find myself saying it, even though drawing has been a hobby of mine since I was a kid.

In my day job as a user experience designer, I often come across situations where communicating with words, or even vigorous gestures and sound effects, just don’t quite get the message across. Usually this is just when I’m working things out for myself, but sometimes when explaining or discussing things with others. I’ve started to bring my hobby more into my work and get more confident at sketching and sharing sketches to communicate and work through ideas. Even for someone who has been drawing for some time, this is scary!

That’s why I started to try and think of this as not art, but sketching to get an idea across quickly, as you would in a game of Pictionary. It can be fast, scrappy and low fidelity – doesn’t matter as long as it makes sense in the moment. It’s much easier to start sketching without that fear of being less than perfect and the pressure of being an artist.

This talk that I did for DDD Perth was to share that sentiment and what has worked for me, and to get more people sketching – even if they’re not artists. It was a really fun event and such an honour to get to speak along with so many amazing developers, designers and data scientists! I was a little overwhelmed with the response and the feedback afterwards, and so happy that some people told me that they were going to try and start sketching in their work soon.

You can see my talk slides and view a video of a previous run of this talk at Fenders Perth.

I also did my best to take sketchnotes through the day from all the great talks I went to – check the DDD Perth website and social media for photos and videos soon.

Perth Web Accessibility Camp 2023

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

This is one of the Perth conferences that I look forward to every year, because there's always such a diverse range of speakers and topics within accessibility. In particular I enjoyed the talks with case studies of real organisations embedding accessibility into their practice.

P.S. Yes, I did check that my colour palette has sufficient contrast.

Design Research 2018 sketchnotes

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

I was lucky enough to be able to fly to Melbourne to attend the annual Design Research conference for 2018. Here’s my sketchnotes from the very impressive lineup – I learned so much!

DDD Perth 2019 sketchnotes

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

DDD Perth is one of my favourite conferences, so having a young baby in tow wasn’t going to stop me from attending – and sketchnoting. I wasn’t able to get all of it, but being prepared meant that these are some of the nicest sketchnotes I’ve done!

Some things I did to make sure I was set up:

went over the program in detail and decided which talks to attend
set up a colour palette and my brush set that I use for sketchnotes
made a new file for each talk in Procreate with the header and footer set up

Setting up in advance meant that I could spend more time doing little portraits of each speaker based on their bio pics, rather than scrambling during the talk or having to remember afterwards.

You can see the 2019 program for DDD Perth, which also has links to videos of the talks, if you’re interested in the topics above.

UX Camp Perth 2023 - sketchnotes

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

What an awesome day at UXCamp Perth | Boorloo! This was my third time attending and it’s always full of good vibes and great chats. It’s still amazing to me that I can attend such a high quality event at a low cost without having to fly somewhere. The Perth UX community is so open and supportive, which made it an easy to choice to pitch my first conference talk in 5 years (my last one was Sketching and how to win at pictionary at DDDPerth 2018).

I spent a lot of time preparing for my talk, on Starting with Sketchnotes, because I really wanted to include some live drawing and completely hand drawn "slides". It's a bit of a gamble when the unconference format meant that I might not even get to present, but worth the extra effort. Huge thanks to the lovely people who voted my talk in and participated in sketchnoting along with me! It was super cool to spot people sketchnoting in talks throughout the day 👀

Although I usually sketchnote on my iPad, this time I decided to go fully analog, to see if I still can. I missed being able to undo and move things around, but overall being constrained to one pen and an A6 page was somehow freeing? Maybe it's because it's harder to try and be a perfectionist. Usually I get to the end of a conference day drained, but this time I left feeling happy and energised. I might stick to simple pen and paper more often.

As usual, these notes will make more sense to me than anyone else! Check with UXCamp Perth | Boorloo for recordings and slides when they are released.

UX Camp Perth 2022

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

Starting with Sketchnotes

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

This post is essentially a talk I gave at UX Camp Perth 2023. It doesn't have quite the same effect when it's not live, but I wanted to share it with anyone who couldn't be there for it.

Here are my own sketchnotes from UX Camp Perth 2023 for the other excellent talks/workshops from the day!

One thing I like to point out before I get started - you don't have to be an artist. People can be scared of drawing because they think they won't be any good at it. But you don't have to be an expert at drawing to make sketchnotes.

What is it?

We're all familiar with traditional notes. They tend to be in a linear format, written in lines. Possibly light formatting (bold, italic etc). The meaning is conveyed through the words themselves. These days most people will type notes rather than writing by hand.

In contrast, sketchnotes are a visual way of taking notes. Instead of a linear structure, it can be loose - it doesn't have to follow top to bottom, left to right - it can zoom around. The meaning is conveyed through the structure, illustrations, lettering and words layered together into something that is more alive. It has to be created by hand and is highly personal to the creator. It also takes a lot more work!

But why?

It helps you to learn by engaging different parts of your brain. If you're just passively listening to a presentation, you're receiving that input through your ears and eyes, but might not be actively engaging with it. It's easy to get distracted. Even if you're typing notes, because of the speed of typing you can capture a lot more of what the speaker is saying, without necessarily thinking about it.

When you're sketchnoting, you're actively listening and trying to figure out what is or isn't worth getting down on paper, because it isn't fast enough to capture everything, only the big ideas and the parts that speak to you personally. There's research to suggest that rather than being a bad thing, this helps create more connections in your brain around the ideas that you're capturing and how it fits into your existing knowledge, making it easier to learn and recall later. There's also the kinaesthetic aspect of using your hands to write or draw which is again bringing in another part of your brain, and further embedding meaning and memory into what you create.

Visual thinking skills are also relevant for just sketching to ideate or figure things out, by yourself or with others. Getting different parts of your brain involved can help break out through to different ways of thinking and learning.

Tools

The first question I get asked when people see my sketchnotes is "Do you use an iPad, and what app do you use?"

I use an app called Procreate on my iPad, and it's great (and affordable). There are a lot of cool things you can do with it - different brushes, colours, erase, select and resize and move things around.

Tip: it won't magically make you good at drawing! If you don't get great results drawing on paper then it will be the same working digitally.

But! The iPad is an expensive tool to buy and has an overwhelming number of options. Don't think that you can't take sketchnotes if you don't have an iPad - it’s definitely not a necessity.

What I suggest is to start with what you have, then get fancy later as you get a feel for what you need. Maybe you don't need anything fancier than a ballpoint pen and printer paper. The main thing is to not wait until you have just the right tool before getting started. Start now!

Let's try it!

Feel free to follow along if you want to.

But before we begin:
YOU ARE CREATIVE!

Sometimes people say "it's so cool that you can do that, I can't I'm not creative". But we are all creative, it's an inherent part of being human. You might just not have much experience with drawing. But it's a skill that you can learn with practice.

This is where the live demonstration sketch-with-me part happened. Talking and drawing and writing at the same time is very hard so this isn't my most amazing work but I'm pretty pleased with it. It was inspired by a talk by Eva-Lotta Lamm, which has stuck with me for many years.

4 elements of sketchnoting

Lettering
Shapes and connectors
Imagery
Structure

Huge thanks to everyone who came along and showed me their sketchnotes!

Sketching and how to win at pictionary

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

I always find it interesting when people say that they’re “not very good at drawing” – I find myself saying it, even though drawing has been a hobby of mine since I was a kid.

In my work as a user experience designer, I often come across situations where communicating with words, or even vigorous gestures and sound effects, just don’t quite get the message across. Usually this is just when I’m working things out for myself, but sometimes when explaining or discussing things with others. I’ve started to bring my hobby more into my work and get more confident at sketching and sharing sketches to communicate and work through ideas. Even for someone who has been drawing for some time, this is scary!

![assets/sketching/tips.jpg|Top tips: 1) Don't be an artist, this is not art. 2) Consider your audience. 3) Make it snappy. 4) Use what you got. 5) Think, then sketch](/img/user/assets/sketching/tips.jpg)

![assets/sketching/Djz9aB6UYAAY5c7.jpg-large-1024x1024.jpg|Photo of a group of amazing ladies at DDD Perth, all wearing my "Trying my best" pin!"](/img/user/assets/sketching/Djz9aB6UYAAY5c7.jpg-large-1024x1024.jpg)

You can see my talk slides and view a video of a previous run of this talk at Fenders Perth.

I also did my best to take sketchnotes through the day from all the great talks I went to – check the DDD Perth website and social media for photos and videos soon.

Perth Web Accessibility Camp 2025 in sketchnotes

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

Another great Perth Web Accessibility Camp!

This is the first time I tried doing one large sketchnote with bits from each talk, rather than a large one each. It's very dense but looks kind of cool as a whole, and takes a bit less energy out of my to produce.

Perth Web Accessibility Camp 2023

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

P.S. Yes, I did check that my colour palette has sufficient contrast.

Fenders June 2018 in sketchnotes

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

Fenders (Front end developers) Perth is always a great meetup, you always learn something new! Here’s some sketchnotes from the June 2018 speakers.

Design Research 2018 sketchnotes

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

I was lucky enough to be able to fly to Melbourne to attend the annual Design Research conference for 2018. Here’s my sketchnotes from the very impressive lineup. I learned so much!

DDD Perth 2019 sketchnotes

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

Some things I did to make sure I was set up:

went over the program in detail and decided which talks to attend
set up a colour palette and my brush set that I use for sketchnotes
made a new file for each talk in Procreate with the header and footer set up

Setting up in advance meant that I could spend more time doing little portraits of each speaker based on their bio pics, rather than scrambling during the talk or having to remember afterwards.

![img_1346.jpg|Sketchnote of the talk "AI for Earth"](/img/user/assets/sketching/img_1346.jpg)

You can see the 2019 program for DDD Perth, which also has links to videos of the talks, if you’re interested in the topics above.

Sketchbook 9

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

I started this sketchbook in May 2024 and completed it in August 2024. It had just 20 pages, and the paper was a bit light for wet media, but ok for light watercolour washes and gouache.

📖 Traveler’s Journal sketchbook insert
🎨 Daniel Smith watercolours, Winsor & Newton gouache
✏️ Prismacolor Premier pencils, Derwent Rebel watercolour pencils
✒️ Lamy Safari, Kaweco Sport, Sailor Fude de Manen
...plus other random materials

Sketchbook 8

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

I started this sketchbook in May 2024 and completed it in June 2024. It has only 20 pages and is very tiny! The paper is very different to regular watercolour paper. I call this one my bird sketchbook.

📖 Traveler’s Journal watercolour insert
🎨 Daniel Smith watercolours, Mont Marte watercolours
✏️ Mechanical pencil with red lead
✒️ Lamy Safari, Kaweco Sport
...plus other random materials

Sketchbook 7

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

I started this sketchbook in March 2024 and it’s still in progress. I’m using pocket sized sketchbooks at the same time, so not getting to this one as much. Still love the Alpha paper though.

📖 Stillman & Birn Alpha A5
🎨 Daniel Smith watercolours
✏️ Prismacolor Premier pencils, Derwent Rebel watercolour pencils
✒️ Lamy Safari, Kaweco Sport, Sailor Fude de Manen
...plus other random materials

Sketchbook 6

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

I started this sketchbook in January and completed it in May 2024.

📖 Stillman & Birn Alpha
🎨 Daniel Smith watercolours, Mont Marte watercolours
✏️ Prismacolor Premier pencils
✒️ Lamy Safari, Kaweco Sport, Sailor Fude de Manen
...plus other random materials

Sketchbook 5

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

I started this sketchbook in January 2024 and completed it in January 2024. In this sketchbook I completed the Sketching Now Watercolour course, so there’s a lot of colour mixing and swatching in here.

📖 Handbook watercolor journal
🎨 Daniel Smith watercolours
✒️ Lamy Safari, Kaweco Sport
...plus other random materials

Sketchbook 4

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

I started this sketchbook in October 2023 and completed it in January 2024.

📖 Paper Republic drawing book
🎨 Daniel Smith watercolours
✏️ Prismacolor Premier pencils
✒️ Lamy Safari, Kaweco Sport
...plus other random materials

This was my first time using the pocket or A6 size, after using mostly A5 or larger sketchbooks. I tend towards working small so this was a good change. It was so convenient to carry around with me, and that may be why there's even a few sketches done on location in there. You can see more about my notebook system here.

I did some experimenting with different media as well as continuing with my watercolours. When I felt like I was losing steam and running out of ideas, I did the 100 Heads challenge, fanart studies and some different timed drawings.

The drawing book paper was lovely with pens and pencils, and not bad with watercolour. Although it wasn't designed for watercolour I think that those sketches are some of my favourites.

!watercolour sketch of a bottle of ink and 2 fountain pens

Sketchbook 3

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

Started August 2023
Completed October 2023

📖 Born Visual Art Diary, A5
🎨 Daniel Smith, White Nights, , Micador watercolours
✏️ Prismacolor Premier pencils
✒️ Lamy Safari, Kaweco Sport ...plus lots of other random materials

This was kind of a “junk” sketchbook, until I finished Sketchbook 2 and it became my main one. I didn’t have high hopes for this cheap mixed media sketchbook paper, but it was almost great, considering the price. It wasn’t just that it cost me less, but not feeling at all precious about “wasting” it was freeing and meant a lot more experimentation and risks, some of which paid off. I’d consider buying it again if it came in a smaller softcover version.

Some things I enjoyed trying out were permanent inks, my kids cheap watercolours, and sketching my travels, recent and long past.

Sketchbook 2

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

I started this sketchbook at the end of June 2023, and completed it at the start of September 2023.

After completing Sketchbook 1, I decided to lean further into exploring watercolor and learning sketching fundamentals. This time I bought a watercolor sketchbook (Seawhite of Brighton) with nice thick paper and a hard cover. The difference in how watercolor layers on this paper versus the 90gsm Rhodia paper is huge, but the extra expense and weight is also making me pause before picking it up as often. I have a sense of not wanting to "waste" it, although of course a sketchbook sitting unused is surely more of a waste.

I've also been doing Liz Steel's Foundations course, which means most of my pages are doing the assignments which vary from testing materials to whole watercolor paintings done on location.

Here's some of my favourite spreads:

Sketchbook 14

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

I started this sketchbook in October 2025 and completed it in March 2026. I unintentionally skipped doing a sketchbook number 13!

📖 Homemade using Artec Como Sketch Pad 210gsm mixed media paper (pocket sized)
🎨 Daniel Smith watercolours, Winsor & Newton gouache
✒️ Sailor Fude with permanent black ink, Kaweco Sport with permanent sepia ink
🖌️ 1/4 inch dagger brush

Sketchbook 12

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

I started and completed this sketchbook in June 2025 on a 4 night trip to Bali with some friends.

📖 Homemade using Artec Como Sketch Pad 210gsm mixed media paper (pocket sized)
🎨 Daniel Smith watercolours, Winsor & Newton white gouache
✒️ Sailor Fude with permanent black ink
🖌️ Sakura Koi travel water brush

Here's more on my Travel sketching kit and a flick through of my sketchbook.

Sketchbook 11

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

I started this sketchbook in September 2024 and it’s currently in progress. I cut this into 2 halves to better fit into My notebook system.

📖 Stillman & Birn Beta
🎨 Daniel Smith watercolours
✏️ Prismacolor Premier pencils
✒️ Lamy Safari, Kaweco Sport
...plus other random materials

Sketchbook 10

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

I started this sketchbook in August 2024 and completed it in September 2024. I made this very thin sketchbook from 180gsm Montmarte watercolour paper and bound it with wax thread. I like the effect, it was very lightweight! This was mainly a portrait sketchbook.

📖 Handmade sketchbook
🎨 Daniel Smith watercolours, Winsor & Newton gouache
✏️ various pencils
...plus other random materials

Sketchbook 1

2023-08-15T00:00:00.000Z

I've tried various times in the past to keep a journal, and usually it fizzles out very quickly. Bullet Journalling was more my speed for some time, but it was mainly to-do lists interspersed with a few notes for ideas. These days I have less free time to need organising, so that style of journal isn't so relevant for me.

For this sketchbook, I'm trying a looser and more visual approach. At the start of the year I bought myself an inexpensive, plain page notebook and refilled my old foutain pen. I'm not forcing myself to draw or write in it every day, although most days I do. Sometimes they're simple ink sketches, others I've tried to experiment with watercolour paint (not the best choice for this paper unfortunately). Sometimes it's about my day or referencing photos I've taken, other times it's whatever I feel like drawing. There are some ideas and notes, but no to-do lists. It's not neat, or cohesive, or well thought out. There is no pressure to be consistent or maintain a high standard, as I try to Optimise for curiosity, not productivity It's just fun and exploratory.

I completed this sketchbook at the end of June 2023, a huge achievement for me!

Here is a super fast flip through, and below are some of my favourite pages.
I completed this sketchbook at the end of June 2023, a huge achievement for me!

This sketchbook was intentionally very experimental, varied and casual - sketchbook 2 has watercolour paper and is turning out a bit different!

Sewing patterns for a chill wardrobe

2025-11-29T00:00:00.000Z

I’ve been making some simple clothing that I haven’t been able to find easily in shops. So far I’ve been sticking to linen and trying to make some matching sets that can also be mixed in with my other clothes. It’s so satisfying to make something to fill a gap in my wardrobe, even if the construction is a little on the dodgy side as I’m learning.

I’ll add more in here as I make more things.

How to: Sew an elasticated skirt with a flat front waistband
DIY Trapezoid Skirt Tutorial — DIY Daisy
These two skirt patterns are very similar but give slightly different silhouettes. I love the look of the flat front waistband, which could also easily be used with the trapezoid shape rather than the rectangle. I have 3 skirts in different prints/colours, but a simple black linen skirts with pockets has been one of the favourite things I’ve made.

DIY Rectangle Sleeve Top Tutorial — DIY Daisy
I’ve made the jacket version of this top in two different linens, and they make a great lightweight cover when in the sun, or a thin extra layer when it’s slightly cold.

Optimise for curiosity, not productivity

2025-12-10T00:00:00.000Z

The past few years (2019-2022) I've avoided setting goals - carrying, giving birth to and then caring for two children really doesn't leave a whole lot of energy for chasing big dreams, or at least not for me. I've been in survival mode, and very gentle with myself in terms of productivity. I gave myself permission to not worry about chipping away at big goals, but to instead follow my curiosity as my energy allows, without judgement of where I get to and whether I've reached any measure of success or value.

But you know what? In addition to being a whole lot more chill, I've actually done a lot of good stuff, and had fun doing it. Not as much as pre-kids me with consistent sleep and a free schedule perhaps, but I don't think that would have been the case even if I'd hustled through the sleep deprivation. I've painted (digitally and traditionally), made a new website, learned about investing in shares, reduced my environmental footprint, found a consistent gym routine, got myself a new job, read a bunch of books, written a bunch of notes - and these things energised and enlarged me.

This has led me to believe that for me at least, setting big goals and optimising for productivity isn't the way to living a satisfying life. Maybe optimising for curiosity, especially in my very limited free time, is the approach that will give me the most energy and take me to the most interesting places.

References

3-2-1: Discovering passion, the power of your mind, and how to do your best work - James Clear

It's easy to find ways to improve when you are genuinely curious about something. Rather than asking yourself, “How can I be better at this?” start by asking, “How can I be more curious about this?”

Busting the myths of the brain with neuroscientist Chantel Prat - WorkLife with Adam Grant | Podcast on Spotify

“When you feel curious, your brain is squirting out dopamine which helps it to learn and rewire in the the face of what happens next.”

A life of splendid uselessness is a life well lived | Psyche Ideas

Throughout the whole history of science,’ wrote Abraham Flexner in 1939, ‘most of the really great discoveries which had ultimately proved to be beneficial to mankind had been made by men and women who were driven not by the desire to be useful but merely the desire to satisfy their curiosity.’

Notes

2025-11-29T00:00:00.000Z

I've made a few attempts to take notes for things that I read, hear or have ideas about. These have always been private, but I'm tentatively trying to put them here publicly.

There is very little that is original here - it is mostly based on various sources. Some notes are extremely brief, which helps keep them atomic. All are opinionated but loosely held. These should evolve over time, if I'm continuing this practice.

Title	Summary	Date Posted
Build tools using AI		2 December 2025
Sewing patterns for a chill wardrobe		30 July 2025
How to Take Smart Notes (2017), Sönke Ahrens		2 June 2025
Designing Your Life (2016), Bill Burnett & Dave Evans		6 March 2025
Dailyish		17 February 2025
Avoiding multitasking is unrealistic		16 February 2025
Do one thing at a time		16 February 2025
Orwell's Roses (2021), Rebecca Solnit		20 January 2025
Optimise for curiosity, not productivity		3 January 2023
Digital Gardening	A digital garden is an alternative to blogs or essays, in that they aren’t organised linearly by time. Posts or notes might start as incomplete ideas that will be added to or evolved over time, growing more connected to each other.	11 December 2022
Evergreen notes		-
Keep a project journal		-
Notes		-

I've tried to put these into a few broad themes, which can be handy for navigation when I finish putting this together.

Keep a project journal

2025-11-29T00:00:00.000Z

A case study is a powerful storytelling tool. But writing them long after a project has finished, maybe when you’re applying for a new job, is hard. It’s easy to forget all the important details if you’re not keeping track of them in a centralised place. This is the same idea as Don’t let good ideas go to waste, but specific to a project.

A project journal is one answer to this. For each project or initiative, keep a daily or milestone-based log. The personal journal format is key - details about how you felt, the mistakes you made and the tiny wins will help to create a more compelling story when the time comes to write a full case study, similar to how Qualitative research tells a better story

References

Using a work journal to create design case studies - Tanner Christensen

The project journal is a valuable part of any work journal because it captures project-specific reflections and notes. Within each work journal, I have multiple project journals: dedicated pages for every defined project at the company. Some projects are short journals—no more than two weeks of entries—while others span months or years.
I have 15 minutes on my calendar for heads-down time to reflect on the day and journal what got done. I don't restrict myself from journaling during those times, but I have found that having that set time on the calendar helps me remain consistent.
During scheduled journaling time, I'll capture what I remember from meetings, points that came up during my one-on-one conversations, or any specific design artifacts or elements I'm exploring at the time.
The linear and personal format of a journal works well for translating into a case study because it focuses on your personal experience of the work. Your journal won't follow a stereotypical template of some romantic design process; it will follow the actual process you took through the work. It will be faithful to what you experienced as you worked on the project, making for a compelling case study.

#writing #design #process #storytelling

Evergreen notes

2025-11-29T00:00:00.000Z

https://notes.andymatuschak.org/

A note-writing practice and system inspired by Zettelkasten but with some key differences. It’s detailed in Andy Matuschak’s own public collection of notes online, which is a great example of ideas mingling.

I like the way that the notes are named, so they can easily be linked together without disturbing the flow of sentences.

Overview

https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Evergreen_notes

“Evergreen notes are written and organized to evolve, contribute, and accumulate over time, across projects. This is an unusual way to think about writing notes: Most people take only transient notes . That’s because these practices aren’t about writing notes; they’re about effectively developing insight“

Principles

Evergreen notes should be atomic
- Each note should be about one thing only,
- “This way, it’s easier to form connections across topics and contexts. If your notes are too broad, you might not notice when you encounter some new idea about one of the notions contained within, and links to that note will be muddied.”
Evergreen notes should be concept-oriented
- Not by book, project etc - this makes it easier to form connections across disciplines, topics and sources
- “The most straightforward way to take notes is to start a new note for each book, each project, or each research topic. Because each note covers many concepts, it can be hard to find what you’ve written when a concept comes up again later: you have to remember the name of each book or project which dealt with the topic”
Evergreen notes should be densely linked
- “If we push ourselves to add lots of links between our notes, that makes us think expansively about what other concepts might be related to what we’re thinking about. It creates pressure to think carefully about how ideas relate to each other“
Prefer associative ontologies to hierarchical taxonomies
- “Let structure emerge organically. When it’s imposed from the start, you prematurely constrain what may emerge and artificially compress the nuanced relationships between ideas.”
Write notes for yourself by default, disregarding audience
- Don’t write notes as if they are a final published piece, as the overhead isn’t usually worth it. Let them be notes and use them to write for an audience later.
- “I try to write things with all the context and clear prose needed for an outsider to understand what I’m talking about. Then I often find that I can’t write anything at all! Better to write at a level where I can produce something, then use that to lever myself upward.”

Implementation

1 Collect passages that seem interesting and thoughts that emerge while reading: How to collect observations while reading

“Since you’re going to write lasting notes anyway, annotations need carry just enough information to recreate your mental context in that moment of reading. ”

2 Process clusters of those passages and thoughts into lasting notes: How to process reading annotations into evergreen notes

#reading #workflow #learning #productivity

Do one thing at a time

2025-11-29T00:00:00.000Z

Based on time and accuracy (e.g. comprehension of text read), multitasking is not as efficient as you think it is. Even with evolving expectations in our busy society, the human brain is limited in how much it can process at the same time, especially if it requires the same parts of the brain.

Avoiding multitasking is unrealistic, but maybe we can Multitask better?

References

Go on, admit it. You’re multitasking. Here’s how to do it better | Psyche Ideas

Despite perceptions that multitasking is efficient, studies generally show that doing one task at a time is more efficient (based on the time and accuracy) than doing two tasks at the same time. That’s because the human brain is limited in terms of how much information it can process at a given time.

The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

Whenever we engage with a task, the relevant ruleset must be loaded into a small area of the brain called the Lateral Prefrontal Cortex (LatPFC). Whatever ruleset is being held within this part of the brain will ultimately determine what the attentional filter deems relevant or irrelevant.

Here's the problem: the LatPFC can only hold onto one ruleset at a time.

This means anytime we attempt to consciously undertake two tasks simultaneously, the brain simply cannot handle this; the best it can do is quickly jump back-and-forth between tasks, swapping out the ruleset within the LatPFC each time.

#productivity

Digital Gardening

2025-12-07T00:00:00.000Z

Digital Gardening

A digital garden is an alternative to blogs or essays, in that they aren’t organised linearly by time. Posts or notes might start as incomplete ideas that will be added to or evolved over time, growing more connected to each other. They’re intended to be explored through rich inter-linking. They’re usually more personal and less performative than other written content published online. Reading a digital garden feels a bit like peeking into someone’s brain.

This is similar to How to Take Smart Notes (2017), Sönke Ahrens and Evergreen notes, although published on a website instead of a private knowledge base. Many digital gardeners have their own private notes, and then publish ideas on their sites as they start bringing ideas together.

There is some connection to Indie Web and the ideas of publishing on your own site first, as an antidote to the fickle algorithms of social media.

References

A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden

"A garden is a collection of evolving ideas that aren't strictly organised by their publication date. They're inherently exploratory – notes are linked through contextual associations. They aren't refined or complete - notes are published as half-finished thoughts that will grow and evolve over time. They're less rigid, less performative, and less perfect than the personal websites we're used to seeing."
"Gardens are never finished, they're constantly growing, evolving, and changing. Just like a real soil, carrot, and cabbage garden.

[…] there is no "final version” on a garden. What you publish is always open to revision and expansion. "

"Gardens are a chance to question the established norms of a 'personal website', and make space for weirder, wilder experiments."

Digital Gardening for Non-Technical Folks

Gardens are...

a) Explorable, rather than structured as a strictly linear steam of posts. This is usually achieved through deeply interlinking notes where readers can navigate freely through the content.
b) Slowly grown over time, rather than creating “finished” work that you never touch again. You revise, update, and change your ideas as they develop, and ideally find a way to indicate the “done-ness” state to your reader.

Dailyish

2025-11-29T00:00:00.000Z

Rather than a rigid commitment to doing something every single day without fail - a commitment that is destined to fail at some point - "dailyish" adds the light pressure of intending to do create a daily habit whilst acknowledging the reality that there will be times when this isn't possible. The focus is then not on getting an unbroken streak, but on doing the thing.

I'm aim to write Morning Pages and work in my Sketchbooks dailyish, and try to not beat myself up too much about missing days here and there.

References

'Dailyish' | Oliver Burkeman

an every-single-day rule is so rigid, so intolerant of the vagaries of life, that you'll inevitably soon fall off the wagon. And once that's happened, you lose all motivation to continue – so you end up doing less, in aggregate, than if you hadn't been quite so exacting in your demands

something about "dailyish" shifts the focus away from your particular smorgasbord of psychological problems back to the thing itself – to the creation you're seeking to bring into existence, whether that's a piece of writing or work of art, a happy family, healthier body, meditation habit, or anything else. It's a reminder that in some fundamental way, real productivity – provided you're working on something worth producing to begin with – isn't about you. It's about what's being produced. What matters, in the end, is what gets created, not whether the person doing the creating has an impeccable record of red Xs.

Meditation Advice for Beginners from Dan Harris

“dailyish”, provides enough elasticity so that you if you fall off the wagon for a day or two or three, you can still start up again, and that’s totally fine.

Build tools using AI

2025-11-29T00:00:00.000Z

I like the idea of building small, custom tools for my individual purpose (initially at least) using AI as an enabler. I know a little frontend code - CSS/SCSS, HTML, Javascript - but using AI means I can build things that I can dream up but couldn't easily build myself.

I prefer this mindset over using AI to build the complete project, as it's reusable and creates a deterministic tool that can then produce predictable results. It's a high agency approach.

"Home-cooked" software

Home-cooked apps or software is:

simple
Cheap or free to run
Made for a particular specific context
Private and safe
Made with love and care
Probably not going to make millions of dollars or be motivated by that idea

This is in contrast to professional software which is built for a larger user base, complex, is made by professional teams, and probably not specific to your needs. This is related to The long-tail problem and Design for emergence.

LLMs for non-developers can help support Barefoot developers to be able to create home-cooked software without learning how to code.

References

Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

It’s hard to argue it wouldn’t be overwhelmingly net good for more people to be capable of designing and building their own software to solve problems for their local communities.

You can just build your own design tools now - YouTube
Ryan Miyoshi, Head of Design at Column how he vibe codes tools to create unique images using Cursor. When he comes across something that's difficult or annoying to do (e.g. creating a mosaic effect over a given image), he creates a tool for it with some UI for changing different values to change the effect. So instead of using AI to produce an image, he used it to create the tool which then uses to create the image, which is easier to manage with sliders rather than via a chat interface.

Coding the Vibes. Using AI to build fun design tools. - YouTube
Similar video to the above, Anton Reponnen uses LLMs to create simple image manipulation tools specific to his needs. Also just a very well produced video.

Avoiding multitasking is unrealistic

2025-11-29T00:00:00.000Z

We multitask because we get bored easily, and require a certain level of stimulation to remain interested. If that isn’t coming from the task at hand (e.g. jogging which I find very boring), we supplement it with something else.

Unfortunately, it’s usually more efficient to Do one thing at a time. However for some tasks (e.g. jogging) we can combine complementary activities to Multitask better.

References

Go on, admit it. You’re multitasking. Here’s how to do it better | Psyche Ideas

So, rather than preaching that multitasking ought to be avoided, I propose a more realistic approach that aims at creating the optimal conditions for learning, given the human need for arousal and our limited cognitive resources.

letters 9

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

Hello!

How is your year going so far? Did you do New Year Resolutions, a vision board, a word of the year?

I did some thinking about setting big goals for myself, even made clever Notion pages for them. But I’ve decided to throw out the whole SMART goals thing and just boil it down to trusting my gut. This might sound like a passive approach, but I’m finding that untangling the noise and the conditioned behaviours to really listen to myself is something that takes real effort and patience. Is my gut reaction always correct? No, but I can pay more attention to what it is telling me without jumping straight to my logical brain and second-guessing myself.

My gut is telling me to keep painting in my sketchbooks, and that’s what I’ve been doing. No specific end goal, certainly no plans for monetisation, just keep sketching. Friends have asked me why, and I usually just say it’s because I like to. I think that’s reason enough, but beyond that I think that I’m just a better, happier person when I’m creating art regularly. It’s as important for my wellbeing as getting enough sleep.

This year I’ve been focusing on watercolour with a Sketching Now course, but I’ve also kept experimenting with different media and techniques to keep things interesting. Here's some of my favourite things at the moment:

Cheap kids watercolours, which I bought so that my kids keep out of my expensive ones. But although they behave quite differently to my "nice" watercolours, the intensity and opacity are so much fun to play with! I'm especially loving the fluorescent colours, although they don't photograph nearly as in-your-face as they are in real life.

Fude fountain pen, which has a bent nib that can achieve incredible line weight variation. There's a definite learning curve but it feels like my calligraphy and lettering days with dip pens and brush pens.

Making little videos - don't worry, I have no ambition to become a content creator, I just think some things work better in video format. It's fun being a complete beginner at something. I have a couple of short videos up on YouTube.

I hope the year is treating you well so far!

letters 8

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

Hey there,

It's that time of year where I start thinking where did the year go? I feel like I did too much to hold in my head and yet not much at all, like I'm a completely different person yet still the me from January. I'm getting old enough that places, events and especially times like the end of the year are layered with memories, some happy and some sad. Lives ending, lives about to begin, both literally and figuratively. I'm sure it's a time of mixed feelings and layers of memories for many people.

If like me you're the type to do some reflecting and journaling at the end of the year, here's the simple list of prompts I used in 2022 and plan to continue with. I usually do this in the days after Christmas but I've already started thinking about what I've learned this year.

Something I keep relearning is to push down my inner critic and just give things a go, even if it's only because otherwise my brain will just keep thinking about it. Even if it's unlikely to earn me money or praise, only the joy of making cool stuff. This newsletter is one of those things, where I had to quiet down the voice telling me no one cares what you have to say, who are you to take up space in people's inboxes? But I know that if I didn't try it, I would have been endlessly mentally cycling through all the cool things I could write but found excuses not to. If you are actually reading this then you are part of a very exclusive group, and I thank you for sticking with me!

I’m trying to remember to not put expectations on myself over this holiday period. Whilst I’ll have a couple of weeks off of work, the work of a parent of young kids never really ends. There will be some quiet moments whilst they play with new toys or watch too much tv (“quiet” is relative) for me to scribble some thoughts or sneak in some painting before they notice and come to investigate. I do really want to finish my 100 heads challenge because I’m just so temptingly close, and also kind of over drawing heads.

How has your year been? Do you get much of a break over this season? I hope you get what you need from this strange time of year. Please let me know if you have any particular end of year journaling rituals!

Til next time, if I continue doing this newsletter next year,

Teresa

P.S. I’ve done some more Writing since you last heard from me. You might also be interested in what I’m up to Now.

letters 7

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

Hello!

For several years I was very into Bullet Journaling. Not so much the extravagant spreads with colour coded everything, but the basic logging and pages of ideas, collections and plans. I used to teach lettering workshops, do a little freelance, run a zine with friends, regularly blog, and I always had at least a few creative projects on the go. That all kind of fell apart after having kids and finding myself having very little spare time or personal projects to manage. A planner gets a little depressing when so much of it is empty.

I felt like looking after my family, working at my job, and maybe squeezing in a little art here and there was about all I could handle. With my limited spare time I tried to Optimise for curiosity, not productivity and just see where that led. I'm proud of what I did! But now I think I'm ready to dream a little bigger again. I've been keeping notes in random apps and bits of paper but nothing like my old journals.

I got sucked in by social media ads and bought myself a "pocket" sized notebook cover with some removable inserts. My main idea was to have a sketchbook and a blank notebook for writing notes in the same space but separate. No pressure, just always there. I underestimated how much it would make me feel like the old me, having a physical space to plot and plan again. It's not exactly the same. I'm still going gently, more freeform and up to my mood and interest than any kind of structured planning system, and I love it. I'm putting down thoughts and ideas instead of having them bounce around uselessly in my head. I've managed my best run of Morning Pages so far (not hard considering my previous record was about 3 days). We'll see if this enthusiasm fades away as the new shiny thing aspect fades, but right now I'm rolling with it.

Are you a planner? I'm always up for some stationery nerdery, just send me an email. And if you're in an intense phase of your life where you feel like you've lost yourself a little, I hope you can find your way again, whatever that looks like.

letters 6

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

Hello! It's been a while. Safe to say that the weekly newsletter thing has (unsurprisingly) not worked out. But I felt compelled to write to you again because of something that doesn't happen very often: I finished a sketchbook!

I don't think I've ever managed to keep such a consistent drawing practice, and although individually most of the pages are not really that impressive, together it's six months of my life in scribbles, experiments and crinkly pages. Between my watercolour explorations, pasted in drawings, and generally being treated a bit roughly, this cheap notebook is looking a bit chonky and well loved. I finally got around to adding some gold foiling, as I used to do for my bullet journals. It's personal and precious, a turning point for me creatively.

I've added some of my favourite pages here, and here is a super fast flip through.

I wrote a few reflections on the final page - I'd like to come back to these and expand on them on this site someday.

I'm curious - do you keep a sketchbook or notebook? How do you use it, or wish you could use it?

letters 5

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

A couple of years ago, I decided to indulge in a daydream. The dream was a house, a big and beautiful and very designed house, with a little studio in the garden for creating. I love daydreams, but this one quickly turned into more of an obsession as I decided to add a little more realistic detail to my imagining. Besides the scrolling through social media for inspiration, I started researching house prices, builders, materials, mortgages, and started thinking that just maybe, if we worked and saved really hard (and took on a ton of debt), it could become a reality. And then our real lives could begin, and I could start properly creating.

I don’t feel like it was a bad thing to indulge in aesthetic escapism, especially in the early days of motherhood where life can sometimes be chaotic and yet incredibly dull at the same time. But it took a while for me to admit to myself that obsessively “researching” this unattainable future state was holding me back from appreciating and allowing myself to enjoy what I have right now. Whilst yes, this season of my life doesn’t lend itself to big messy hobbies, I’m finding new ways to add small, nimble creative projects that are beautiful in their own way. There’s something satisfying about something being exactly what it needs to be, nothing more or less. There’s ingenuity in working within constraints to come up with solutions that wouldn’t have been found otherwise. There’s a connectedness that comes with living in close proximity to others. And I don't think I have the patience to clean a huge house!

So it looks like I’ll be writing and drawing and painting from my dining table for some time to come (which I knew from the beginning anyway), and making the most of right now.

I've been creating

Sketchbook pages - this week has been big on socialising and less on sketching, which is nice every once in a while.
Space in the pantry for my baking adventures. Limited storage in our house definitely puts a cap on any mindless consumption - anything new requires some rationalisation or reduction of what we already have. I'm pretty happy with the way we've been able to shuffle things around for our shifting needs.
Drawings for the kids - I've been doing my best to fulfil requests, including fire trucks, dinosaurs, volcanos, and their new pet fish.

Their names are Orangey (not pictured) and Bingo

I've been consuming

PS: more than an afterthought is a newsletter I've been enjoying lately for thoughts on motherhood and minimalism. Celebrating mediocrity really spoke to my house daydreaming. We don’t need grandiose houses, or an abundance of space or to go into eye watering debt for brand new furniture in order to live happy, contented, sustainable lives. I suppose it really comes down to priorities (like most things), of valuing time or money, of celebrating the remarkable ordinary and being okay with charming mediocrity.
Via Swiss Miss
Eventually we realize that not knowing what to do is just as real and just as useful as knowing what to do. Not knowing stops us from taking false directions. Not knowing what to do, we start to pay real attention. – David Whyte
Kawa Leaf | A story about life and loss really got me, as someone who has experienced grieft recently - although it's something never really goes away.
Grief, I have learnt, is something you always carry with you. It’s like an amulet I will always wear. I feel her so intensely in my heart and know that she is always there.

letters 4

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

Hey there,

Last week I mentioned creating a camping packing list and trying to accept that there are things I can't control. Well, two big things that really resist control and can throw a spanner in the works for newbie campers are bad weather and sick kids, and both of those things happened for us resulting in our trip ending a couple nights early. Would I camp again? Yes, but probably not in the rain with two young kids and a dog until we have a little more experience.

This truncated trip definitely made me aware of comfortable, ordered and routine-based our life at home is. I was very much out of my comfort zone with the chaos of staying in a tent, our things everywhere, rain and dirt and mud everywhere, only thin tent fabric between us and our neighbouring campers, the kids precise bedtime routine pointless to attempt. But actually, it was fine. Everyone got (some) sleep, we played in playgrounds between the rain, we rugged up and had meals in the outdoor part of the brewery (where our dog could be with us), we made s'mores and pancakes on a kitchen stove inside the tent to keep out of the rain. It wasn't exactly what I had hoped, but it was definitely a memorable experience with plenty of good bits. Then Mr 2 got sick and dealing with that in a slightly leaky tent is a bit too much discomfort for all of us, so we packed up and drove home to our house which suddenly felt so much bigger, warmer, more solid and lovely than it did when we left it a few days ago.

Whilst I kind of wish I'd followed my instinct to cancel or delay our trip for better weather, I think that having periods of contrast like this where I am pushed out of my comfort zone are useful. Not just to better appreciate my privilege and possessions, but to force myself to let go a little and be more open to spontaneous experiences, and less anxious about things not going to plan. I've started to think about whether I sometimes let control get in the way of joy or connection.

Mr 4 was not at all keen on sleeping in tents. After a lot of convincing he eventually laid down in his sleeping bag next to me. "Did you know," he whispered, big eyes looking at me and then the tent shaking around us in the wind and rain, "when things wobble like this, it means they're about to fall down." I told him: "Some things, yes. But some things, like this tent, are made from stuff that is strong, but also bendy. So they might wobble or flex but they don't break or fall over. And when the wind stops blowing they stand straight again." That seemed to satisfy him because he curled up next to me and drifted off to sleep.

I've been creating

Sketchbook pages, doing some more exploring with watercolours and highlighters.
A Notion template for planning out my week - not sure if it will be useful for anyone else, but it's working nicely for me so I thought I'd share.
Blind contour sketches. I have a confession: I often doodle during remote work meetings, but don't want people to feel like I'm not paying attention (keeping my hands busy actually helps me keep focus). So I've started drawing portraits from the little squares in Google Meet without looking at the paper. The results are awful and funny and completely unrecognisable.

I've been consuming

Letter of Recommdendation: Blind Contour Drawing Looking more into the drawing exercise led me to this gem: Our brains are designed to simplify — to reduce the tumult of the world into order. Blind drawing trains us to stare at the chaos, to honor it. It is an act of meditation, as much as it is an artistic practice — a gateway to pure being. It forces us to study the world as it actually is.
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky, after listening to an interview with him on Ezra Klein's podcast. It's a sci-fi novel about an advanced civilisation built by spiders, not for the arachnaphobic.
I bought a pair of waterproof walking shoes before camping, an expensive last-minute purchase when I realised my collection of shoes, whilst well suited to a person who only leaves their home for school dropoff and walks in nice weather, would be completely miserable in the rain. The shoes reminded me of a recent newsletter from Sasha Chapin, about buying experiences vs posessions Shoes are supposed to offer a small but significant improvement to your life hundreds of times. They’re actually supposed to prevent the formation of memories, if they’re working properly—specifically, memories of sore feet or blisters. Conceivably, this small but significant improvement of many sunny walks could dwarf the dinner in terms of overall enjoyment, but it certainly won’t be as memorable. Thus, the happiness granted by the shoes will be less apparent to the remembering self.

letters 3

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

Hey there!

I’ve had conversations recently with friends suddenly granted a day or an afternoon free from work or caregiving duties, often after a period of stress, who were told to relax or do something for themselves. When you receive such a gift, what do you do? How do you fill your cup? How do you go from being always switched on, to suddenly off? Or is a binary of completely on or completely off even healthy?

I personally find the typical suggestions for “self-care for busy mums” in these scenarios well-meaning but not for me, and often with the insinuation that you should recharge quickly in consumption mode in order to go hard at being productive once again. I think this is part of the issue - trying to optimise things that are restorative until their value is only in what they enable you to do, instead of being valid ways of spending your time in themselves. There's also a pressure to "properly" relax - I'm defintely guilty of telling a friend that decluttering their pantry is not the right way to spend a kid-free afternoon. But sometimes taming a bit of chaos and doing something nice for others is exactly what's needed.

Right now I'm spending my precious kid-free lunch break writing this email, which is using a lot of brainpower and is not really relaxing. But I'm sitting in the sunshine, thinking and writing about interesting things to lovely people and I know I'll feel good when it's done. I don't know if I'm doing self-care right, but it feels right enough to me.

I've been creating

Daily(ish) sketchbook sketches. If this were a strict goal then I suppose I’ve already failed, but since I’m taking the approach of being a person who draws every day, I know that I’ll keep going and doing my best. I’d like to get better at accepting that some days my drawing effort will look a bit shit, and that’s okay.
A kids art table. My kids are now at a point where they (mostly) won’t go nuts with drawing on walls, so I’m tentatively trying to nudge them to do more art by setting up a little table for them with materials always ready and accessible. Is it working? Sort of. Do I sometimes start colouring pages in the hope that it’ll pique their interest, then get caught up in colouring Dino Ranch characters whilst the kids keep playing with trucks? Yes. It’s a work in progress.
A packing list for camping. Starting with a good list and some research is how I tend to approach something new and a bit scary to me, to make it feel more known and comfortable. There’s a lot in camping that’s outside of my control, but having the main things we need is something I can do my best with. I’m learning to let go of the rest and go with the flow.

I've been consuming

REAL Self-Care - Unladylike (podcast) Interview with Dr. Pooja Lakshmin, author of Real Self-Care. It's not stepping out of your life for fifteen minutes to meditate, it's actually inside everything that you do.
Productivity - Overthink (podcast) I'm really enjoying Overthink lately for a bit of accessible philosophy Marcuse notices we end up looking for some kind of release or pleasure precisely in the logic of production and consumption that ultimately is the origin of our very repression
Plein Airpril posts (Instagram), which are wonderfully envy inducing. A great way to lose a few hours and find new artists to follow.

letters 2

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

Hey there,

Wow, I actually have subscribers now! Part of me was wondering if it would be just me writing to myself, which would have made it easy to just slink away and pretend I didn’t say that I’d write a weekly(ish) newsletter. So thank you for coming along for this experiment and keeping me accountable.

Speaking of accountability, I’ve been very gentle with setting goals for myself for the past couple of years - I’ve been unintentionally trying to optimise for curiousity, not productivity and it’s mostly worked out for me pretty well. I’m now trying to be a little more intentional with this and approach it in a slightly more organised way. I’ve been thinking how quickly new habits become part of my identity - for example, I started baking sourdough a few months ago just to try it out. Now I consider myself a person who bakes bread (and other stuff) every week, this is who I am now. Maybe it won’t be who I am in another few months time, but now it’s part of my identity and therefore not something I’ll let go of easily.

So I’m trying to do this on purpose, and start from the identity I’d like to explore and try different things to support that. I’m starting from the premise that this is what I already am, I just haven’t figured out the how yet. Here’s what I’m exploring over the next two months:

I am a writer (of weekly newsletters, and maybe other stuff too)
I am someone who takes their family camping (and enjoys it)
I am an artist who draws every day (even if it’s just a scribble)

It doesn’t sound like much of a shift, but let me tell you it’s quite terrifying to publicly write something like “I am a writer” when I have no real basis for this statement. But on the other hand it’s freeing to start from that assumption and get down to making it shine through. Thank you for being part of this process!

I've been creating

This Tiny watercolor kit for sketching on the go. It made me very happy to not have to buy anything new for it!
- Sketches using pastel highlighters, again trying to use what I have already instead of jumping on the temptation to buy new markers. I’ve found it’s a nice base for layering watercolours or coloured pencils over the top, especially for my sketchbook which doesn’t love super wet media.
  - The header image on this email. I really wanted it to look 👌 whether you’re reading this email in light mode or dark mode, which meant a lot of messing around with accessibility colour contrast checkers to find just the right colour. Let me know if this shade isn’t working for you.

I've been consuming

Treat your to-read pile like a river
this means treating your "to read" pile like a river (a stream that flows past you, and from which you pluck a few choice items, here and there) instead of a bucket (which demands that you empty it). This is also how I treat social media streams - trying to consume it all is impossible.
Artist vlogs on YouTube. It's interesting to see how different artists work, and I've found it nice to have on in the background whilst drawing - kind of like you're sketching with a friend. I'm enjoying Leigh Ellexson and Furry Little Peach so far, let me know if you have any faves I should check out.
Dense Discovery is my favourite email newsletter, having been a fan of it since it was The Modern Desk and the writer, Kai, was publishing a magazine called Offscreen. There's always interesting links for me to add to my reading list, and I always enjoy Kai's opinionated intros.

letters 1

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

Hey there,

I used to have an email newsletter, called Letters from Teresa. It was mainly a way for me to let people know about calligraphy/lettering workshops I used to run, before kids, and for a while I'd design a printable calendar each month to send out with it. I wrote a little introduction for each Letter, which ended up being some rambling thoughts about creativity or something personal going on in my life.

I think most of my readers signed up to be notified about workshops, but it was fun to write and I did get some kind responses. Mostly it was nice in a way to have a monthly writing habit with a fairly defined but loose structure and low expectations. It feels different to writing a blog post, certainly different to social media posts - more intimate, from me to you in your inbox. I know of course that most people get a million emails every day which aren't intimate in the least, but I have a few email subscriptions that do feel a bit like getting a letter from a friend.

There are plenty of other ways to start a writing habit, that don't involve bothering other people (or bothering to write for people other than yourself). There's a pretty good chance that it will only be me reading these Letters anyway, and I don't have any ambitions of growing an audience. But I do like an experiment, and iterating in public (whether the public wants it or not). So here's my weekly-ish-for-now writing experiment.

I've been creating

My new site, the result of getting fed up with Wordpress and deciding to fumble around with a static site generator (Jekyll in this case). The result is very simple, but I kind of like it.
Many sketchbook drawings and paintings of mangoes. I'm trying to stick with a single subject and instead play with different media, styles and scale.
Sourdough loaves using tin loaf sourdough recipe, which I've had more luck with than freeform loaves baked in a dutch oven (in a loaf tin the only way it can go is up!).

I've been consuming

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by S.A. Chakraborty, a fun pirate fantasy adventure with touching explorations of motherhood. It works really well as an audiobook!
How to craft a harmonious life via Psyche as long as your psychological needs are satisfied to a certain degree in any of the roles you have, you are fine. For instance, if you have a rather boring job that provides few opportunities to feel competent and have mastery experiences, you may be able to compensate and satisfy your need for mastery by engaging in a challenging hobby
Knowing when to quit with world poker champion Annie Duke - WorkLife with Adam Grant (podcast) - I find the concept of "Monkeys on pedestals" hilarious, memorable and important: If you want to have a business of monkeys standing on pedestals juggling flaming torches in the town square, the first step isn’t to build the pedestal - it’s to train the monkey to juggle. Because if you can’t find a monkey to do this then the whole premise is invalid.

It took me a while to write this (and forget about editing!), so we'll see how I go on the weekly thing. Feedback and kind words are very much appreciated as I start on this journey.

Letters 16

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

Hi there,

How is your year going? Are you a resolutions person, or is the start of a new year a hectic time for you? I always thought that Lunar New Year was a better time for starting over with big ambitions (or little ones). I don’t make resolutions anymore, but I have a few ideas to explore in mind…

At the end of 2025 I did my End of year journaling and bound it up into a little book, as I’ve done for the past few years. Last year didn’t go the way I’d intended (does it ever?) and had a lot of work-related growth for me, but did not leave with me with much mental energy for making art. This year I’m hoping to find more of a balance.

It will help that my part time work schedule, originally so I could look after my kids when they were little, will remain even now they are both in full time school. This means that for one or two days a week, during school hours, I won’t be working at my job or working caregiving. I’ll be completely free to do… what? I’m not quite sure yet. Art, time outside, social time maybe. All that time will be mine, unless I let things creep in. Having created this space for myself, I’m keen to use it wisely.

I’ve painted a few self-portraits so far this year, and slowly edging closer to the achieving the look that I want. I hope that when I repeat this exercise at the end of the year, I'll be able to see some improvement. Watercolour is such a strange medium, even after three or so years I still don’t quite get it.

Other things:

I finally made it to a Workshop with Sue Hibbert after years of following her work. She’s an incredible watercolour artist and this was the first time I really learned to paint with traditional watercolour methods. I’ve been inspired to do a lot more watercolour this year.
I made an updated video about my notebook/sketchbook system, if 12ish minutes of me talking about stationery is your kind of thing.
I’m pretty proud of my Books I've read in 2025 page, which now has book cover pics and some thoughts on each book. Some of my favourites were Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, and Juice by Tim Winton.

You might also be interested in what I’m up to Now.

Letters 15

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

Hi there,

Right now in Perth we’re in Kambarang, the season of flowers and births. The warming weather as we move towards the end of the year always feels like hopeful anticipation to me, probably solidified in my mind from a time where summer meant the long school holidays, Christmas presents, visiting family and beaches. Those things hit different as an adult, but with both my kids in school the rhythms of the school holidays are coming back more strongly than ever (just on the parent side!).

My eldest flying our shark kite on the beach

In October I had another go at Peachtober, an art challenge run by Sydney artist Sha‘an/Furry Little Peach, with a single word prompt for each day of the month. I made it through 8 of the 31 days, which might actually be my best attempt yet. I’m less interested in completing the challenge perfectly than I am in making a few pieces that are visually linked, so I feel pretty good about what I came up with.

Things in my kids room

If they look a bit like I’ve just painted things from my camera roll, it’s because that’s exactly what I’ve done. With a good 20 years of happy snaps in my camera roll I can usually find something close enough to the prompts. For 8 days anyway.

My youngest when we went strawberry picking and he ate as much as he picked

Some people believe that digital art is not “real” art, and it’s true that there are parts of the traditional painting process that I can skip entirely working this way. Not having to set up or pack away is the main reason I sometimes choose to work this way instead of getting out my paints. The app I’ve used here, HeavyPaint, has an array of different brushes, a digital colour palette that simply can’t be replicated with paint, an ability to layer without drying time, to zoom in for detail, to undo. I don’t feel like it’s “cheating” or makes my digital art any less “real” than my traditional art though, it’s just a different medium.

I’m currently untangling my feelings about art created by/with an LLM. Is it just another different medium? If so, why is my immediate reaction to AI art something like revulsion and betrayal? Something I’ll have unpack a bit more.

After 8 days I felt like I’d had enough of digital painting and was aching to return to my watercolours. It’s unpredictable sure, and I only own 8 tubes of paint (at $30 a pop a limited palette is a must), but the unexpected results and the “mistakes” are what make it so interesting.

Things since my last newsletter:

Sketchbook 12 aka my Bali travel sketchbook
Painting botanicals with Anya Brock, the next best thing to getting an actual Anya Brock painting
Even more life drawing in watercolour (warning: contains illustrated nudity)
Many additions to Books I've read in 2025 (I now have an e-reader that can read library books!)

Letters 14

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

Hey stranger!

I have been thinking letters and not actually writing them. When it’s been a while since you’ve seen someone, or written to them, it can be hard to know where to begin because it feels like a lot had happened but also not much at all. So the answer to how have you been? becomes something like you know, work, family, normal stuff.

So here’s an unpacking of that unsatisfying answer - some stuff that has happened since I last wrote to you in February:

I turned 40 a few weeks ago. Feeling pretty good about it overall, aside from having an awful cold that took me out of action for far too long. I guess that’s part of being born in July, in the depths of Makuru/Winter.
Possibly related: someone called me wise. I am wise now.
I went on a birthday trip to Bali with some friends, the first time I’ve been overseas since Covid. I made a cute travel sketchbook that almost met a watery end on a snorkelling trip, but thankfully managed to keep dry.
Still doing life drawing when I can make it!
Overall I’ve been doing less painting and sketching though, probably due to some extra responsibilities at work that are taking up a lot of my mental reserves. I’m hoping as things settle I’ll be able to get back into it more.
I did play around a bit with digital sketching tool HeavyPaint. I was inspired by this interview with the founder Vaughan Ling, talking about how he created the app to fill a need he had as an artist.
I’ve been making some more simple clothes, and finding that the time I spent making them is comparable to the time I spent browsing online shops looking in vain for cute, affordable linen sets. I’m now playing around with crochet, although it’s slower going than sewing.
I bought a little printer that only does standard 4x6 photo prints, and an old school photo album. It felt like a silly indulgence but so far I’m finding it delightful to be able to print photos to stick on my fridge and flip through a physical album, without the time investment of getting photos printed in store or making a photo book.
I’ve been reading a lot of fiction, and got an e-ink reader that allows me to read digital library books which has been very very nice.

So how about you? What have you been working on lately?

Letters 13

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

Hey hey,

How has 2025 been treating you so far? I hope you've been keeping cool (or warm if you've stumbled across my newsletter from the Northern Hemisphere).

Last time I wrote to you it was 2024, and I was trying to figure out what to ease back on rather than trying to do all of the things. I really struggled to let go of the idea that just maybe I could do it all. But I came to the conclusion that I need to be intentional about what challenges I take on, because some of them I don't get a say in (kids that insist on growing up, for example).

Something I'm playing around with is reading less non-fiction, but more deeply. The internet is so full of information and I'm interested in so many things, and there is literally no way I can read it all. Even if I could, I wouldn't be able to comprehend or synthesise it all in any meaningful way. It helped to largely move off of social media, but even with the relative slowness of long-form articles and newsletters I'm jumping wildly between topics without a whole lot really sinking in.

I save quotes from things that resonate, but have fallen out of the habit of then weaving that new information into things I've already noted to reinforce them in my memory and allow new ideas and connections to brew. If I don't remember anything from a book or an article that I've read, was there any point in reading it at all? Maybe it's better to read far less, but get more out of it. At least, that's what I'm hoping to do. I'm currently revisiting all my unsorted notes, which will keep me busy for a while without reading anything new.

I wanted to "use up" some dried gouache on an old palette, and was surprised by how far it went. Gouache is still mostly a mystery to me, but I'm enjoying messing around with it like this when I have no expectation of making anything good. It helped that I now have a drawing board, my Christmas present to myself, so there's less distortion when doing the initial sketch.

Some things I added to the site recently:

Reading things later - on how read later apps make the internet more friendly as a reader
Photographing artwork with a phone - an app to circumvent the aggressive processing done in iPhone photos
Getting the best out of Focus modes - making my phone what I need at the time that I reach for it
To the drawing board - the difference drawing upright makes!
Charcoal portrait - probably the best portrait I've ever done
Perth Web Accessibility Camp 2025 in sketchnotes - sketchnotes from a recent conference
Books I've read in 2025 - now with cover images and short summaries

I'll probably write again soon!

Teresa

Letters 12

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

Hey there,

Is there a word for when all of your library holds come in at once, and you want to read all of them but have to choose what to start with, and what to risk having to return before getting to? That’s me right now. Good thing it’s almost the end of the year and a good time for hiding from the heat inside with a good book.

Similarly the amount of things I want to do next year is piling up, and if I don’t consciously choose what to pull back on I know it’s going to shove out something that I probably would prefer not to sacrifice, like sleep. Unfortunately unlike the library books, some things you can’t just reserve again and hope it comes at a less busy time. But then again, having too many worthy options to choose from is a pretty lucky problem to have.

I’ve been making a lot o art since I last wrote, and even did a few one-on-one classes with a local artist. It’s a leap of faith to invest (more) real money into a hobby that I don’t expect to ever give any meaningful income, but it makes such a difference having someone believe in me and push me to go further. These classes are likely to be something I have to pull back on next year, but I’m hoping that sporadic sessions will be enough to keep the momentum going.

I spent a little time updating my page of Sketchbooks recently. 2024 seems to have been a year of experimenting with different sketchbooks - I’ve completed 5 and have another 2 in progress, all in a variety of different sizes, brands and paper types. I don’t love every page, and I don’t work in them every day anymore, but they’re still such an important outlet for me that I can’t see myself stopping. I’ll probably keep experimenting with buying and making sketchbooks to shift with the medium I’m interested in.

Will 2025 be the year I start actually writing more, or will it have to continue being something on the back burner with just some sporadic letters? I haven’t decided yet. But thank you for being here with me, reading my emails if you’ve gotten this far. I hope you have a wonderful end to the year, however you choose to honour it. Tell me if you have any good journaling prompts - Sandy has me considering doing Year Compass again, time consuming as it is.

Here’s a few interesting things I’ve come across lately:

I really enjoy Emily Hughes videos explaining how she creates her art, and her bold, visible paint strokes, especially in gouache.
After raving about Omnivore for reading newsletters and saved articles, it was acquired and sadly shut down. After trying a few alternatives I’ve landed back at Instapaper, which is not as fully featured but is free and has the ability to subscribe to email newsletters.
On a recommendation I listened to the 28ish Days Later podcast from BBC, all about periods and cycles. Really well put together and interesting information for anyone who menstruates or has someone in their life who does (so everyone pretty much).
Of the Books I've read in 2024, two of my favourites came from readers of this newsletter. Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt (thanks Meredith, Marcellus the octopus is probably one of my favourites characters ever as well), and Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh (thanks Sandy, loved the twist and the writing in this space opera).

See you next year probably!

Teresa

Letters 11

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

Hello hello,

How are you friend? It's been a while.

I've been on the hunt for the perfect sketchbook, and I suspect I'm not the only one. The trouble is "perfect" is a moving target when you're still learning and experimenting. My latest is one I bound myself, which has cheap watercolour paper bought from the local shops. It only has 20 pages and doesn't have a cover, but it's light and cute and means I get to that finished sketchbook feeling faster. There's something satisfying about being able to fill a need by just making the damn thing yourself, even if it's a little rougher than something store-bought.

In another act of book surgery, I spliced a thick Stillman & Birn Beta sketchbook into two much thinner ones that fit more nicely into my notebook system. Hacking up a (very expensive) sketchbook felt very wrong, but the pages haven't fallen out and it's now much more usable. I'm still deciding whether binding my own sketchbooks or bisecting store-bought ones is the best approach for me, probably a mixture of both depending on what I'm doing.

Lately I've been getting more into watercolour, working a bit more traditionally and learning to not rely on having ink line art so much. I go to sleep with my head full of colour mixes on paintbrushes and lovely paint names like “Opera Pink”. Progress is not linear but it is there, slowly reaching more confident brush strokes, stronger values, and leaning more into the unique nature of watercolor. I’m trying to not think about where I'm going with this, if anywhere at all, and just enjoy the journey.

Some other things I’ve enjoyed lately:

This analysis of D’Angelo’s song “Really Love”, which breaks the beautiful song down beautifully. That wandering baseline now lives in my head.
Newsletters from Henrik Karlsson, a Swedish writer that I stumbled across somehow - it might have been from this essay on shortcuts and longcuts.
Beeper app, which brings together all the various messaging platforms my family and friends use so I don’t have to remember where I should look for them.
My public library - I’ve barely purchased any of the books I’ve read over the past few years, since the library almost always has a copy of what I’m looking for. The trick is to be patient and not be too fussed about the format. A recent fave was the short utopian book “A Psalm for the Wild-Built” by Becky Chambers.
I’ve dipped my toes into front-end development at work and for UXCamp Boorloo, and whilst I’m enjoying the challenge it’s been nice to have experienced developers to troubleshoot Git and teach me things about modern tech stacks.

I'm trying to lean more towards human recommendations rather than algorithmic ones these days - let me know if you have any articles, books, music or movies to recommend!

Teresa

P.S. You might also be interested in what I’m up to Now.

Letters 10

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

Hi hi hello,

It’s been a little over a year since I sent out my first Letter, and here we are now at number 10! If I’m being honest I’m still sometimes surprised that you’re still reading these letters, and sometimes even responding to them. It’s a privilege that I don’t take lightly, or at least that’s the excuse I make to myself when I put off writing these because I want to spend the time to make it worth your while.

A few months ago I decided to try sewing again.

I wanted to do a sewing class back in highschool, which my mum felt was ridiculous when she could teach me herself.

So I learned to sew from her, with a haphazard approach that involved taking some inspiration from actual sewing patterns, some tracing existing clothing items onto old newspaper, and a whole lot of winging it.

I remember asking her to help (ie. make the whole thing for me) when I started getting into cosplaying almost 20 years ago. Between my don't-know-what-you-don't-know beginner's mindset and my complete faith in my mum's ability to make things work, I was always confident that we'd be able to bring my vision to life (I'm sure this caused her a lot of stress). There were of course no obscure anime character costumes in the Butterick pattern catalogues at the fabric store, but we'd flip through them to find something that might make a good starting point and pull some inspiration from here and there to get the general vibe.

She had a cool trick where she could knot a thread seemingly by rolling it with one finger her palm that always seemed like magic to me. Or was the trick to thread a needle? It makes me sad that I can't remember exactly, but I guess the main thing is the memory of my mum, magic, and sewing.

She passed away a bit over two years ago, and I've inherited (amongst other things) her old overlocker, a container of sewing pins that were almost certainly bought at a garage sale before I was born, and a general sense that "proper" sewing technique is entirely optional as long as you get where wanted to go in the end.

All this to say that I'm pretty rubbish at following a sewing pattern, and will avoid pressing, measuring, even pinning wherever possible. So I was pretty excited to find a book of "patterns" which are really just simple shapes drawn up to your own body shape and preferences and fit the comfy, elasticated-waistband lifestyle that I currently have.

So far I have made the Trapazoid Skirt (free pattern here and a jacket, and they're far from perfect but they feel very me. I made them to fill specific gaps in my wardrobe and chose patterns and colours to complement what I already have. Despite being simple they did take me some time, but still less than the many hours I’ve spent window shopping online, and far more worthwhile.

I hope you’re making time for some cool projects too! Let me know what you’ve been making :)

Teresa

P.S. I'm still painting! I have however emerged from the blissful beginner stage where anything feels possible and progress is dramatic, to a point where I'm becoming painfully aware of how much I don't know, and therefore how much I don't know that I don't know yet. You know. I'm working through it. I’ve been doing some Life drawing in watercolour which has been a wonderful challenge.

Orwell's Roses (2021), Rebecca Solnit

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

For some reason I was expecting fiction rather than a collection of meandering essays following George Orwell's interest in gardening and how it relates to his writing, his politics, and the state of the world then and now. Beautifully written with each chapter weaving in from the previous ones. Makes me want to revisit Orwell's novels and pay some more attention to my poor garden.

This quote about artificial flowers made me think of AI generated content:
"...no one cries over artificial flowers, and there's a particular kind of disappointment when you begin to admire a bouquet or a blossom at a distance and find out closer up that it's fake. The disappointment arises in part from having been deceived, but also from encountering an object that is static, that will never die because it never lived, that didn't form itself out of the earth, and that has a texture coarser, dryer, less inviting to the touch than a mortal flower."

How to Take Smart Notes (2017), Sönke Ahrens

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

Audiobook listened in 2022
Paperback version read in 2025

Description of how to use the Zettelkasten system created by prolific German sociologist Niklas Luhmann in the 60's, and how and why it can be set up as a productive writing workflow.

The target audience is students, academics, and non-fiction writers whose aim is to publish written work.

How might the zettlekasten/slip box be useful for practitioners, leaders and people just wanting to get their shit together?

Fleeting notes

For capturing ideas in the moment, intended to be the basis of permanent notes and to then be discarded. Capture every idea in one place, like an inbox.

“Don’t let good ideas go to waste”
“Read with a pen in hand”

Literature notes

short and meant to help getting to permanent notes
Summaries in your own words of the content of a text
- How could this work for other media e.g. artwork, audio?
Can include sparing quotes, ideally with some context
Reduces or eliminates the need to read the original material again, once added to permanent notes
- Re-reading can add to confirmation bias, which can hinder real understanding

Whenever you read something, make notes about the content.
Keep these notes together with the bibliographic details in one place - your reference system. p23

Permanent notes

Don’t just collect - use these to develop ideas, arguments and discussions
Add to or combine with existing notes
Use 1 note for each idea
Write as if for someone else - since it will be used by your future self. Use full sentences and be precise, so you know what you mean later
Use a standardised format
Should not be reminders of ideas, but the idea itself in written form

The idea is not to collect, but to develop ideas, arguments and discussions.

Filing permanent notes in the slip box

Luhman added a note behind an existing, related note (like a thread)
For digital, we can use keywords
- Choose keywords based on how you might want to retrieve it, not to store it
Under what circumstances would I want to stumble across this note, even if I forget about it

In which context will I want to stumble upon it again? p38

This becomes an external scaffold to think within
Connect ideas to generate insight
- “Critical mass of inter-connected ideas”
- “Generating insight by letting ideas mingle”
- Notice clusters
Should not become a “graveyard for ideas”

Making sure you will be able to find this note later by either linking to it from your index or by making a link to it on a note that you use as an entry point to a discussion or topic and is itself linked to the index. p24

Just follow your interest and always take the path that promises the most insight. p24

Project notes

Notes for a particular project, which might draw from existing permanent notes. Should be archived after the project is complete.

Read with a pen in hand
Take smart, intentional notes when reading, and Don’t let good ideas go to waste. Memory is fallible and ideas from reading can stretch beyond their original context.

Read with a pen in your hand.
Take smart notes.
Develop connections between them.

We have to read with a pen in hand, develop ideas on paper and build up an ever-growing pool of externalised thoughts. We will not be guided by a blindly made-up plan picked from our unreliable brains, but by our interest, curiosity and intuition, which is formed and informed by the actual work of reading, thinking, discussing, writing and developing ideas - and is something that continuously grows and reflects our knowledge and understanding externally. p46

Psychology

Dunning-Kruger effect
Where you don't know enough to know that you actually don't know much at all, and so overestimate what you know. You know.

Poor students lack insight into their own limitations - as they would have to know the vast amount of knowledge out there to be able to see how little they know in comparison. That means that those who are not very good at something tend to be overly confident, while those who have made an effort tend to underestimate their abilities. p7

Environments that set you up for success
Grit is overrated - success is more tied to creating a smart working environment where resistance is not needed at all.

Studies on highly successful people have proven again and again that success is not the result of strong willpower and the ability to overcome resistance, but rather the result of smart working environments that avoid resistance in the first place. p16

Simple ideas can be underestimated

Intuitively, most people do not expect much from simple ideas. They assume that impressive results must have equally impressively complicated means. p17

Growth vs Fixed mindset
Having a growth mindset is linked to long-term success. This means being open to, even seeking, feedback to continually improve. Being afraid of negative feedback to preserve ego can stunt learning.

the most reliable predictor of long-term success is having a "growth mindset". To actively seek and welcome feedback, be it positive or negative, is one of the most important factors for success (and happiness) in the long run. Conversely , nothing is a bigger hindrance to personal growth than having a "fixed mindset". Those who fear and avoid feedback because it might damage their cherished positive self-image might feel better in the short term, but will quickly fall behind in actual performance. p51

Ironically, it is therefore often the highly gifted and talented students, who receive a lot of praise, who are more in danger of developing a fixed mindset and getting stuck. p51

#Sources #sources/books

Designing Your Life (2016), Bill Burnett & Dave Evans

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

The authors, both from Stanford, apply design thinking techniques to planning your own life.

They draw a distinction between engineering problems, which have a specific desired outcome and lots of data, and design problems, where what you’re working towards is a problem in itself.

There’s a difference between design problems and engineering problems. […] engineering is a good approach to solving a problem when you can get a great deal of data and you’re sure there is one best solution. (5.2%)

Designers don’t think their way forward. Designers build their way forward… It means you are not just going to be dreaming up a lot of fun fantasies that have no relationship to the real world—or the real you. You are going to build things (we call them prototypes), try stuff, and have a lot of fun in the process. (9.7%)

Most people don’t have one thing they are passionate about, so this process is not about simply following your passion.

most people are passionate about many different things, and only way to know what they want to do is to prototype some potential lives, try them out, and see what really resonates with them… You don’t need to know your passion in order to design a life you love. (11.2%)

Curiosity

Bias to action

Reframing

Awareness

Radical collaboration

Finding the right problem is essential. E.g. some people will stick with a career path that they decided was good for them, trying to figure out how to succeed within that, whilst ignore evidence that it isn’t right for them.

people waste a lot of time working on the wrong problem. If they are lucky, they will fail miserably quickly and get forced by circumstance into working on better problems. If they are unlucky and smart, they’ll succeed—we call it the success disaster—and wake up ten years later wondering how the hell they got to wherever they are, and why they are so unhappy. (14.9%)

Gravity problems - problems which you cannot solve for and need to accept, such as the effect of gravity. Other examples might include lamenting that being an artist does not pay much or that being out of the workforce for a few years can make you difficult to hire.

The key is not to get stuck on something that you have effectively no chance of succeeding at. (17.1%)

Workview - what work is and what it means to you, a general statement of your view of work and what good work deserves to be. A work manifesto. Not what work but why you work. Can and will change over time. Questions such as:

Why work?

What’s work for?

What does it mean?

How does it relate to the individual, others, society?

What defines good or worthwhile work?

What does money have to do with it?

What do experience, growth and fulfilment have to do with it?
(24%)

Lifeview - defining values and perspectives that inform your understanding of life. What matters most to you. Questions such as:

Why are we here?

What is the meaning or purpose of life?

What is the relationship between the individual and others?

Where do family, country and the rest of the world fit in?

What is good, and what is evil?

Is there a higher power, God, or something transcendent, and if so, what impact does this have on your life?

What is the role of joy, sorry, justice, injustice, love, pease and strife in life?
(24.6%)

The combination of the Workview and Life view give “True North” to help you keep on course. Revisit them when going through any kind of life change, or at least once a year.

Wayfinding - figuring out where you’re going when you don’t know your destination.

Enjoyment is a guide to finding the right work for you. P98

Life design is about helping you get more out of your current life by making some improvements, not necessarily changing it completely.

Good Time Journal - logging how your job makes you feel to enable better self-reflection. For each item you add to the activity log, rate the engagement and the energy it gives you (or takes away). The examples look like a semi-circle where you can draw an arrow at the level. Be specific about what the activity is to get the best results. Can also be done retrospectively about past events.

two elements to the Good Time Journal:

Activity Log (where I record where I’m engaged and energized) - daily

Reflections (where I discover what I am learning) - weekly, after the first few weeks of logging activities

Your job is to drill down into the particulars of your day and catch yourself in the act of having a good time.
(30.2%)

AEIOU method of observation:
Activities
Environments
Interactions
Objects
Users (people)

Don’t fall in love with your first idea. Having lots of good ideas to choose from can help us choose better.

Most often, our first solutions are pretty average and not very creative. Humans have a tendency to suggest the obvious first. Learning to use great ideation tools helps you overcome this bias toward the obvious and helps you regain a sense of creative confidence. (37.2%)

Anchor problems - a problem we get anchored on and have trouble moving on from. Better to become unanchored by reframing the solution and doing to some prototypes to come at it from a different angle.

Sometimes it is more comfortable to hold on to our familiar, failed approach to the problem than to risk a worse failure by attempting the big changes that we think will be required to eliminate it.
(41.3%)

Prototyping reduces risk and helps you learn and iterate
Experiment, measure and iterate rapidly to validate ideas

The way forward is to reduce the risk (and the fear) of failure by designing a series of small prototypes to test the waters. It is okay for prototypes to fail—they’re supposed to—but well-designed prototypes teach you something about the future.
(41.3%)

Mind mapping with the Good TimeJournal P153
(I’ll have to come back and do these later). Pick these from your Good Time Journal and make it the centre of your mind map, create connected word and concepts working outwards. The idea is to generate a lot of ideas, without thinking too hard.

Engagement - a strong area of interest, or a really engaging activity (e.g a mentoring session)
Energy - something that really energises you in work and life (e.g. an art class)
Flow - an experience when you were in a state of flow (e.g. doing a UI design)

Choose 3 different items from a mind map and try to combine those into a possible job description that would be fun and interesting (does not have to be practical). Name the role and do a sketch of it. Repeat for each mind map. Likely these ideas will be a bit silly.

Odyssey Plans
Map out 3 possible lives for the next 5 years (not necessarily with the job descriptions above). Each should be very different to the others. This will help open your mind to possibilities, even if you end up with the one you assumed you would.

If your mind starts with multiple ideas in parallel, it is not prematurely committed to one path and stays more open and able to receive and conceive more novel innovations. (45.5%)

Some ideas for this:

What you’re doing already or an idea you’ve had already
What you’d do if you weren’t doing what you are currently
What you’d do if money or image were new object

P169
Each must include:

visual/graphic timeline
Title in the form of a 6 word headline
2-3 questions this alternative is asking
A dashboard to gauge:
- Resources
- Likability
- Confidence
- Coherence

You are not so much finding answers in this exercise as learning to embrace and explore the questions, and be curious about the possibilities. (50.6%)

Prototyping is a way to explore and experience possibilities rapidly before overinvesting before having any data.

Prototyping the life design way is all about asking good questions, outing our hidden biases and assumptions, iterating rapidly, and creating momentum for a path we'd like to try out. (53.2%)

The simplest prototype in life design is a Life Design Interview, in which you have a conversation with someone doing the thing you want to do and hear what their day-to-day looks like, how they feel about it, and what their path was.

Log your failures as part of becoming better at reframing them. Different types of failures:

screwups - accidents that you wouldn’t normally do, apologise and move on
Weaknesses - mistakes you make over and over. Sometimes it’s best to avoid these situations rather than trying to overcome a weakness
growth opportunities- failures you can learn from and do better next time

Don't stress too much about failures, use the learnings to keep building forward (where it makes sense) or let it go.

Designers don't agonize. They don't dream about what could have been. They don't spin their wheels. And they don't waste their futures by hoping for a better past. Life designers see the adventure in whatever life they are currently building and living into. This is how you choose happiness. (77.6%)

Much of our greatest learning comes from a failed prototype, because then we know what to build differently next time (83.5%)

On mentors:

The value of mentors’ life experience when they are giving counsel lies not in borrowing what facts or answers they know but in accessing the breadth of their experience and their objectivity, which helps them to help you to see your own reality in a new way. Good mentors spend most of their time listening, then offering possible reframings of your situation that allow you to have new ideas and come up with the answers that will work for you. (87.6%)

The end result of a well-designed life is a life well lived. (96.1%)

Books I've read in 2025

2026-01-16T00:00:00.000Z

This year I'm trying something a little different - writing a few notes for each book I finish, in an effort to try and remember things better.

In progress

Agile Experience Design (2012), Lindsay Radcliffe and Marc McNeill

Completed

Babel, or the Necessity of Violence, R F Kuang

When I started this very long audio book in the last couple weeks of 2025 I didn’t expect to finish it. But I was quickly hooked (and also forced to rest a back injury) so managed to end it on the last day of the year.

Set in an alternate universe Oxford University in the 1830s, Babel felt to me like a classic magic school book, with the added twist of centering non-white characters in a very white, male, colonialist environment. The half-Chinese main character, Robin, struggles with both racism and the guilt that comes with being sometimes-white-passing and a model minority. There’s the internal conflict in enjoying the privilege that comes with being aligned with the colonisers, versus the reality of what that means for the main character's homelands. The magic system, based around silver and translation, is unique.

This was interesting to read after other books featuring magic schools (albeit more typical ones), A Wizard of Earthsea and The Name of the Wind. I was also playing a Professor Layton game at the time and initially wanted to compare the two professors, but it quickly became clear that gentle Professor Layton and Professor Lovell are two very different sorts of guardians.

A fisherman of the inland sea, Ursula K. Le Guin

Short stories have such a small amount of time to hit you hard, and this is what Le Guin’s do here. These are the first of her science fiction stories I’ve read, having completed the Earthsea fantasy cycles this year. The book introduced some ideas that she uses in other books, like the ansible for communication during space travel, and the Nearly As Fast As Light (NAFAL) speed. The final story that gives the collection its title was the most interesting to me, getting mind bendy on the time dilution effects of space travel paired with complex family structures. It was interesting reading it just after To be taught, if fortunate, which feels almost like it could be in an adjacent world.

To be taught, if fortunate, Becky Chambers

I rounded out all my Becky Chambers books with this novella about four explorers visiting planets to learn and study, rather than conquer. As usual for Chambers it’s less about plot, more about the characters, their relationships and internal struggles, and just a refreshingly humble perspective on humans encountering other worlds.

Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami

The book that made Murakami famous in Japan, but in my opinion not one of his better ones. The story follows a 19 year old man studying at university, sorting out his feelings following the suicide of his best friend and interest from female characters that didn't really make sense to me. It deals with grief, mental illness and sexuality but not particularly sensitively.

The Husbands, Holly Gramazio (book club)

The premise of having an attic that keeps spawning new husbands (one at a time, no bigamy here) was intriguing and hilarious. If you can sort-of reset the world and get a new husband by sending the old one up into the attic, where does it end? I enjoyed how this book and the things the protagonist did grew steadily more unhinged as it got towards the end.

Bindi, Kirli Sanders

My first ever verse novel! Apparently its intended audience is mid to upper primary school kids, a similar age to the narrator Bindi, but the themes around connection to land and community are beautiful in the simple language. The illustrations and glossary of Gundungurra words used throughout bring it to life.

It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, Ann de Marcken

It's been a while since I've read a book about zombies! I found this one via Celine Nguyen, who found it via a review by Jon Repetti. The story is told from the perspective of an unnamed zombie holding onto memories from her life, in between the killing and eating and her arm falling off. It's weird and beautiful.

The Other Wind (Books of Earthsea #6), Ursula K. Le Guin

A satisfying end to these trilogies, with dragons, the dead, wizards, a king, a princess, Tenar still trying to talk sense into everyone, and Ged still wanting to stay out of it and have a peaceful retirement.

Tales from Earthsea (Books of Earthsea #5), Ursula K. Le Guin

I'm finding myself really enjoying short stories and novellas lately. The ones in this book expand on the world and history of Earthsea, and explain how the school on Roke became a place only for men.

Tehanu (Books of Earthsea #4), Ursula K. Le Guin

I was surprised to read reviews of this book afterwards that pointed out nothing happened, there was no magic, it was “too feminist”. To me the focus on the life of Tenar and her adopted daughter felt so alive and magical through the descriptions of the everyday routines and fears. But then again I do apparently like books where nothing much really happens (see the Wayfarers series that I read earlier in the year). Personally I found it more captivating than the earlier stories in this series of powerful magic and more of what you’d expect of this genre. In my minds eye I picture the story as if it were a Ghibli film with all the quirky detail and magic in a domestic setting. I felt Tenar’s pain at realising she’d raised her son to be an entitled jerk who won’t put away his dishes!

American Dirt, Jeanine Cummins (book club)

A thriller (or crime?) story about a mother and son on the run from a cartel, fleeing across Mexico to the supposed safety of the United States. The book starts with a bullet in the wall and a massacre, and doesn’t really let up the whole way. Engaging and entertaining, although I think it falls short of the author’s aim to help readers empathise with immigrants coming from South and Central America into the US. More than anything I think it makes Mexico out to be a dangerous place full of dangerous people, full of the usual stereotypes of how Mexico might appear to a white American woman with little real experience of the place. I don’t think authors should only write about what they’ve personally experienced, but I do think that it’s important to be aware of how you’re representing a group of people who don’t typically get the same access to tell their own stories, especially before getting all white saviour-y.

Ranma 1/2 (Volumes 1 and 2), Rumiko Takahashi

Ranma was the first manga I ever read, found in the local library in my early teens. I’ve read the entire series at least twice since then, but I’ve lost my bootleg copy so am slowly rebuilding my (ebook) collection more legitimately. This wacky harem/reverse-harem martial arts story definitely has elements that are of its time, but I’m just as impressed with Takahashi’s artwork and fun characters as the first time I read it.

The Paper Menagerie, Ken Liu

These sci-fi short stories hit hard. All have elements, characters or settings from East Asia, which makes it a nice change from the usual US focus in most science fiction. There are stories involving space, time travel, AI and cyborgs, but also ones that lean more towards fantasy. I don’t know that I could pick a favourite.

The Farthest Shore (Books of Earthsea #3), Ursula K. Le Guin

Another time skip and more sailing around the ends of the world for the hero of The Wizard of Earthsea, this time seen through the eyes of his young companion. Like The Tombs of Atuan this book felt much more dark than the start of the series.

The Tombs of Atuan (Books of Earthsea #2), Ursula K. Le Guin

I wasn’t expecting the series to shift focus to a completely different character living a very different life in the fringes of Earthsea, although the stories do eventually connect up. Where The Wizard of Earthsea went wide with the main character travelling all over the map, this one is intensely focused on a young priestess bound to a crumbling temple and the labyrinths beneath it.

Everyday Permaculture (2025), Anna Matilda

I spotted this one at the library and was intrigued. I thought I sort of knew what permaculture was, but this book was a nice, illustrated introduction to the main principles and practical real-world applications.

A Wizard of Earthsea (Books of Earthsea #1), Ursula K. Le Guin

Diving into some classic fantasy, I can see how this story of a boy wizard (allegedly) inspired another boy wizard at another wizarding school. It was interesting following up a book about shadow selves with one where the main character chases and is chased by what he calls his shadow.

The City and It’s Uncertain Walls, Haruki Murakami

Strange and dream-like, which is what I expect of Murakami. There’s a tension throughout the book between the real and the not-real, the self and the shadow self. In the afterword he mentions that he first wrote The City as a short story decades ago, and the idea stayed with him until he could revisit it as an older man and more experienced writer.

Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud

I bought this book because I saw it mentioned in a few different contexts, and I thought it might be interesting since my kids are getting into graphic novels and I’ve had to explain the different patterns to them. But even though this is a comic book about comics, it’s also literary critique, and is more intellectual than I’d assumed. There’s so many interesting ideas in here for anyone who loves comics, literature, art, design and how we communicate.

Record of a Spaceborn Few (Wayfarers #3), Becky Chambers

Again there’s not a whole lot that actually happens in this book, but each of the characters is grappling with place and purpose. Unlike the other books, all of the narrating characters are human and living on huge fleet ships that fled Earth with most of what was left of the human race. What fascinated me about this one was the culture and economic system that had to be adopted by the Fleet to have any chance of surviving without everyone destroying each other. In a lot of ways it was almost easier for me to believe in the dystopian wasteland in Juice, which I read earlier this year, than in humans working together, ensuring everyone has food, shelter and air, living in commune-style arrangements, where everyone goes in the lottery for “sanitation” duty to make sure the shit jobs are taken on by all. But I want to believe it, and whilst it isn’t a utopia for everyone I think this book raises interesting ideas of how humans can live together more kindly and sustainably. Hopefully it doesn’t take the literal end of the world to get there.

The Making of a Manager (2019), Julie Zhuo

Julie Zhuo pulls together advice from her newsletter about her experiences as a design leader at Facebook. She writes about her transition from star designer to manager, and the lessons she learned along the way.

Juice, Tim Winton

A man travels through a desolate landscape with a young girl who doesn't speak, and ends up in a situation where he has to tell his story to save their lives. My first thought was it's The Last of Us without zombies, then Max Max without the costumes and gangs, but it quickly evolved into its own flavour of a dystopian future. It's long but gripping in its story of survival and righting wrongs in a future severely impacted by the actions and decisions we're making today. I hope climate fiction like this takes off and reaches people's imaginations in ways that pure data can't.

A Closed and Common Orbit (Wayfarers #2), Becky Chambers

The second in this series, focused on characters briefly mentioned in the first. This one considers the messy ethics of cloning and sentient AI, through flashbacks of the experiences of a young clone girl and the "current" timeline where the girl, now grown up, cares for an AI illegally housed in a humanoid body. The characters were less interesting to me than the first in this series, but it does a lot more world building and continues on the themes around a found family.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Wayfarers #1), Becky Chambers

A human woman joins a long-haul space mission with a multi-species crew. After reading the last book in this series, The Galaxy, and the Ground Within, this first book makes a lot more sense - the main character, Rosemary, lived a sheltered life on the almost completely human populated Mars, and learns about the different species she's working with alongside the reader. There's some interesting exploration of gender, sexuality, family structures and acceptance as human norms don't make sense when applied to, for example, a scaled species that can change sex as needed. It’s thought-provoking and I love it.

How to Take Smart Notes (2017), Sönke Ahrens

A reread of this book that got me started actually taking notes on things that I consume, almost 3 years ago. The high-level how to start a personal knowledge management system is outlined in the first chapter, and the rest of the book gets into the details and the why. I don't follow it exactly as I'm not a writer, student or academic, but my hacky version has enough value for me.

The Galaxy, and the Ground Within (Wayfarers #4), Becky Chambers

A sweet sci-fi story centering on a group of aliens unexpectedly stranded in transit. I kept waiting for a humanoid character to appear, but all of the main characters are completely alien and creatively imagined. Not a whole lot happens but the developing characters and relationships are worth the read. Everyone is so nice, which feels unrealistic, but also the kind of galaxy I'd like to live in. I only realised after this is the last in a 4 part series, which I'm going to have to read the start of.

The Invisible Life of Addie Larue, V.E. Schwab

A book club pick. My favourite so far! A young woman makes a deal with the darkness, who twists her wish so that she is always forgotten, unable to leave a mark. Some unexpected turns and interesting characters.

Meditations for Mortals (2024), Oliver Burkeman

I’ve been a fan of Oliver Burkeman’s Imperfectionist newsletter for some time, and there were a lot of familiar ideas here about time and the futility of trying to control it or optimise it. It’s a lot more digestible and practical than Four Thousand Weeks, written in short chapters intended to be read one a day over 12 weeks.

Animal Farm, George Orwell

Revisiting a classic "fairy story" that lives on my shelf. It's a lot more brutal than I remembered. Something that stood out to me this time was the inspiring power of rituals and song.

Designing Your Life (2016), Bill Burnett & Dave Evans

The authors, both from Stanford, apply design thinking techniques to planning your own life and career. Prototyping and iteration play a big part in this process, as it does when applying design thinking to any problem. Useful frameworks for living an intentional life.
my book notes

This is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Two combatants on opposite sides in a war amongst time travellers slowly build up a relationship over cleverly hidden letters they leave for each other. Incredibly poetic, I felt like rather than trying to make sense of every sentence I should just let it wash over me. I’ve never read prose anything like it before. Thank you for lending it to me Sandy!

Spider-Man: Animals Assemble! and Spider-Man: Quantum Quest!, Mike Maihack

I don't usually put the books I read to my kids in here, but this made-for-kids graphic novel series is actually really good! The stories are silly and fun, and the art style is cute but still has its recognisable Western comic roots. It's clear a lot of thought was put into how to make it easy for an adult to read to a child, not an easy thing with a graphic novel. I'll always appreciate the way Spider-Man's mask eyes make expressions as if they were actual eyes, a comic effect that just doesn't make sense in a live action movie. More comics for me this year I think!

The Nightingale, Kristin Hannah (book club)

This historical fiction story follows a pair of estranged sisters living in occupied France during World War II. I don't often read books about war, but when I do it's usually stories about the people left behind rather than the ones on the frontlines. There's some romance threads in this one but they're outshined by the beautifully complicated family relationships. I think all the characters started out unlikeable but grow over the course of the book. Starts slow but the second half escalates quickly!

The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss

This epic fantasy novel started out strong for me with its premise of the main character, Kvothe, telling the story of his start in learning magic and music to a collector of stories. The magic system is unique and there are some intriguing characters, but towards the end it dragged on and did not make me feel up to tackling the next book in the series anytime soon.

Orwell's Roses (2021), Rebecca Solnit

See Books I've read in 2022, Books I've read in 2023 and Books I've read in 2024.

Books I've read in 2024

2025-01-16T00:00:00.000Z

Here's what I read in 2024:

The Neuroscience of You (2022), Chantel Prat
Shards of Earth, Adrian Tchaikovsky
City of Brass, S. A. Chakraborty
Exit Strategy, Martha Wells
Reminders of him, Colleen Hoover (book club)
The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
The Kingdom of Copper, S. A. Chakraborty
Co-intelligence (2024), Ethan Mollick
In Praise of Shadows (1933), Jun’ichiro Tanizaki
The Empire of Gold, S. A. Chakraborty
Kingdom of the Wicked, Kerri Maniscalo (book club)
Exhalation, Ted Chiang
A Psalm for the Wild-Built, Becky Chambers
A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, Becky Chambers
Sun of Blood and Ruin, Mariely Lares
This Much is True, Miriam Margolyes (book club)
The Art of Frugal Hedonism (2017), Annie Raser-Rowland & Adam Grubb (reread)
The Accident, Fiona Lowe (book club)
Filterworld (2024), Kyle Chayka
In Ascension, Martin McInnes
The Collected Regrets of Clover, Mikki Brammer
The Bookbinder of Jericho, Pip Williams
Network Effect, Martha Wells
Slow Productivity (2024), Cal Newport
The Skeleton House, Katherine Allum (book club)
Feel Good Productivity (2024), Ali Abdaal
Remarkably Bright Creatures, Shelby Van Pelt
The Dictionary of Lost Words, Pip Williams
Some Desperate Glory, Emily Tesh
Fugitive Telemetry, Martha Wells

In progress:

Exercising Influence (2015), B. Kim Barnes
Orwell’s Roses (2021), Rebecca Solnit

See Books I've read in 2022, Books I've read in 2023 and Books I've read in 2025.

Books I've read in 2023

2023-10-20T00:00:00.000Z

I'm trying to be mindful of reading from a more diverse set of authors this year. I usually keep one non-fiction book and one fiction on the go.

Here's what I've read so far:

Daughter of the Moon Goddess, Sue Lynn Tan
Continuous Discovery Habits (2021), Teresa Torres
Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors (not a book but I count it)
Stories of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang
The Penelopiad, Margaret Atwood
Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro
The Last Storyteller, Donna Barbara Higuera
The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, S.A. Chakraborty
Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky
Children of Ruin, Adrian Tchaikovsky
The Immortal King Rao, Vauhini Vara
Children of Memory, Adrian Tchaikovsky
Your Brain on Art (2023), Ivy Ross and Susan Magsamen
The Book of Koli, M.R. Carey
All Systems Red, Martha Wells
Artificial Condition, Martha Wells
Bewilderment, Richard Powers
Marvel 1602, Neil Gaiman
Yet We Sleep, We Dream, JL Periodot
Rogue Protocol, Martha Wells

In progress:

The Neuroscience of You (2022), Chantel Prat

See Books I've read in 2022.

Books I've read in 2022

2023-01-12T00:00:00.000Z

This year, I've somehow gone from reading very few books to back up to pre-kid levels. I've put this down to actually getting consistently decent sleep, moving to a part-time job, and deliberately not putting pressure on myself to read if I don't want to.

Since reading How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens I've also really taken to the concept of "don't let good ideas go to waste", and have gone down the rabbithole of zettlekasten and personal knowledge management (essentially taking notes as you read). I feel like this has transformed how I read non-fiction, and made me want to read a lot more as a result.

I've come to realise that being able read quickly is a superpower, and its one I'm planning to learn into more in 2023.

In (roughly) the order they were read:

The Overstory, Richard Powers,
Die with Zero, Bill Perkins
The Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson
Four Hour Work Week (2007), Tim Ferriss
Mothering our boys, Maggie Dent
How to Take Smart Notes (2022) , Sönke Ahrens
Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir
Lean UX (2016), Jeff Gothelf, Josh Seiden
I didn’t do the thing today (2022), Madeline Dore
The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
Big Magic (2015), Elizabeth Gilbert
The Artist’s Way (2020), Julia Cameron
Articulating Design Decisions(2021), Tom Greever
Four Thousand Hours (2021), Oliver Burkeman
The Art of Frugal Hedonism (2016), Annie Raser-Rowland, Adam Grubb
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
The Strange Library, Haruki Murakami

Started in 2022

Daughter of the Moon Goddess, Sue Lynn Tan
Continuous Discovery Habits (2021), Teresa Torres

See Books I've read in 2023.

The Word for World is Forest, Ursula K. Le Guin

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

Humans from Earth, having stripped the planet of its natural resources, have come to colonise and cut down forests of another planet, Athshe. The native people of the planet are considered primitive and inferior, and are horribly exploited, enslaved and brutalised to the point that they're forced to abandon their peaceful nature and retaliate.

This book felt brutal and disorienting, especially as the point of view changed between the villain, an Athshean, and an anthropologist trying to defend them. It's a stark contrast to the Becky Chambers books I read in 2025, where space-travelling humans are careful to tread lightly even amongst non-sentient creatures.

The Word for World is Forest was a good one to follow up R F Kuang's Babel which has similar themes of colonisation. I also started reading Bruce Pascoe's Dark Emu, which quotes many British colonisers records of Aboriginal Australians they encountered on first coming to Australia, and have echoes of Captain Davidson's disdain.

Atmosphere, Taylor Jenkins Reid (book club)

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

Set in the 1980s, a cohort of astronauts in training includes some of the first women to go into space. Also there's a love story.

I do enjoy science fiction, and had just read a book about astronauts to my 6 year old, so I felt pretty ready going into this book. There's quite a tonal shift going from the science-heavy beginning as main character Joan starts her astronaut training, to the love story unfolding, to the boring middle bit, and then to the final chapters where a whole lot of stuff happens all at once. There are dual timelines, which can be a bit confusing if you're not paying attention. There are touches on the sexism that women, and particularly queer women, faced in such a male-dominated space in the 1980s.

I thought it was good but didn't feel completely cohesive. It made me want to reread Andy Weir books like The Martian and Project Hail Mary for more space nerdery, and also This Is How You Lose the Time War for another queer love story.

Orwell's Roses (2021), Rebecca Solnit

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

Designing Your Life (2016), Bill Burnett & Dave Evans

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

The authors, both from Stanford, apply design thinking techniques to planning your own life.

They draw a distinction between engineering problems, which have a specific desired outcome and lots of data, and design problems, where what you’re working towards is a problem in itself.

There’s a difference between design problems and engineering problems. […] engineering is a good approach to solving a problem when you can get a great deal of data and you’re sure there is one best solution. (5.2%)

Designers don’t think their way forward. Designers build their way forward… It means you are not just going to be dreaming up a lot of fun fantasies that have no relationship to the real world—or the real you. You are going to build things (we call them prototypes), try stuff, and have a lot of fun in the process. (9.7%)

Most people don’t have one thing they are passionate about, so this process is not about simply following your passion.

most people are passionate about many different things, and only way to know what they want to do is to prototype some potential lives, try them out, and see what really resonates with them… You don’t need to know your passion in order to design a life you love. (11.2%)

Curiosity

Bias to action

Reframing

Awareness

Radical collaboration

people waste a lot of time working on the wrong problem. If they are lucky, they will fail miserably quickly and get forced by circumstance into working on better problems. If they are unlucky and smart, they’ll succeed—we call it the success disaster—and wake up ten years later wondering how the hell they got to wherever they are, and why they are so unhappy. (14.9%)

The key is not to get stuck on something that you have effectively no chance of succeeding at. (17.1%)

Why work?

What’s work for?

What does it mean?

How does it relate to the individual, others, society?

What defines good or worthwhile work?

What does money have to do with it?

What do experience, growth and fulfilment have to do with it?
(24%)

Lifeview - defining values and perspectives that inform your understanding of life. What matters most to you. Questions such as:

Why are we here?

What is the meaning or purpose of life?

What is the relationship between the individual and others?

Where do family, country and the rest of the world fit in?

What is good, and what is evil?

Is there a higher power, God, or something transcendent, and if so, what impact does this have on your life?

What is the role of joy, sorry, justice, injustice, love, pease and strife in life?
(24.6%)

The combination of the Workview and Life view give “True North” to help you keep on course. Revisit them when going through any kind of life change, or at least once a year.

Wayfinding - figuring out where you’re going when you don’t know your destination.

Enjoyment is a guide to finding the right work for you. P98

Life design is about helping you get more out of your current life by making some improvements, not necessarily changing it completely.

two elements to the Good Time Journal:

Activity Log (where I record where I’m engaged and energized) - daily

Reflections (where I discover what I am learning) - weekly, after the first few weeks of logging activities

Your job is to drill down into the particulars of your day and catch yourself in the act of having a good time.
(30.2%)

AEIOU method of observation:
Activities
Environments
Interactions
Objects
Users (people)

Don’t fall in love with your first idea. Having lots of good ideas to choose from can help us choose better.

Most often, our first solutions are pretty average and not very creative. Humans have a tendency to suggest the obvious first. Learning to use great ideation tools helps you overcome this bias toward the obvious and helps you regain a sense of creative confidence. (37.2%)

Sometimes it is more comfortable to hold on to our familiar, failed approach to the problem than to risk a worse failure by attempting the big changes that we think will be required to eliminate it.
(41.3%)

Prototyping reduces risk and helps you learn and iterate
Experiment, measure and iterate rapidly to validate ideas

The way forward is to reduce the risk (and the fear) of failure by designing a series of small prototypes to test the waters. It is okay for prototypes to fail—they’re supposed to—but well-designed prototypes teach you something about the future.
(41.3%)

Engagement - a strong area of interest, or a really engaging activity (e.g a mentoring session)
Energy - something that really energises you in work and life (e.g. an art class)
Flow - an experience when you were in a state of flow (e.g. doing a UI design)

If your mind starts with multiple ideas in parallel, it is not prematurely committed to one path and stays more open and able to receive and conceive more novel innovations. (45.5%)

Some ideas for this:

What you’re doing already or an idea you’ve had already
What you’d do if you weren’t doing what you are currently
What you’d do if money or image were new object

P169
Each must include:

visual/graphic timeline
Title in the form of a 6 word headline
2-3 questions this alternative is asking
A dashboard to gauge:
- Resources
- Likability
- Confidence
- Coherence

You are not so much finding answers in this exercise as learning to embrace and explore the questions, and be curious about the possibilities. (50.6%)

Prototyping is a way to explore and experience possibilities rapidly before overinvesting before having any data.

Prototyping the life design way is all about asking good questions, outing our hidden biases and assumptions, iterating rapidly, and creating momentum for a path we'd like to try out. (53.2%)

Log your failures as part of becoming better at reframing them. Different types of failures:

screwups - accidents that you wouldn’t normally do, apologise and move on
Weaknesses - mistakes you make over and over. Sometimes it’s best to avoid these situations rather than trying to overcome a weakness
growth opportunities- failures you can learn from and do better next time

Don't stress too much about failures, use the learnings to keep building forward (where it makes sense) or let it go.

Designers don't agonize. They don't dream about what could have been. They don't spin their wheels. And they don't waste their futures by hoping for a better past. Life designers see the adventure in whatever life they are currently building and living into. This is how you choose happiness. (77.6%)

Much of our greatest learning comes from a failed prototype, because then we know what to build differently next time (83.5%)

On mentors:

The value of mentors’ life experience when they are giving counsel lies not in borrowing what facts or answers they know but in accessing the breadth of their experience and their objectivity, which helps them to help you to see your own reality in a new way. Good mentors spend most of their time listening, then offering possible reframings of your situation that allow you to have new ideas and come up with the answers that will work for you. (87.6%)

The end result of a well-designed life is a life well lived. (96.1%)

Workshop with Sue Hibbert

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

I have been trying to get into one of artist Sue Hibbert's classes for ages, and I think I'm not the only one - they always seem to sell out faster than I can organise myself. But this 2 hour watercolour workshop came up at the right time for me and I managed to make it in.

Although I've been painting with watercolour for a while now, I'm mostly self-taught and somewhat chaotic (or intuitive maybe?). It was nice to work larger and in a more traditional style, whilst still embracing the unpredictability of watercolour and going where the painting wants to go. I could of course easily spot a bunch of things I admire about Sue's version that I didn't manage in mine, but looking at it on its own it doesn't feel so bad. The big round brush and fan brush were new to me and I struggled to get the lightness and restraint I'd like, something that will hopefully come with more practice working at this scale.

My thumbnail sketch, colour testing, brush testing, and other notes

Afterwards I had to give the same reference image another go but at a more familiar size to me, in my A5 sized Alpha Sketchbook 7. I still lost more white than I would have liked, but I think the colours were more successful.

Top sketch is from Sue's reference image, the bottom two are from a recent trip to Margaret River

Doing a little landscape like this made me want to do more, and the two quick sketches from photos I took on a recent trip helped me explore colour and value without spending too much time.

I really want to get more serious about watercolour this year, and this workshop with Sue was a great way to kick that off!

Self portrait in gouache

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

Trying to use up some dried up gouache from my palette. Because I painted the background first, it’s overall a bit pinker and darker than I would have liked. Not quite a great likeness, but closer than I’ve gotten in other self portraits.

Revisiting ceramics

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

Finally got around to taking photos of the pieces I made in a 1:1 workshop with Lien Nguyen Ceramics The donut is officially the coolest thing I’ve ever thrown (with some help!). I’m so happy that I still have some muscle memory and so glad I got some time free to do this.

Portrait - Sabrina

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

Recently I've been doing 1 on 1 art classes with Stephanie Sheppard, after going to a couple of her group workshops focused on portraits. This pencil portrait of Sabrina from a reference photo was my first assignment, which I completed over a 2 week period.

Because I usually work quite small and quick in little sketchbooks, this was a massive challenge! A couple of hours in I had a powerful urge to stop and call it done, although the point of this assignment and what I asked for was to push myself further in detail and realism. I'm glad I overcame it and kept going, because this is one of the best things I've ever made.

I came across Sabrina again, modelling for life drawing, always a pleasure to draw.

Playing with soft pastels

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

I bought a set of soft pastels a couple of years ago to make some abstract art. They’ve sat in their box, barely used until I felt like braving their messy, blunt nature recently. I still have no idea what I’m doing and feel like I need larger, more appropriate paper but it is pretty fun.

I wonder if I’m in love with the messy start of learning a new medium or art form, where I don’t have to be scared of being bad at it because it’s almost guaranteed. At least I didn’t spend any extra money on new materials this time!

Peachtober digital sketches

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

I made it through 8 days of the Peachtober 30 day challenge for October, which is a record for me! This year I decided to play around with digital art app HeavyPaint, using my iPad. Such a strange and unpredictable app, it's both completely different to working with traditional media but also kind of similar.

Painting botanicals with Anya Brock

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

I’ve been following Anya Brock’s work for something like 20 years, so it was surreal to get to do a painting workshop with her!

The subject for the workshop was wax flowers, but before getting to any paint we got warmed up to draw. After a meditation to get into the right headspace, we did some blind contour drawings using different native Australian plants as a reference. We did some contour drawing with a reference image held upside down, and finally just drawing from a reference. It was interesting to see how much the self-judgement increased the more I was able to look at what I was drawing versus looking at the reference. Although I didn’t think much of my blind contour drawing when I did get to look down at it (I didn’t take a photo), the feeling of drawing without judgement or self-editing whilst in the process was something I want to keep coming back to. Apparently some people have emotional breakthroughs (or breakdowns) during this process - I can see how powerful and confronting feeling that kind of freedom is.

This was my drawing I did after going through the blind contour exercises. It’s tighter and more readable than my blind contours, but I can also see the looseness and shapes that doing that exercise first helped warm up.

When we got to painting, having the reference photo and colour palette chosen for us and Anya’s completed painting to look at made things feel almost deceptively easy, but necessary to fit into the timeframe. I don’t think I’d have arrived at this combination without a bunch of experimentation, if ever, because I usually tend towards directly representing the reference which just wouldn’t look as fun. We laid down the sketch on the canvas in charcoal, and it was only after I started painting that I realised I’d done mind upside down. Not such a problem with this kind of subject though, with flowers going in all directions. Mine just looked a little more different to everyone else’s, but they were all really unique in the end. This isn’t the type of prescriptive class where it’s this stroke here, then that one there - there were demonstrations and examples, but more intuitive and left to interpretation.

Starting the painting process - you can see my charcoal sketch, and the paint palette in muffin trays

Since my medium is usually watercolour and very small, I had to mentally switch gears to work with squishy acrylic paint on a large canvas. I love having something large, bold and lightfast enough to hang up in my house though.

It’s not the same as having an original Anya Brock painting in my house, but considering how many random art projects I have littered around this feels more me. It was such a lovely, challenging and affirming class and Anya is a wonderful teacher.

Our home

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

One Week 100 People challenge

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

This year I participated in OneWeek100People, a challenge organised by urban sketchers Liz Steel and Marc Taro Holmes for the first week of every March. The idea is to sketch roughly 20 people a day for 5 days, or to at least sketch more people than you would otherwise. I don't usually sketch many people, so this low bar option felt achievable.

The weekend before I went to Sculptures by the Sea at Cottesloe Beach, and whilst sketching people from life is a bit beyond me, I took enough photos of the crowds to have plenty of subjects to draw 100 people from. Drawing teeny tiny people off in the distance was its own challenge, but a useful skill to learn.

For most of my people I used my new favourite fountain pen, a Sailor Fude de Mannen, which has a strangely bent nib that gives amazing line variation. I used my fountain pens with coloured ink to fill in the space with closer sketches of myself and the kids.

During the week I also did some Life drawing in different media which I feel counts, even if all the drawings were of one person in different poses. I'm not sure I hit 100 people in total, but it's certainly far more than I'd usually draw.

This last painting was done after #OneWeek100People, and I definitely felt a difference drawing a scene with lots of people in it. Usually I'll omit people in my paintings of buildings or landscapes, and even feel a bit annoyed that they're blocking a clear view. But here I feel like the vague figures give a sense of scale to the architecture, and more accurately capture the memory of the busy day.

Mr Roo

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

Trying to push towards high key colours, helped by the reference pic of a white kangaroo I took a photo of at Caversham Park.

Painted in Procreate using the Perfect Oils brush set, mainly IMPASTO 3.0 Fechine's Expressive #1 which does some lovely mixing.

More life drawing in watercolour

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

I’m still doing monthly life drawing sessions, really focusing on making watercolours work for short poses. It doesn’t always turn out great, but I feel like I’m slowly making progress and creating some work I’m really proud of. The painting above is my favourite so far.

Some things I’m taking note of for next time:

watercolour is totally doable for 1 minute poses, they just require being organised and a lot of abstraction!
blues and purples can leave the figure looking strangely unhealthy, or at least I haven’t figured out how to use them
I’m still loving Cadmium Red Light for a single colour sketch, but mixing it with Monte Amiata Natural Sienna (a light brown) gives a beautiful peachy skin tone
I’ve tried both with and without a pencil sketch, and although my favourites are the former doing a sketch takes a lot of my precious time! I feel that this works better for 10 or 20 minute poses, whereas shorter poses I get straight into paint and add some pencil lines on top near the end.
For sketching I’ve started using an erasable red lead in a mechanical pencil. I have to be careful to not get too carried away with the sketch and have enough time to paint.

Magpie

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

Getting back into the swing of digital painting after spending the last week or so messing around with code for this website! This magpie was eyeing my son's snacks at the park the other day.

Painted in Procreate using the Perfect Oils brush set, mainly IMPASTO 3.0 Fechine's Expressive #1 which does some lovely mixing.

Life drawing the male figure

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

Although I've done a fair bit of life drawing over the past year or so, I haven't had the chance to sketch a male model in a long time. It was great to have Billy to draw at Sticc + Thicc recently, although it was a challenge to switch gears from drawing the female form.

Life drawing in watercolour

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

I’ve been attending more life drawing sessions, and exploring how to use watercolours and watercolour pencils. I’m still struggling in the short poses, but I feel like I’m getting a little better at 10 or 20 minute poses. Some thoughts on this so far:

Watercolour pencils are cool for getting lines down quickly, then adding water for shape after, which is handy for 5 minute poses.
Only bringing a couple of pencils helps keep things simple!
I’m still getting used to mixing the right colours quickly, so sticking fairly monochromatic and focusing on value for now is helping. I have a Cadmium Red Light that I’m enjoying for this.
Sketchbooks aren’t ideal because you can’t turn the page on the drying paint! I brought a watercolour pad I could tear sheets off for the most recent session, which was much better.
I’m very reliant on my watercolour pencil sketch to guide my painting and also show edges. I’d like to move away from this and work just in paint, for looseness and speed.
Drawing a live model in a room with other artists is SO different to drawing from a photo. I feel like my sketches have so much more life when drawing from life, I’m so in awe of what the awesome models bring to their craft, and the creative energy of everyone capturing the moment in their own way.

Life drawing in different media

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

I’ve gone to a couple of life drawing sessions over the past few months, and whilst I’ve mostly stuck with the provided charcoal, this time I wanted to branch out. Not because I’ve mastered any of these mediums, but I really enjoy how different tools have different personalities. Also I can be very indecisive!

Charcoal stick for 1 minute warmups, nice and loose, slightly messy.

I used my kids’ twistable crayons, sharpened to fine points, for some 5 minute sketches. For sketching it feels a bit like using coloured pencils, lending themselves to details, fine lines and soft shading. Maybe a little tighter than I’d like for short poses.

Since I usually spend a lot of time in sketchbooks, I wanted to take the opportunity to go BIG and fill up the A3 sheets of paper we were provided. I brought another kids tool, a chunky chisel tip chalk pen in black, and some brush pens filled with ink for some of the details.

My friend brought some soft pastels and I gave it a go - a lot more difficult (and messier!) than I thought.

Since I've been studying watercolour recently, I wanted to give it a try for the longer poses. It was really fun to work loose for the main shapes, then come in with darker layers for shadow and back to the charcoal stick for detail. I realised after the first pose (middle) that I wouldn't be able to turn the page on the wet paint, but adding the next one in around it (I had enough time for 2 versions in the 20 minutes) gives an interesting layout.

I was hoping that now I've tried a bunch of things, I'll be able to commit to one for the next life drawing session - but I like them all!

Life drawing in Charcoal

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

After struggling a bit with Life drawing in watercolour recently, I’ve returned to charcoal. It’s nice to not have to worry about mixing colours or having enough watercolour paper. It’s been a while since I’ve done the longer poses in charcoal, and I feel like I’ve come a long way over this year of regular life drawing sessions - I’m no longer afraid to work larger, go darker, include faces (sometimes).

More life drawing:
Life drawing in different media
Life drawing in watercolour
More life drawing in watercolour

Learning sketching foundations

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

I'm just completing Liz Steel's Foundations course, having taken twice as long as intended to finish it! Even then, by "finished" I mean that I've watched the main videos and attempted each of the assignments. There's a whole lot of bonus material and livestream recordings for each lesson that I have barely scratched yet. Liz says this course is intended to be done multiple times, and now I can see why - there's far too much content to properly absorb in a single run through.

The final lesson is reviewing your work and reflecting on three big takeaways from the course. Here's mine:

Investing in learning to make art was a huge leap for me, but so worth it. It took me years after learning of this course to fork out the money for it. I agonised ages over buying artist-grade watercolours, decent sketchbooks and quality inks. Even investing my meagre free time time in this hobby took time to come to. I have no regrets (and have signed up for more courses).
I think I started the course leaning more towards thinking in shapes, and ended it leaning more towards thinking in edges. I'm still learning how to choose and mix the different ways of seeing to suit the subject or the vibe I'm going for. I feel like my sketching in ink has overall gotten much stronger after doing this course, as well as my general confidence in art.
Just the right amount of abstraction or simplification can make for a more powerful story than photorealism. I'm still learning how to find this balance and not overcompensate by trying to draw all the things.

It was a great course and I'm looking forward to starting the watercolour one next!

Here are some of my favourite assignments from this course:

Jury duty sketches

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

My second time doing jury duty. I got a 4 day trial, which I think is not bad in the scheme of things. It wasn’t gory or complicated but was mostly incredibly dull, and I was so grateful that we were allowed to have a pen and paper to “take notes”, because otherwise it would have been hard to not fall asleep.

Obviously I couldn’t keep or take photos of my court notes, but I made use of the lunch hour to do some plein air sketches, mostly of the St Mary’s Cathedral. Later I added from photo a sketch of the ugliest ever magpie, who joined me for lunch by the cathedral. I rarely get the time or opportunity to sketch out and about, especially of such interesting architecture, so it almost made the jury service worth it.

Sketches done with Daniel Smith watercolors in Sketchbook 11, a Stillman & Birn Alpha in pocket size.

Jellyfish

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

I've been mostly sketching traditionally lately, so here's my first go back at digital painting for 2023.

Painted in Procreate using the Perfect Oils brush set, mainly IMPASTO 3.0 Fechine's Expressive #1 which does some lovely mixing.

Illustrating Nature course

2023-04-28T00:00:00.000Z

I've been slowly making my way through the Illustrating Nature course by Laura McKendry on Domestika. I wanted to start dipping more into how to use watercolours, and although this course doesn't cover watercolour basics I was really drawn to Laura's non-traditional and energetic mixed-media illustrations.

This course is all about creative experimentation, making mistakes, playing with different media and different ways of referencing subjects. I've mostly been doing the tasks in my regular sketchbook, which is not exactly made for watercolour or pencils, but is fun to flip back through and see the things that I've done. It really feels like the beginning of something, where I'm not too concerned about the quality of the result as much as what I can learn whilst doing it. I feel so creatively energised trying all these different techniques!

Fountain pens and ink

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

My first two fountain pens, Lamy Safari and Lamy Joy, along with my first permanent fountain pen ink, De Atramentis in “Urban Sienna”. There’s something satisfying about drawing my art supplies.

Even more life drawing in watercolour

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

For a while I went back to life drawing in charcoal rather than watercolour, after a run of sketches that really weren't working out. With short poses (1 minute, 5 minutes, 10 minutes and 20 minutes), the more predictable and monochromatic medium was a nice break! But after getting back into my watercolour groove a bit with my travel sketchbook, I've been trying it out again.

Some things I've been playing around with:

Using A3 Kmart drawing paper. Working at a larger size, with larger brushes opens up more space for detail and experimenting, and the cheaper paper handles watercolour pretty well. Some warping and not as crisp with the colours, but it helps me feel less precious about "wasting" good watercolour paper that's much more expensive.
Doing a little thumbnail sketch in the corner to map the shapes and values and decide on composition, then get straight into painting. This has helped me be more intentional about taking up space in the page, and sometimes focusing on part of the figure rather than trying to tackle everything. Sometimes I think the more "zoomed in" compositions feel more intimate, especially when I take the time to think about the composition.
Using a contrasting colour (usually cobalt blue) to fill in a background area and highlight parts, especially lighter areas where the paper is unpainted.
Sometimes using a darker shade to outline areas that need some more definition, sometimes leaving them as lost edges.

I feel like a combination of more confidence with watercolour, diving in rather than sketching, and working with larger brushes have made a huge difference to the results I'm getting. I'm embracing watercolour's unpredictability and moving away from drawing an outline that I then colour in, which I think means for more lively and interesting abstractions rather than tightly controlled sketches. I'm spending less time trying to accurately capture what I see and more on thinking about the design, composition, and how I want it to feel. It's looser and better fits the beauty of being able to paint a live model.

Model: Sharna

Model: Sharna. I think taking on a portrait was a bit too much of a challenge for me at this point!

Model: Sharna, wearing fairy wings for Halloween

Model: Sabrina + Kiki the dog

Model: Sabrina

Model: Gila

One time all the painters were sitting together (most of the group uses charcoal or pencils)

More life drawing:
Life drawing in Charcoal
Life drawing the male figure
Life drawing in different media
Life drawing in watercolour
More life drawing in watercolour

Charcoal portrait

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

I'm always amazed about how quickly a charcoal sketch can come together... and how quickly it can be smudged if you touch it wrong! I thought I was finished with this one after just a few sessions, but came back to it after a break to deepen the shadows and get the nose just right. Reference photo and direction from Stephanie Sheppard.

Beginnings, at Steph's studio - crazy eyes and eyebrows!

At home, I tape the paper to my courtyard door in place of a vertical easel. Blocking in shadows roughly here.

After I thought I was finished, I did a study focusing on just the nose and realised I could push my full portrait further

Deeper shadows and smoother transitions after some more work

Writing

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

Switching from Kindle to a Boox Go 7 e-ink reader 26 November 2025
My planning, writing and sketching tools - 2025 23 November 2025
Travel sketching kit 6 August 2025
Reading things later 15 February 2025
Photographing artwork with a phone 1 February 2025
Getting the best out of Focus modes 22 December 2024
A better way to read email newsletters 16 June 2024
Tiny watercolour kit v2 18 May 2024
Voice chats with my ChatGPT UX mentor 19 January 2024
End of year journaling 11 December 2023
My notebook system 6 December 2023
Remote Sketching - tools for UX designers 28 November 2023
Fountain pens 13 November 2023
Morning Pages 13 November 2023
Using an iPad as a second screen 11 August 2023
Tiny watercolor kit 3 April 2023
Thoughts on mending 19 February 2023
My planning, writing and sketching tools 13 January 2023
The Ugly Stage 11 January 2023
Optimise for curiosity, not productivity 3 January 2023
My Obsidian workflow 12 December 2022
Procrastination through process 29 November 2022
My cosy working from home desk setup 29 May 2022

Voice chats with my ChatGPT UX mentor

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

I love the idea of having a mentor or coach for my UX work. I've worked with wonderful colleagues and friends who have given me ad hoc advice, but never in a formal relationship. Something about not wanting to take up people's time, and a lack of self-knowledge about what I even want to work on, has always stopped me from seeking this out. So when I read about people using AI for coaching, I thought this was worth trying out. A mentor with unlimited time, patience, and availability I can ask all my dumb questions? Sounds too good to be true (spoiler: it kind of is, but it's still pretty cool).

Setting up a custom GPT

It's worth noting that you don't actually need to set up a custom GPT to try this - I believe you can get a similar result by giving similar instructions at the start of a chat or using custom instructions. You can even get a decent result using the currently free GPT 3.5 if you haven't paid for a plan.

"Create" mode steps you through the process using ChatGPT, which then generates the instructions shown in "Configure" mode

However custom GPTs are included in the Plus plan and are extremely easy to set up - you are walked through the process in a series of chat prompts, taking just a few minutes - so I gave it a try. I didn't have any particular texts that I wanted to train it with, so just gave it some prompts around the areas of expertise and the types of responses I was hoping for.

As soon as I gave UX Mentor a profile image of a human face, a nickname (Max), and a friendly and informal conversational style, my perception of "it" changed to "her" and this has coloured our interactions since. This was even more pronounced once I started using voice chat through the iPhone app and having verbal conversations with her (more on that coming up). Although it's essentially the same thing, I can feel myself mentally switching contexts when I'm chatting to Max versus standard ChatGPT, as if the former is tipped slightly more towards the human end of the scale.

Using voice chat

The voice chat style interface shifted our interactions to more closely emulate how I'd speak with a real human being. I use niceties and colloquialisms that I rarely do in text, especially with an AI. It felt natural and distant from "prompt crafting", which I never really bothered to get the hang of. The voice acting is very good, especially compared to the stilted tones of Siri.

But still, I don't think that it reached the uncanny valley because it felt clear at all times that I was speaking to an AI and not a real human being. Max obviously made attempts to sound warm and friendly, but it's still distant enough from a personal conversation that it wasn't creepy, for me at least.

Some use cases

What’s an AI UX mentor good for? Here’s a few things I’ve tried out so far, with varied results.

Suggesting ideas for a professional development plan. Max asked me some questions about my current role and career aspirations, then suggested a path forward including a timeline with milestones.
Advising on me coaching or mentoring colleagues. Yes I got the mentor to mentor me on mentoring.
Drafting a UX case study. Building a portfolio has got to be the number one thing I procrastinate on. Answering a few questions and getting a draft is a decent starting point to get the ball rolling, and did make me reflect on the project in ways I hadn’t before. I also did it via voice chat whilst cleaning my bathroom!
Refining copy I had drafted. I feel like I’m an okay writer, but it helps to get another perspective.
Feedback on an illustration. This was more to test how well the AI can “see”, but based on my article on Remote Sketching - tools for UX designers and one of the illustrations I did for it, it was able to note that there were two people collaborating on a whiteboard and that this looked like a good fit.
Brainstorming the downsides of using an AI as a mentor.
Writing an article about our interactions so far. I felt it was far too effusive in its praise of itself and didn’t end up using any of the material.
Feedback on this article. I ignored all of it.

All of these tend to fall into a few categories:

Ideation, brainstorming, going wide with ideas
Refining or critiquing to hone in on a solution
Asking one question at a time then formulating an output based on the answers

The limitations

There is currently a limit of 50 GPT4 responses in a 3 hour window, which I was surprised to run through so quickly in a voice conversation. There’s a definite lag whilst the answer was being formulated that doesn’t make for a completely smooth conversation. There were times where UX Mentor didn't infer the nuance in my responses that I know a human would have. I question the validity of and bias in some of her answers, relying on my experience and intuition to pick and choose what to take on board. I do expect all of these things to improve over time, especially with the rapid pace of AI improvements.

At the end of the day, although Max does a decent job of mimicking a person, I don't believe she is a meaningful replacement for a real mentor. I'm not sure that would be possible in any field, because mentorship is a human relationship which goes beyond regurgitating common advice or even asking pointed questions. A good relationship goes two ways, and this isn't something we should necessarily seek to replace.

Still, I think that AI has a role to play as a collaborator, a tool for getting unstuck, and coming up with things you might not have thought of. Used with care and many, many grains of salt, there’s definitely value and potential there. As we move from the phase of using AI for entertainment to actually improving workflows, I’m curious to see what kind of role it plays in the UX design field.

If you want to give it a go and have ChatGPT Plus, you can find Max here, along with many other UX mentor GPTs created by others.

Using an iPad as a second screen

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

When I upgraded my laptop, I found that I simply couldn’t justify sticking with the MacBook Pro range for my rather basic needs. Changing to a MacBook Air did however mean sacrificing a little more screen real estate, going from 15 inches to a teeny 13.

This wouldn’t be an issue of course if I had space for my big monitor, but unfortunately My cosy working from home desk setup isn’t ideal for this. The past year I’ve done my best to lean into the very portable nature of working from a laptop, and for the most part it works very well. Having limited screen space means I don’t have much choice but to focus on one task at a time, and I’ve found that I get distracted far less easily.

Where I’ve run into issues so far is when I need to reference something to create something else, such as typing notes whilst in a user interview, making a report based on some data, or doing anything whilst getting help from ChatGPT. In those cases, having to switch between windows or make them really small is cumbersome and more distracting rather than less.

I looked into getting a portable monitor, then looked at my gen 1 iPad Pro which isn’t much smaller. I’ve played around with apps for using it as an extra screen before, but now there’s Sidecar built in natively which makes it a whole lot easier, and free! At first it felt unreliable, dropping out frequently, but now I’ve sorted out the kinks it works beautifully. I don’t think I’d use it as my main screen but as a second for referencing it’s exactly what I need and nothing more.

Some things I’m liking about it:

I didn’t have to pay for an extra piece of tech, and of course the iPad can do regular tablet things that a monitor can’t
Even though I use it with a cable for a more stable connection, I can position it where it makes sense for the specific task at hand, even flat in front of me for use with the Pencil
Since both my laptop screen and the iPad Pro aren’t large, the edges don’t feel far away and I don’t feel tempted to display heaps of things at once
It’s all very portable and easy to tuck away when not in use.

Travel sketching kit

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

This 4 night birthday trip to Bali is the most prolific trip I have been on in terms of sketching! It’s in part because I went with friends and without kids, but it also helped to have a pared down travel sketching kit.

I always bring too much, but day to day this is what I had with me this time:

A very slim, pocket sized sketchbook that I made myself. It has just 9 spreads so very light and portable.
A Sailor Fude pen with permanent black ink, for line work.
My Tiny watercolour kit v2 with some updated watercolour paints, now I can fit more in there.
A Sakura Koi travel water brush.
A cut down microfiber cloth.

All of this fit easily into my Uniqlo sling bag, along with my water bottle and camera. It was nice to have something to work on in downtime throughout the day, and I feel the difference between the pages where I was able to get a quick sketch down en plein air versus ones where I worked entirely from photos. They're rough but lively!

There's a flick through of my sketchbook at the end of the video above, and you can also see photos of the spreads in Sketchbook 12.

To the drawing board

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

I struggle a lot with capturing correct proportions, especially when it comes to portraits. Mostly I put this down to a lack of experience, but lately I’ve wondered if it’s due to the fact that I draw and paint with my sketchbook flat on my dining room table. Since I usually work fairly small I thought that this perspective wouldn’t be much of an issue, especially as my reference is usually on a phone or tablet right next to it.

But I bought a drawing board just in case, and I do actually think it’s made a difference. So far I haven’t had the strangely elongated faces I tend towards when working flat, and I’m also not so hunched over my sketchbook. I did see some beautiful huge drawing tables in my search, but for now this very light and portable table top solution is plenty to work with. I haven’t done much watercolour with it so far, but since I don’t work very wet and it’s extremely hot here in Perth right now I haven’t had any issues with drips as I paint.

This one is a Montmarte Signature A3 drawing board which gives me enough space to go up to an A4 portrait sketchbook, probably as large as I’ll go.

Tiny watercolour kit v2

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

I've had a few false starts with my first Tiny watercolor kit, and I felt it was time to make some improvements to help it be more useful.

Better colours and paints

I was frustrated with the 4 Cotman watercolour pans that I chose initially from what I had available. The blue and the red mixed a muddy brown, it was hard to get any decent darks and I've since discovered that student grade watercolours ironically need a lot more skill and effort to get working nicely - not ideal for a palette that needs to be convenient for quick painting on location with limited mixing space.

My little tin only fits 4 half pans, 5 if they're a bit tilted, and they jangled around a bit despite my efforts with magnets and blu-tack.

I've now bought some artist quality tube watercolour paints to make my own palettes, and cut down an empty pill blister pack to hold up to 6 colours. They only fit quite a small amount of paint, but enough for many tiny paintings. It's also super light!

Tiny paper

I have a stack of old business cards, left over from my calligraphy workshop days, which I've had difficulty letting go of as they were quite the splurge! They are 300gsm and whilst they're not exactly ideal watercolour paper they do hold up okay if I don't overwork it. I also had a slim metal card case that is the perfect size to hold a few at a time and fits into my little kit pouch.

Holding it all together

I'm using a fridge magnet clip from an old playgroup craft project which holds the card case flat for a nicer working surface, and the metal tin stays nicely on the magnet. Although I prefer to work on a surface where I can, this clip makes it possible to sketch standing up with everything held in one hand whilst the other paints.

So now altogether my little kit contains:

Tin with 6 watercolour paints on an old blister pack, propped up on a small sponge
Old business cards and card holder
Sakura Koi portable water brush I have from an old set
Little lead pencil accidentally taken from IKEA
Magnet clip from a playgroup project
Small zip pouch that came with a magazine I bought a decade or so ago

Overall I'm feeling very happy and also justified in holding on to all these random things "just in case". I have looked into tiny watercolour kits that you can buy, but it's so satisfying that aside from the paint, this one is made from reusing stuff I had lying around.

And having everything fit into one little pouch has meant that I really can take with me everywhere, and have gotten in some sketching when I otherwise wouldn't have.

Tiny watercolor kit

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

I've loved the idea of drawing and painting whilst out and about, especially as I start seeing artists posting for "Plein Airpril". I've also found it very easy to make excuses to not do this, one of them being just not having any drawing tools with me at the right time. Well not anymore!

Inspired by some Youtube videos, I put together a pocket-sized watercolour kit using bits and pieces I had on hand. My kit includes:

A little tin that used to contain pins
Four Winsor & Newton watercolour half pans, given to me as part of a larger palette from a friend, with little magnets stuck on the back with glue so they don't rattle around
A Koi waterbrush and tiny sponge from my Sakura Koi Watercolour Pocket Field Sketch Box
A little pencil that made its way home with me from IKEA
Cut up pieces of watercolour paper, held onto a Rhodia notebook cover with a clip
A purse that holds the tin, waterbrush, and pencil, but not the notebook

So far I've done a test painting at home, and started another whilst out at a playground with the kids (not so successful). I don't know that I'll necessarily be making any fabulous art, but this kit is small enough to take with me most places I go. I'm still learning how to mix colours with primaries and how to adjust to using a waterbrush. I think it's likely that if I do any painting whilst out and about, I'll be finishing it at home with more tools and more time. But I'm so pleased that I was able to put this together without having to buy anything new!

I do think that this could be improved, but who knows if I'll still have the urge to do plein air panting by then? I'm going to give this a go for a while and see how it goes.

Thoughts on mending

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

Several years ago, I brought a cardigan with me to work to mend on my lunch break. It had been on my to do list for ages, and I thought that sitting on the office balcony with a needle and thread would be a nice enough way to spend my break from work. A colleague asked me what I was doing, and when I told them they replied "OR you could just buy a new one?".

I'm not sure why that stuck with me. Maybe because I still have that cardigan, which I've patched up a few more times since then. It did occur to me, and still does when I mend something, that my less-than-perfect, often visible stitches might make it look to others like I can't afford to buy a shiny new replacement. But I think it more reflects that I have the luxury of time to fix rather than replace. It means that I have the skills, rudimentary as they are, to do a passable job. It means that I have the privilege to invest in something like a merino cardigan that's worth repairing.

Probably though, no one really cares or notices, and that colleague was just making conversation. It still makes me happy to extend the lifetime of a faithful piece a bit longer.

The Ugly Stage

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

When creating a piece of art, there's often an "ugly stage" where it hasn't all come together yet and it doesn't make sense as a whole. I feel like I get this a lot when I'm painting and haven't gotten to the detail or shading that really makes it, especially in a portrait where this stage can look particularly horrifying.

I often feel some panic in the ugly stage that I've bitten off more than I can chew, that the current state is proof that I don't have the skills to pull off what I had planned. I get the urge to give up and do something else, maybe something easier and more predictable. Sometimes I do abandon the piece and move on.

But I've learned that in general, the best thing to do is to push through the ugly stage. It's uncomfortable and you have to have a fair bit of faith in yourself, and not fear the potential for failure if it never makes it through. Most of the time though, I find the challenging pieces that I'm despairing in and tempted to stop wind up being the ones I'm most proud of. The discomfort was a necessary part of the process that needed to be worked through to reach the destination.

I'm trying to embrace the messy, ugly, not-ready-to-show parts of life and learn to identify when something is a good discomfort that can be worked through, versus a signal that something isn't quite right.

Some more random thoughts to get into order later:

You can't just skip the ugly stage (or at least, I've never been able to). With increased skill you might be able to minimise it, but it's a necessary part of the creative process. Better to just accept it as inevitable and keep going.
Work in the ugly stage can be shared, but with caution. Anyone who is asked to (or might decide to) give feedback should be made aware of its incomplete state so they can take it into account. It's a fragile state where a too-critical comment might cause you to lose faith in yourself and abandon it. The early stages before the ugly stage, or later as things are starting to come together, are usually better points to ask for feedback to avoid your ego being crushed.
Because of the above reason, you don't often get to see the ugly stage of other people's work. This might lead you to believe that it doesn't happen for them, but it's more likely that you just don't get to see it.

Switching from Kindle to a Boox Go 7 e-ink reader

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

I like to read a lot. I especially like to read fiction to wind down before sleep, usually whilst lying down and with dim lighting, so I prefer the ease and ergonomics of ebooks over paper books. Kindle ebook readers have served me pretty well over the years, but I’ve grown to resent being locked into the Amazon ecosystem and don’t want to continue buying books in it.

An e-reader I can use for library books

So after some research I landed on the Boox Go 7 Monochrome, an Android based e-ink tablet that has a built-in reading app and also allows me to install apps from the Google Play store, including other reading apps, Kindle and Kobo apps, as well as ones that allow me to read library books. The latter is what sold it for me - in Australia the Libby app can be used only with Kobo readers, not Kindle, and neither support the other app my library uses, BorrowBox. Having the flexibility to read books from any of these sources, plus the ability to side-load books and other files, has been a big factor in the number of Books I've read in 2025.

While it’s nice to not be tied to one ecosystem, using an Android e-ink device is not without its drawbacks. I can technically manage my library loans through the Libby and BorrowBox apps, but it’s much easier to do on my phone. And although you can install any app on the Boox, they’re mostly not created with e-ink in mind. It’s great for reading books but not much else (still more than my Kindle though!).

Getting it set up

It also exposes far more options than you get with a more integrated e-reader, I guess to allow you to adjust for the wide variety of apps, most of which aren’t designed for e-ink displays. As a Kindle user I didn't need to know anything about the underlying technology, but with a Boox device I needed to configure the display mode, refresh rate, resolution and contrast for each individual app. This is in addition to the confusing array of options and settings which lack any sensible defaults or information architecture that I can determine, and required days of messing with to get the way I like it.

Now that I have things set up (with the help of Reddit threads) I don’t have to think about it anymore, but the process nearly broke me. This is my first ever Android device, but I do work in tech, have set up and used so many different devices at this point, and actually do generally like fiddling with settings. If I struggled, how is a less technical person going to feel? This is the main reason why I wouldn’t recommend it to friends and family, unless I’m certain that I’m not going to be stuck as tech support for the foreseeable future. They have made some updates to improve this, like a “Recommended” e-ink option depending on the app that does a decent job, so maybe this will improve.

The physical device

The physical device is lightweight and the perfect size for me for reading novels, and just a touch small for reading manga. I didn’t realise until getting this how delightful it is to turn pages with physical buttons rather than tapping a screen - not quite the tactility of real paper, but enough to shift my mental mode from tapping, swiping and scrolling on my other digital devices.

I chose the black because I like to read in dark mode and it’s nice to have the bezels visually blend in, allowing me to adjust the view to have the smallest possible margins (helpful as I read with quite large text). Dark mode also means I’m less distracted by the colour temperature and not completely even way the screen is lit, an issue I’ve seen mentioned with the way the Boox Go 7 is constructed, although even in light mode it’s not terribly noticeable.

I wish the edges were a little more rounded to make it more ergonomic to hold in one hand. The battery life is not as ridiculously good as a Kindle, but I get about 1-2 weeks out of the Boox which is infrequent enough to not bother me. I got the Onyx magnetic case to go with it, something I didn’t bother with with my Kindle as it felt more indestructible, but it doesn’t add much weight or bulk.

The reading experience

I’ve side-loaded all my purchased e-books, liberated of any DRM (quite the process), and use the default reading app for Onyx, called NeoReader. I did try some more powerful and customisable reading apps like KOReader, but they felt like too much work - possibly because I’d already spent so much time messing with the Boox settings and just wanted to actually start using it. NeoReader does a decent job for my needs, which don’t really require much in the way of highlighting and notes (although it’s also not bad for these things). Unsurprisingly it also works with the least amount of messing around with settings, even for dark themes which I’ve found trickier to configure. And although NeoReader isn’t specifically designed for reading comics, the manga I’ve tried reading on it looks great and handles the reversed reading direction well. It was delightful to be able to screenshot a title page, crop it and set it to my lock screen, something that isn’t possible on my Kindle.

Overall I'm really happy with my Boox, and even if moving away from the Kindle ecosystem wasn't enough, the number of library books I've already read with it is making it worth me purchasing the new device. The complex setup is now behind me, and updates to the firmware do seem to be improving the overall experience.

Start here

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

I haven't decided what to include here just yet. So far I'm just building things, which I'll detail in About this site. Also, here's what I'm up to Now. I'm trying to figure out my My Obsidian workflow. I'm also trying to do some art here and there. I sometimes write letters.

Things are still very new, so you'll be able to see all there is to see from the pages linked above.

Sketchnotes

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

One practice I’ve found especially useful is creating sketchnotes during talks and meetings – I find it helps me listen more deeply in the moment, and to remember the most important points afterwards.

Sketching

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

I love the way that translating complex ideas into a visual format can make it more understandable and interesting to look at! I try to use sketches, diagrams and drawings both to figure things out for myself, and to explain things to others.

Sketchbooks

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

There's something kind of cool about having all your artwork together in a book. Even if individually each page is not amazing, collectively they tell a story and show skills evolving over time.

I've gone back to keeping physical sketchbooks since the start of 2023, and I'll be numbering them on a rolling basis rather than tied to the year.

Remote Sketching

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

In the days of in-office collaboration, sketching ideas with others was a tangible and straightforward process. Fast forward to the era of remote work, and digital tools like Miro and Figjam have reshaped our approach to ideation.

As a UX designer navigating this shift, I've encountered practical challenges in adapting traditional sketching collaboration methods to the virtual workspace. This article doesn't promise a silver bullet; instead, it delves into the real-world pros and cons of various approaches, offering insights for fellow designers looking for practical solutions for remote collaboration. If, like me, you've missed the simplicity of pen-and-paper ideation, come along as we delve into the practical aspects of sketching in the era of virtual teamwork.

Use a sketching app

Procreate on the iPad is my go-to for sketching digitally, so it's where I have the most muscle memory in sketching ideas. I plug in my iPad and use Quicktime with "New Movie recording" of the iPad screen so that it's displaying on my computer, which I can then screen share in Meet or Teams. I'm sure there are similar Android and Windows tablet options that will work too.

Pros:

An app designed for drawing is going to have some lovely features - especially ideal if you're going to polish the drawing later
If you already have a tablet, stylus and a drawing app you like, you don't need to buy anything new
Great for demonstrating or live-sketching individually

Cons:

This only works if only one person is sketching - it's not easy to collaborate, so can end up feeling one-sided
Requires sharing a screen shared from the tablet, which feels like an unnecessary step - why can't Meet just share an iPad screen?
Adding text isn't straightforward on a tablet without a keyboard

Use a phone or camera

Sometimes going analog just feels right, especially for early ideation. The easiest way I've found to share sketching on paper in real-time is to use my phone pointed down at the page, capturing what my hands are doing as they sketch.

My iPhone 13 mini supports continuity camera, which means it can act as a secondary camera in a video call without any extra software. If your phone doesn't support this or you're using a camera, you can use the Zoom hack or software like Quicktime to bring your camera's view up on your computer screen which you can then screen share.

Getting your phone or camera pointing directly down whilst still allowing you space to draw can be tricky. After trying various hacky solutions, I've stuck with a goose-neck style phone holder or a phone stand, which both allow me to position my phone so that the camera can easily capture an A4 page. If you're using a camera or have other use for it, splurging on a proper tripod with the extra arm for overhead shots might be worth the cost and setup effort.

Pros:

Gets those traditional pen-and-paper analog vibes
Captures your hands and materials, not just what you're drawing
Very seamless if you have continuity camera
No tablet or digital sketching experience required
Great for demonstrating or live-sketching individually

Cons:

Only works if only one person is sketching, or everyone has a similar setup
Some messing around if you don't have continuity camera
Extra equipment to hold the phone or camera in position

Use a white boarding tool

As a user experience designer, these days I spend more of my time in whiteboarding tools like Miro more than I do in drawing or UI design tools. When I'm working with others, often it's in Miro with all of us contributing.

The simplest way I've found to use these tools with a stylus is by using my tablet as a second screen. I can drag Miro over to that screen and use my stylus to draw, touch for gestures, and still use my keyboard and mouse when those make more sense, such as pasting in a screenshot or typing a comment. Others in the board can of course see what you're doing and also edit the board too in real-time. This should work with any white boarding tool such as Figjam or Jamboard.

I've also started to add illustrations to boards that I'm preparing before a meeting - adding them directly in Miro saves the hassle of having to export them from Procreate.

Pros:

Much easier to collaborate on a single canvas, even if other participants don't have a stylus
Easy to paste in screenshots or other reference material to draw on or add notes to
Easy to add in digital sticky notes, comments, and other whiteboarding things
Infinite canvas! Never run out of space!
Drawings are in vector format, so can be resized, recoloured and edited without quality loss

Cons:

Whiteboarding tools have more limited drawing features than a dedicated app
Depends on what whiteboarding tool you have access to - some work better than others for this
Sometimes laggy when sharing over a video call, which can be disorienting when working quickly
I've found Using an iPad as a second screen sometimes struggles a bit with the connection, which is a risk when presenting

To wrap up, remember that transitioning from traditional to digital sketching in remote work comes with its pros and cons. Take these insights as practical considerations rather than definitive solutions. Experiment with these ideas and adapt them to your team's needs. The digital canvas is yours to explore—happy sketching!

Remote Sketching - tools for UX designers

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

Back when I worked alongside my team in an office, we'd grab some paper or use a whiteboard to sketch ideas and designs together. It always stretched my brain and rarely looked pretty, but it was a useful method to get alignment quickly without getting bogged down in detail or technology.

These days I’m working from home and sketching together isn't as straightforward as it used to be. I've fallen out of the practice in favour of diagramming in white boarding tools or sketching on my own to share later. I still think there's value in real-time drawing alongside these methods, it just needs to be adapted for remote work.

If you've struggled with the practical aspects of taking visual collaboration digital like I have, here's three different methods I've been trying out.

Use a sketching app on a tablet

Pros:

An app designed for drawing is going to have some lovely features - especially ideal if you're going to polish the drawing later
If you already have a tablet, stylus and a drawing app you like, you don't need to buy anything new
Great for demonstrating or live-sketching individually

Cons:

This only works if only one person is sketching - it's not easy to collaborate, so can end up feeling one-sided
Requires sharing a screen shared from the tablet, which feels like an unnecessary step - why can't Meet just share an iPad screen?
Adding text isn't straightforward on a tablet without a keyboard

Use a phone or camera

Pros:

Gets those traditional pen-and-paper analog vibes
Captures your hands and materials, not just what you're drawing
Very seamless if you have continuity camera
No tablet or digital sketching experience required
Great for demonstrating or live-sketching individually

Cons:

Only works if only one person is sketching, or everyone has a similar setup
Some messing around if you don't have continuity camera
Extra equipment to hold the phone or camera in position

Use a white boarding tool on a tablet

The simplest way I've found to use these tools with a stylus is by using my tablet as a second screen. I can drag Miro over to that screen and use my stylus to draw, touch for gestures, and still use my keyboard and mouse when those make more sense, such as pasting in a screenshot or typing a comment. Others in the board can of course see what you're doing and also edit or draw on the board too in real-time. This should work with any white boarding tool such as Figjam or Jamboard.

I've also started to add illustrations to boards that I'm preparing before a meeting - adding them directly in Miro saves the hassle of having to export them from Procreate.

Pros:

Much easier to collaborate on a single canvas, even if other participants don't have a stylus
Easy to paste in screenshots or other reference material to draw on or add notes to
Easy to add in digital sticky notes, comments, and other whiteboarding things
Infinite canvas! Never run out of space!
Drawings are in vector format, so can be resized, recoloured and edited without quality loss

Cons:

Whiteboarding tools have more limited drawing features than a dedicated app
Depends on what whiteboarding tool you have access to - some work better than others for this
Sometimes laggy when sharing over a video call, which can be disorienting when working quickly
I've found Using an iPad as a second screen sometimes struggles a bit with the connection, which is a risk when presenting

Sometimes it makes more sense to sketch ideas separately, then come together to talk through them. Although this won't show drawings happening in real-time, it does give space for everyone to get a chance to draw and come up with ideas independently without any one person dominating the discussion.

To make this work digitally, participants can take a photo to email to a facilitator to share or post in a white boarding tool.

Pros:

No special equipment required, just pen and paper and a phone to take a photo
Everyone can participate and contribute
Great for individual ideation workshops like Crazy 8s

Cons:

Loses the momentum of talking through an idea visually as you develop it, as sketches aren’t shared in real time
Not everyone feels comfortable participating in this type of workshop where they have to draw

To wrap up, remember that sketching together won’t make sense for every meeting, and all of the ideas I’ve suggested have their strengths and weaknesses. Visual collaboration with sketching is just one more technique in your UX toolbox to use when the situation calls for thinking outside of the box. Happy sketching!

Reading things later

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

The internet feels like an unfriendly place to be a reader. With very few exceptions, even articles published by excellent writers and savvy designers have popups to agree to or sign up for something (at best), or awful banner ads, poor mobile layouts, and illegible typography (at worst). With my senses assaulted by distractions I find it really difficult to concentrate on whatever it is I came to the page for in the first place.

This is why for ages I've been a fan of RSS readers and read later apps. Yes I'm not getting the full experience of the page as the author (maybe?) intended it, but it's in a format that is friendly to me as the reader. I also find read later apps a great way to return to an article I read earlier without having to trawl through my browser history, and an easier to way to read longer form articles over multiple sessions. This makes a huge difference in getting myself to actually read them rather than bookmarking things in the hope that I'll "have time" later.

I used to use Omnivore app for saving articles and newsletters to read later, but it was bought out by another company and shut down 🥲 After much testing out of different options, I've landed with Instapaper. It isn't quite as good and made me appreciate just how fully featured Omnivore was, but it does the job and its longevity hopefully speaks to its continued future.

A peek at what my reading list looks like at the moment

Essential for me:

saving articles from a browser plugin or iOS share sheet
access on any device (iPhone, iPad, laptop, Kindle)
being able to choose a dark theme, font, size, line spacing and width
saving progress in partially read articles
highlighting (the free plan limit of 5 per month is a killer, I had to upgrade for unlimited)
being able to share the article link + highlights in Markdown format to my personal notes in Bear
having articles added automatically from an RSS feed (this is not available by default in Instapaper that I could find, so I have an IFTTT action doing this)

Anyway, you can find my profile here with a list of my liked articles (or the ones I remember to like at least).

Procrastination through process

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

I've found that I'm very good at procrastination under the guise of productivity. Usually this starts with wanting to do a relatively simple thing, and ends up with taking a deep dive into finding just the right tool or process to really optimise it. Going down this rabbit hole /feels/ productive, but often it's not really proportionate to the actual thing I want to do, and enables me to just put it off longer.

There are definitely times where having a front-loaded effort makes everything else easier down the track, which is what I've been telling myself as I put together this site. I am trying to rein myself in from spending too much time on what might become just another website that I never update, even if the process of updating it is as easy as I can make it.

Where is the sweet spot between investing just enough effort to make all future efforts easier, versus being too obsessed with the process to ever make a product? It's hard to say.

Anyway, the point I'm making is that this site looks a bit raw and I haven't quite got My Obsidian workflow publishing posts right, but since no one knows it exists I'm rolling with it anyway.

More About this site

Photographing artwork with a phone

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

I love traditional media, after years of creating mainly digital artwork. But I still like to be able to view and share my art on digital devices, which means that I need to scan or take photos.

There's a whole process around properly photographing traditional media art for reproduction, and a different skill to style the perfect flat-lay shot to post on social media. But neither of those are what I need. I want to document the process and the result, mostly for my own reference and also to share on this site. I have a nice little camera and a scanner for when I can be bothered bringing them out, but often I just want to take a quick and convenient snap in the moment. My phone, an iPhone 13 mini which is always with me, is a solid option.

But I'm always disappointed with the photos, especially of art. It seems to pick up on weird details, over-sharpen, ramp up contrast and saturation. Although I can choose some "photo styles" and do some editing, there doesn't seem to be a way to turn off this aggressive post-processing. I think it's worse for artwork because whatever algorithm it's using is probably made for photographing the real world, and a 2 dimensional image confuses it.

Using the Camera app - the pencil shading looks very unnatural to me here

Ages ago I paid for a 3rd party camera app called Halide, then mostly forgot about it. But this issue drove me to take another look, and they now have a mode called Process Zero which promises "zero AI and zero computational photography to produce natural, film-like photos". It saves a combined file including a JPEG and a Raw version for more processing. I'm finding the results much closer to the real thing.

Using the Halide app - this is much closer to how the sketch appears in real life

Halide isn’t cheap (AU$29 per year), and personally I’d be on the fence about subscribing to it if I didn’t already have access as an early supporter since I already have a dedicated camera. But if I didn’t have that camera, and even just for the convenience, it’s a pretty good way to get more out of a phone camera. The iPhone 13 mini’s camera is not even a particularly good one by modern standards—from what I’ve seen, if I had one of the newer models, I’d consider selling my camera and go all in with phone photography using a pro camera app like Halide.

Here’s a few more comparisons:

Left: Halide app, Right: Camera app. The default phone processing really emphasise the paper grain in a way I find distracting.

Left: Halide app, Right: Camera app. In low lighting, Halide with Process Zero shows a lot of grain, whereas the standard camera app tries to reduce noise and looks more smeary.

The main reason I stopped using Halide originally was because I kept forgetting it was there - the default camera app is so easy to open with a tap or a swipe from the Lock Screen. Opening up a third party camera app was extra effort I didn't want to bother with. But since iOS 18 the two actions in the bottom of the Lock Screen can be edited, and since the standard camera app is already accessible from the swipe action I can use one of them to trigger the Halide camera. Since I’ve added it to my Lock Screen I remember to use it much more, and make a decision of which camera app to use based on which is right for the situation rather than which is easier to get to.

At the end of the day a phone camera is going to be limited by its hardware, and no fancy third party camera app is going to make up for poor lighting or bad composition. But at least there are options out there for taking photos without all the over the top processing.

Optimise for curiousity, not productivity

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

The past few years (2019-2022) I've avoided setting goals - carrying, giving birth to and then caring for two children really doesn't leave a whole lot of energy for chasing big dreams, or at least not for me. I've been in survival mode, and very gentle with myself in terms of productivity. I gave myself permission to not worry about chipping away at big goals, but to instead follow my curiousity as my energy allows, without judgement of where I get to and whether I've reached any measure of success or value.

This has led me to believe that for me at least, setting big goals and optimising for productivity isn't the way to living a satisfying life. Maybe optimising for curiousity, especially in my very limited free time, is the approach that will give me the most energy and take me to the most interesting places.

I haven't figured out how to evolve this to be a little more intentional for 2023 now that I'm getting a full night of sleep regularly again (for now at least). I'll revisit this note as I figure things out.

Optimise for curiosity, not productivity

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

References

3-2-1: Discovering passion, the power of your mind, and how to do your best work - James Clear

It's easy to find ways to improve when you are genuinely curious about something. Rather than asking yourself, “How can I be better at this?” start by asking, “How can I be more curious about this?”

Busting the myths of the brain with neuroscientist Chantel Prat - WorkLife with Adam Grant | Podcast on Spotify

“When you feel curious, your brain is squirting out dopamine which helps it to learn and rewire in the the face of what happens next.”

Now

2025-11-02T00:00:00.000Z

Here's what I'm up to right now:

19 February 2026

Still messing around with the styling of this website. I spent a few gleeful hours exploring different styles of horizontal rules before settling on this squiggly line made up of Unicode characters.

Trying to prompt myself to create art by leaving my drawing board out and working on things in spurts throughout the day. Also trying to make sure I have mental energy left at the end of a work day to create. It’s all a work in progress.

Still playing my Nintendo 2DS, which it turns out the kids are less interested in than modern gaming consoles. I started with Animal Crossing: A New Leaf, and now onto Pokémon Platinum.

Still both fascinated and repulsed by AI. Still not convinced it’s a net positive for humanity.

December 2025

Doing some Digital Gardening maintenance - I have over a hundred random thoughts and quotes in my digital note taking system, which I'm trying to process into a more Evergreen notes form and better integrate into my existing collection of notes. I'm slowly starting to post a collection of these here on this site, although as they are personal notes they might not make much sense to anyone else!

In a fit of nostalgia I bought myself a "retro" handheld gaming device - a New Nintendo 2DS XL - at an exorbitant price probably driven by other nostalgic adults wanting to revisit some old beloved games. I'm picturing myself spending the lazy days between Christmas and New Years playing Pokémon and Professor Layton, but it's more likely the kids will take it off me.

November 2025

Still reading at lot, painting a little, mostly at life drawing. I bought a secondhand scooter (a push one, not electric) to ride with my kids and I’m still learning how to turn without falling off. Trying to save some of the best hours of the day for myself (I’m not greedy, I don’t need to keep all of them for myself). Enjoying the greenery in my courtyard now that I’ve established a few hardy, water-wise plants that haven’t died despite my neglect.

June 2025

Playing around with sewing and crocheting clothing - nothing fancy or particularly polished, but it’s satisfying being able to fill a need by just making it myself. Making my spaces cosy and well-lit for winter. Not writing much because I’m struggling to bring myself to look at a computer screen once the work day is done. Reading books. Painting a little.

This "Now" page was inspired by the /Now page movement , and also sanlive where I saw it first. I update it when I remember, which usually ends up being when I send a newsletter.

My planning, writing and sketching tools

2023-11-06T00:00:00.000Z

I've made an updated version of this: My planning, writing and sketching tools - 2025

The other day I was trying to explain the various tools I use for various purposes to a friend, and one thing became clear: I use a lot of different things. I like to tinker with productivity tools, and it's maybe complicating things more than necessary.

So here's what's in my stack currently:

Analog writing and sketching

I've switched from A5 notebooks to Pocket (just a little smaller than A6) size ones with soft covers and fewer pages to keep lightweight. At the moment I have my Pocket notebooks together inside a leather cover by Paper Republic, so altogether it feels like one book. Inside I have:

A plain notebook for personal projects, diagrams, sketchnotes, to-dos and thoughts. Currently using the Paper Republic plain refill in the Pocket size.
A loose folded sheet to log notable moments from the week, which I'm planning to bind together into a little book at the end of the year. It's just a loose sheet to avoid adding extra bulk and because it's a new thing I'm not sure I'll continue.
A notebook for Morning Pages. Currently using up my stash of Field Notes and Moleskine Cahiers, as I'm getting through a couple each month.
A sketchbook with smooth mixed media paper nice for sketching and painting. Currently using Paper Republic drawing book in the Pocket size.
A cream coloured Lamy Safari fountain pen with blue ink for writing (I also use various other art materials but this is the one always with the notebook)

I mostly use digital tools for work, but also have a Rhodia A5 notebook for work doodles, wireframes and mind maps.

Previously

I started Sketchbook 1 at the beginning of 2023 intending it to be notes, journalling and sketching. I finished it in June 2023 becoming almost entirely a sketchbook, and have used dedicated Sketchbooks since then.

Before this I was solidly Bullet Journalling in Leuchtturm1917 notebooks for years, but dropped right off after having kids and pretty much not having any spare time to plan for. I'm still following some Bullet Journal ideas but not rigidly or as any kind of planner.

Digital writing

Notion

Work notes, journal and to-dos. I don't go as hardcore with this as some - I have a page to house notes for each of my work projects, plus a page for each week's to-do list. At work we use Jira for task management, so the tasks I keep in my Notion are more granular.

Personal notes. Currently this includes an exercise log, and sourdough baking log, and a list of to-dos for this site.

Bear

Fleeting notes, reading notes, and evergreen notes. This is my zettlekasten, my personal digital garden of notes from things I've read, heard or thought about. Each note contains one idea and usually a bunch of references, linked densely with other notes.

Daily-ish notes. Bear makes it really easy to add highlighted content to notes, so I usually create a new daily note at the start of the day and chuck in quotes from articles that I read or podcasts that I listen to. Ideally these should be turned into evergreen notes on a regular basis, but it doesn't always happen. It feels good to have a place to put them though.

Obsidian

Website writing. I landed on Obsidian when looking for a cross-platform Markdown editor for writing blog posts on my iDevices - here's My Obsidian workflow.

Obsidian as a whole is powerful enough to replace Bear and Notion for me, but the UI and reliability of the iOS apps is just not quite there.

Digital sketching

iPad Pro 9.7 inch + Apple Pencil + Procreate. These are my tools of choice for digital painting, and I'm so used to Procreate that I've struggled to use anything else for sketching.

I feel like each tool has its own purpose, and does what it does well.

My planning, writing and sketching tools - 2025

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

Here's what's in my stack currently:

Analog writing and sketching

I'm still using my pocket (A6) sized Paper Republic leather cover - more on my notebook system here. Inside I have:

A plain notebook for personal projects, diagrams, sketchnotes, to-dos and thoughts. Currently using a plain Moleskine cahier notebook.
A homemade notebook for Morning Pages, using old dot grid Leuchturm notebook paper.
A sketchbook with smooth mixed media paper nice for sketching and painting. Currently using a homemade sketchbook.
A light blue coloured Kaweco Sport fountain pen with sepia ink for writing and drawing (I also use various other art materials but this is the one always with the notebook)

I mostly use digital tools for work, but also have a Rhodia A5 notebook for work doodles, wireframes and mind maps.

Digital writing

In 2025 I consolidated my various digital note taking tools to simplify a little, to allow for better cross linking, and play around with using locally run LLMs to "chat" with my notes. Obsidian is the tool I landed on, for its portability and extensibility (although these two things do conflict with each other a bit). The key thing for me is that it works across my devices, albeit not quite as smoothly as other options.

In Obsidian I have:

Work notes and to-dos. I don't go as hardcore with this as some - I have a page to house notes for each of my work projects, plus a page for each week's to-do list. At work we use Jira for task management, so the tasks I keep in my Obsidian vault are more granular.
Fleeting notes, reading notes, and evergreen notes. This is my zettlekasten, my personal digital garden of notes from things I've read, heard or thought about. Each evergreen note contains one idea and usually a bunch of references, (ideally) linked densely with other notes. The fleeting notes are mostly highlights from articles I've saved to Instapaper.
Website writing. I publish some of my notes online, including Art, Writing, Letters, and a smattering of my evergreen notes. Here's My Obsidian workflow for notes that I publish to teresawatts.com

Previously

I used to use Notion for work and personal notes, and Bear my reading notes, fleeting notes and evergreen notes. I do still really like those apps, but it's nice to have everything together in Obsidian.

Large Language Models (AI)

Strange that this one now has a place in my planning and writing stack. I still prefer to use AI as a co-intelligence as opposed to something I outsource writing to. I don't currently have any loyalty to a particular model other than using Gemini for work-related queries as we are given pro-level access to it. I don't usually have subscriptions to other LLM services unless I have something I particularly want to do with it; otherwise the free versions is enough to answer my needs.

Digital sketching

iPad Air + Apple Pencil + Procreate. These are my tools of choice for digital painting, and I'm so used to Procreate that I've struggled to use anything else for sketching.

My notebook system

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

At the moment I have my notebooks and sketchbook together inside a leather cover by Paper Republic, so altogether it feels like one book. It's a bit hard to explain the system, so here's a video I made!

Inside I have:

A plain notebook for personal projects, diagrams, sketchnotes, to-dos and thoughts. Currently using the Paper Republic plain refill in the Pocket size.
A loose folded sheet to log notable moments from the week, which I'm planning to bind together into a little book at the end of the year. It's just a loose sheet to avoid adding extra bulk and because it's a new thing I'm not sure I'll continue.
A notebook for Morning Pages. Currently using up my stash of Field Notes and Moleskine Cahiers, as I'm getting through a couple each month.
A sketchbook with smooth mixed media paper nice for sketching and painting. Currently using Paper Republic drawing book in the Pocket size.

My cosy working from home desk setup

2023-01-30T00:00:00.000Z

Since returning to work after having my youngest son, I've been working almost entirely remotely. There’s a lot of benefits to working from home (and a lot of privilege to be in such a position), but I’ve definitely had to rethink my work setup to make it work. During the lockdowns of 2020 I had a study to work from, but now that that room belongs to my youngest I've had to get a bit more creative!

I definitely need to be in a room with a door so I can hide from the kids, which only really left one option… our bedroom.

Not ideal, but I made it work. Sadly my standing desk was too big for the space, so I settled for a cheap narrow desk that just fits with enough space to comfortably walk around or sit a chair at (but not really both simultaneously). My monitor is also too big for the desk, and I find screens have too aggressive a vibe for a bedroom, so I’ve done without that too. These days when I need more screen space than my laptop screen allows, I use my iPad Pro as a second screen. I wasn’t sure how it would work, but it’s actually not bad.

I wasn’t sure if I’d want to keep the hutch sitting on top, but I’ve found it’s the perfect height for my laptop screen. I also found some bamboo trays that fit nicely in the space, which hold my keyboard, mouse, charger and stationery, keeping them hidden when I’m not in work mode.

Is it ideal to spend a full day working in the same room that I sleep and relax in? Not really. I’ve had work-related insomnia in the past, and staring at my work station whilst trying to go to sleep is not going to help. To try and avoid this, I pack away all of my work stuff when I’m not working, including my desk chair. In non-work mode, my desk is clean but cosy – I’m going for dressing table vibes, minus the mirror.

It takes some discipline to unpack everything at the start of the day and pack it all up at the end. I’ve made it as efficient as I can, and I’ve found it a useful ritual designating the beginning and the end of the work day, especially now that I don’t have a commute or even a different room to go to.

I’m really pleased with my little space and how well I’m able to work there. There’s something satisfying about having just enough space, but used wisely so it’s just right.

My Obsidian workflow

2023-11-06T00:00:00.000Z

I try to hold myself back from going too far down the rabbit hole of trying out too many different apps in search of the "perfect" one, to avoid Procrastination through process. But I had a few specific things I wanted for this website:

A markdown editor to write and edit notes
To be able to push what I've written live to my site
To be able to do these things on a laptop, iPad or even on my phone

The last point, being able to complete the whole process on a mobile device, is important to me because I try my best to not open my laptop once I've closed it at the end of my work day. As someone who works from home, in their bedroom, I need to have some separation between work and hobbies (some of which do somewhat resemble my work, which makes the distinction even harder).

My other cross-platform note-taking tools, Bear and Notion, aren't great at opening existing files and editing where it exists - they just create a new copy in their own system. VSCode is serving me well for any bits of coding I need to do, but there isn't an equivalent app for mobile devices.

The solution I've found is Obsidian, a note-taking app that's really built around a knowledge management system workflow and is also very extendable through community plugins. It's not quite as slick a writing experience as Bear, and not quite as powerful as Notion, but it does allow me to open my website files (stored in iCloud) as a "vault" of notes that I can edit and publish using a plugin.

A screenshot of this post in Obsidian. How meta!

Here's my workflow for adding a new notes at the moment:

Fire up Obsidian and start a new note, which I've set up to add to a Drafts folder.
Insert a template containing the standard frontmatter.
Write the thing, using Markdown, and insert any images. My Obsidian theme is set to roughly mimic my website, to get a feel for how it will look.
Open the Digital Garden Publication Centre in Obsidian and send it live, along with any index pages that might have been updated.
Check and make sure it looks okay!

Previously

I used a Jekyll Digital Garden theme with the Obsidian Github Publisher plugin to publish, but sadly the two were not completely compatible and now I'm much happier with this solution.

Even longer ago I used Wordpress for many years, until the cost of hosting and truly awful mobile editing experience drove me to static site generated sites.

Morning Pages

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

!illustration of a woman sitting in a chair writing in a notebook
Each day, I make some time to write three pages of stream of consciousness thoughts, by hand, in a little pocket notebook. It's rarely anything good or profound, most of the time it's barely legible or coherent at all. There's a lot of waffling about who in my family is sick at the moment, stationery, imposter feelings, "I should..." and "I want...". For me they are morning pages in the same sense as morning sickness, which is to say that it's often not in the morning at all.

This daily practice has been popularised by Julia Cameron in her book The Artist's Way, which I intensely disliked reading but did admittedly get a lot out of. Technically the Morning Pages is one tool to be used across the 12 week program, which I have read but not done, but it seems to be one that has had much further reach outside readers of the book.

I find that often I have thoughts that bounce around in my head uselessly, taking up space and creating a buzz of low key distraction. Writing them down sometimes helps me feel somewhat resolved, like it’s made it more real to be out in the physical world, even if I’m the only one to see it.

I’ve tried Morning Pages a few times before, with varying degrees of success. Here are a few things that I think are helping me stay the course (so far) this time:

A small notebook (currently a Field Notes). I didn’t see any specifics of what size the 3 pages should be, so I’m rolling with pocket sized.
An enjoyable writing experience. My previous failed attempts were with random pens on random paper, but I’ve had more success using a nice fountain pen (currently a Lamy Safari) in a notebook with nice paper which seems to add more ceremony to the whole thing and is just a pleasure to use.
Remembering that done is better than perfect. Sometimes I only get through 2 pages for the day, sometimes I manage 3 pages only over a few sittings. I’m sure I’ll have to miss days entirely. Like any habit, I’ll keep trying.
Not worrying about niceties like handwriting, spelling, paragraphs or even coherent thoughts. This is supposed to be stream of consciousness writing, so it’s natural that it will bounce all over the place and there is no reason to edit it.

It's still early days for me at this time of writing, but so far I'm feeling the value in this practice even if I'm not doing it 100% as intended.

Little automations for a calmer week

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

Lately I've been trying to notice when small, recurring things annoy me and see if I can improve them or avoid them entirely. Usually these things are small enough that the effort required to address them is disproportionately large, but now with Large Language Models available there's suddenly a lot more possible.

Here are a couple of scripts I've written to help me have a calmer week, where AI did most of the actual coding. These all use Google Apps Script as we use Google Workplace at my work.

Weekly meetings summary

At the end of each week I like to loosely plan out the following week of work. A week feels like a long time, and I often conveniently forget that I work alternating Wednesdays and often have hours of meetings each day, which results in my having a far too ambitious list of things to do.

To help me remember this, every Thursday (the end of my work week), I would go through my calendar for the next week and write into my notes what meetings I had on and for how long, mentally totalling up the number each day. This is exactly the kind of useful but tedious and repetitive task that I like to try and outsource to automation where I can.

Now I have a script that looks through my calendar for the next week, puts it into an email in list form, and totals up the number of hours I'll be spending in meetings for each day and for the whole week. It also shows when I have a non-working day, so I don't accidentally plan anything for it.

Creating this script was more difficult than I originally thought, especially using a free version of ChatGPT. Some things I had to account for:

Determining non-working days and days off - whole day calendar entries that I wanted to just appear as "non-working day" in my weekly summary.
My "focus time" blocks and other calendar events that only include myself, which I didn't want to appear in my summary.
Meetings I was invited to but have not yet accepted, which I did want to include.
Meetings I was invited to and declined, which I wanted to exclude.
Meetings that I didn't accept or decline because I was the organiser
Displaying the results in a usable format in the console, for debugging (there was a lot of debugging)
Automatically formatting the results into an email and making it send when the script is run manually.
Automatically sending the email every Thursday.

Following ChatGPT's instructions, I pasted the code into Google Apps Script, making sure that the script output any results into the console before trying to get it to send me an email. This was the fastest way to spot bugs - and there were many! - which I could then feedback into ChatGPT or try to debug myself. I can mostly read Javascript but would not have known where to begin in writing something like this from scratch, simple as it is.

I've formatted the email that it sends me to be able to be pasted nicely into Obsidian, where all my digital notes live. I could probably take it a step further and automate the generation of this file somehow too, but I don't mind the ritual of pasting it in and planning for my next work week. I think it's valuable to know when to stop, when pushing even further isn't adding any extra value or is even automating away something where the value lies in taking the time to do the thing yourself.

Sprintly meetings summary

The Products team at my company works in 3 week sprints, beginning on a Wednesday and ending on a Tuesday. I had a similar issue with overcommitting to work in a sprint where I had more than the usual number of non-working days or meetings. So with some more LLM help, I created a spin on the weekly meetings summary script that instead looks at the 3 week sprint, summarises the number of hours in meetings at a weekly level, and also lets me know how many working and non-working days I have.

This was much easier building off of the previous one, the only tricky part being figuring out the start and end dates of the sprint, and accurately counting the meetings in those days, especially with the change happening mid-week. Since we have recurring meetings for end of sprint review, I was able to make the script look for a particular meeting name and create the summary email based on the time between two upcoming occurrences. This then emails to me the day before end of sprint.

This sort of thing isn't ground-breaking, and isn't what generally comes up when I search for how generative AI tools and workflows can help UX designers. The final result isn't an AI agent, just a little bit of code that does one thing. But they're small, personalised scripts that do exactly what I need and nothing more, that I wouldn't have bothered to try and build if I didn't have LLMs writing the code for me. These little automations make a tedious but important task a little easier, to free my time up to spend on the good stuff.

Letters

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

Letters from me to you, delivered to your email inbox very infrequently. Some rambling thoughts, things I’ve made, interesting links etc.

Old letters

Letters 16: (Lunar) New Year resolutions
Letters 15: What is “real” art anyway
Letters 14: I’m wise now, apparently
Letters 13: Reading less, but better
Letters 12: Choosing from the pile of unread books
Letters 11: Book surgery and non-linear progress
Letters 10: Elasticated waistband lifestyle
letters 9: Trust your gut
letters 8: End of the year and 100 heads
letters 7: Back to making big plans
letters 6: Finishing a sketchbook
letters 5: Making the most of right now
letters 4: Bendy like a tent pole
letters 3: Am I doing self-care right?
letters 2: Identity, using what you've got and the never-ending to-read pile
letters 1: Writing letters, drawing mangoes & attempting to craft a harmonious life

Home

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

Hi there!

I’m a UX designer & artist, who sometimes writes, makes art, sketches and other fun things. You might be interested in what I'm up to Now.

Fountain pens

2024-03-22T00:00:00.000Z

I bought my first fountain pen in 2017 after getting a new job. It wasn’t immediate love, in fact after playing around with it for a bit it sat sadly unused for the next few years. I was a big fan of gel pens and brush pens for journaling, and as a calligrapher I was disappointed with the lack of flex in the steel nib. I liked the idea of fountain pens, but didn’t have a great use for it.

More recently, I’ve given fountain pens another go - this time for sketching as well as writing. Now I can appreciate the smooth writing experience, the balance of the beautiful pen that isn’t destined for landfill when the ink runs out, and the myriad of ink options. I flushed out that first pen I bought and set it up with permanent ink I can use in watercolour paintings. Now my fountain pens are my go-to for writing and sketching.

I don’t intend to become a serious collector and my budget is on the lower end, but here’s what I have:

Pens

Lamy Joy in matte black, Extra Fine nib. My first fountain pen!
Lamy Safari in cream, Fine nib. This is currently my main writing pen.
Kaweco Sport in mellow blue, Fine nib.
Sailor Fude de Mannen 55 degree in green, my current favourite pen for sketching.

Inks

Platinum pigment ink in blue. My main for writing.
De Atramentis Document Ink in urban sienna. I use this for most of my drawing line work these days.
De Atramentis Document Ink in black
A sample of De Atramentis Document Ink in magenta

This is a potentially expensive rabbit hole to go down, so for now I intend to stick mainly to 3 pens, one each for blue, sepia and black ink. If I want to get more colours I might need a “fun colours” pen…

End of year journaling

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

The past several years I've spent a bit of time in that odd window between Christmas and New Year's Day doing some reflecting and journaling. For years I used the Year Compass prompts in my yearly Bullet Journal, but at some point I decided it wasn't quite capturing what I wanted.

Last year I came up with my own, simpler prompts, which look like this:

Things that happened this year - going through photos, calendars, writing to pull out some key moments
Things I'm proud of
Things that gave me energy
Things to leave behind in the year that passed
Things to do more of in the year to come

Since I no longer have one notebook for the year (here's my current notebook system), I'm planning to try out writing on loose pages with the plan to bind them together as a little snapshot of my year. It's very satisfying to use up empty pages from my old notebooks! Since this DIY booklet will be bound after writing and not taken around with me, I don't have to worry so much about it being robust or easy to lay flat to work in. I've done a test run using a simple Japanese 4 hole book binding technique.

I've pretty much stopped New Years Resolutions or settings goals for the year - I find that I'm terrible at estimating what I can achieve in 12 months and guessing at what my priorities will look like so far from today. I'll just continue Optimise for curiosity, not productivity and see where the year takes me.

Do one thing at a time

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

Avoiding multitasking is unrealistic, but maybe we can Multitask better?

References

Go on, admit it. You’re multitasking. Here’s how to do it better | Psyche Ideas

Despite perceptions that multitasking is efficient, studies generally show that doing one task at a time is more efficient (based on the time and accuracy) than doing two tasks at the same time. That’s because the human brain is limited in terms of how much information it can process at a given time.

#productivity

ChiGarden

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

You might have been looking for ChiGarden, which was my blog for fifteen years. I've decided to close that chapter and start afresh over here. Some of my old content might someday make its way across, but quite likely I'll never get around to it.

Sorry you weren't able to find what you were looking for! If you'd like to stick around, you might like to Start here.

Books

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

In progress

Agile Experience Design (2012), Lindsay Radcliffe and Marc McNeill

Completed

Category	Title	Image (Local)	Summary	Date Posted
Books	Cézanne (2010), Parkstone International	!Pasted image 20260311212605.png	A short and accessible book about unappreciated-in-his-time 19th century artist Paul Cézanne. I'm not terribly familiar with art history and it was nice to get this taster in an easy to understand way, whilst still introducing me to ways of discussing art that I don't currently have the language for.	7 March 2026
Books	Atmosphere, Taylor Jenkins Reid (book club)	!Pasted image 20260224210702.png	Set in the 1980s, a cohort of astronauts in training includes some of the first women to go into space. Also there's a love story. Does it all work together? Sort-of. But not my favourite.	24 February 2026
Books	Dark Emu (2014), Bruce Pascoe	!Pasted image 20260311211725.png	Aboriginal people in pre-colonial times engaged in grew and stored crops, made complex fish traps, sometimes lived in villages with large buildings, and cultivated the land in a way that allowed them to thrive in some of the most difficult places to live. I don't think I was ever taught this in history.	24 February 2026
Books	The Word for World is Forest, Ursula K. Le Guin	!Pasted image 20260220210634.png	Humans from Earth, having stripped the planet of its natural resources, have come to colonise and cut down forests of another planet, Athshe. The native people of the planet are considered primitive and inferior, and are horribly exploited, enslaved and brutalised to the point that they're forced to abandon their peaceful nature and retaliate.	16 January 2026

Books I've read in 2025
Books I've read in 2024
Books I've read in 2023
Books I've read in 2022

Art

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

Some things I've made, sketched or painted. I like to dabble in different media so expect a lot of variety! You might also like to see my sketchbooks..

Category	Title	Image (Local)
Art	Workshop with Sue Hibbert	!IMG_8824.jpeg
Art	Self portrait in gouache	!self portrait - 1.jpeg
Art	Even more life drawing in watercolour	!IMG_7514-e9068564.jpeg
Art	Painting botanicals with Anya Brock	!IMG_7601-f2dcb9fb.jpeg
Art	Peachtober digital sketches	!IMG_0366.jpeg
Art	Life drawing the male figure	!IMG_4498-5bbf1280.jpeg
Art	Charcoal portrait	!IMG_3782-5c80235a.jpeg
Art	Portrait - Sabrina	!steph-art-sessions 3-0cf7a37d.jpeg
Art	Life drawing in Charcoal	!life drawing 20-f319b092.jpeg
Art	Playing with soft pastels	!IMG_3473.jpeg

About

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

I'm an artist and designer interested in exploring how technology can help rather than harm, thinking through writing, and the power of observation expressed through traditional art media.

I have over 20 years of experience working on digital products, websites, apps and brands, and am currently a Lead UX Designer at Moodle HQ.

Art has been part of my life pretty much forever in one form or another, and my drawing skills and creative approach inform my UX design work through sketchnotes, little illustrations and workshops.

From 2026 I’ll have a little availability for interesting projects outside of my usual work and art. If you have something super exciting in mind, [email protected]" target="_blank" class="external-link">let’s chat!

Some cool things I’ve done:

Run an in-person workshop with more than 40 participants at the Moodle Moot Australia 2025 conference. It’s been some time since I’ve done something like that IRL and it has a completely different vibe to completely remote workshops done digitally.
Run another in-person workshop at the UX Camp Perth 2025 unconference, teaching participants how to “see like an artist”, observe more deeply, and draw portraits.
Working with the other Experience Design Leads at Moodle, I designed a fair and creative recruitment process for new positions in our team. Can a job interview with design tasks be a great experience? Yes! I managed the hiring process and interviews for 3 UX design roles, all three fantastic additions to the team.
Reskinned the user account management interface for MoodleCloud to fit with the current brand, improve accessibility and provide a seamless experience going from the website, to signup, to managing your account. I got myself knee-deep in Google Analytics, writing front-end code and trying to understand Git. I’ll probably stay in my lane more next time, but I’m as proud of having my code in production as I am of the vast improvement in how it looks (and sounds if you’re using a screen reader!)
Reinvented our Experience Design team sharing/critique sessions for higher engagement, better quality feedback, and all-round good team culture vibes.
Painted a huge mural on the wall of an ice-cream shop. It was a long time ago and it’s gone now, but I will hold onto that experience forever.

You might also be interested to read more About this site.

About this site

2026-01-17T00:00:00.000Z

This site is a little experiment into writing, Indie web and digital gardening. I used to make big splashy websites but this time I wanted to make it as simple and lean a writing and reading experience as possible.

Most of my digital garden is not published to the web at this point - I'm working on it.

Just the facts

The content of this site is written in Obsidian and uses the Obsidian Digital Garden plugin to publish to Github + Netlify (I have only a vague understanding of how that part works). Fonts are Newsreader + Avenir (if you have it installed, Helvetica or Arial if you don't). Here's a bit about My Obsidian workflow.

A better way to read email newsletters

2026-03-11T13:29:00Z

Edit: since Omnivore shut down, I've switched to Instapaper. I have to pay for the premium subscription and use some workarounds to get the same functionality, but hopefully it'll stick around.

With many writers now using email newsletters to publish, I’ve been finding myself spending more and more time reading long and interesting content in Mail rather than a browser. This has a few drawbacks for me:

I like to include a link to the original source when I save highlights to my notes in Bear, and this requires hunting around for a link to a web version in the email.
I receive a variety of emails to my personal address, so there’s a mishmash of long form newsletters, utility statements, school reminders, spam, and actual correspondence. It’s a distracting environment not ideal for settling in for long read.
After deleting social media apps from my phone, Mail and Pocket became my main apps for “entertainment”. With this odd bunch of emails, Mail weirdly became the closest proxy I have to social media on my phone, and was therefore what I turned to most often for that varied reward dopamine hit. Articles in Pocket that take time to read don’t stand a chance. I want to make Mail boring again!
My unread or partially read newsletters sit there stewing with my other to-action emails, sometimes for ages.
Sometimes I’ll read a newsletter in small in between moments over many days. Since email doesn’t save my place, I have to reorient myself each time.

So I wanted to keep these emails, which are more like articles or blog posts really, with other long articles that I save. I was doing this manually, but I wanted to skip the step of them coming into my email inbox entirely. I couldn’t figure out how to make this happen in Pocket, so shifted to open source alternative Omnivore. Here’s how my setup looks now:

Huge improvement in reading experience compared to Mail

Where available, I’ll use an RSS feed to subscribe. For Substack newsletters, you can find this by going to the writer’s page and adding “/feed” to the end of the URL.
If I can’t find an RSS feed, I can create a special email address to use to subscribe and have any newsletters delivered to Omnivore instead of my personal email.
If I find something whilst browsing, I use the iOS share sheet or the Omnivore browser extension on my laptop to save them. I try to save anything I spend a little time reading to Omnivore, both to keep track of what I read and for a reading experience without the ads, popups and bad typography that are standard on websites these days.
I have a couple of blog RSS feeds I’ve moved over to Omnivore too, so I don’t need a dedicated RSS reader.
Omnivore has the ability to select highlights, take notes, and share them including a link to the original, which I send to Bear where I keep all my personal notes.
I took the opportunity to wipe the slate clean and leave all my unread articles behind in Pocket rather than port them over.

Since making the shift I’ve found that my email app is much quieter and less a place that I turn to for quick amusement. I’m reading in Omnivore far more often than I did in Pocket, although that could be new-shiny-thing syndrome. I’m yet to face the pile of long and serious articles stacking up as I had with Pocket, but I’m reminding myself to treat my to-read list like a river and not fool myself that I can read it all. I’m also saving a lot more highlights from what I read to my notes, because there’s slightly less friction there. And there are so many fascinating and exciting things I read that I want to capture and hold onto and expand on.