Three down, twenty-seven to go

This week: The start of my October challenge & A2CAF reflections.

Maggie sitting at her table at A2CAF, smiling. On the table is a tiered stand with lots of her zines and a separate stack of copies of her Time to Destination comic.

Thank you to everyone who stopped by my table at A2CAF! I had a wonderful time and my comic & zines got lots of love :) I'm searching for more words about it but mostly just coming up with lots of positive adjectives. I'll talk later about the lovely vendors I met and traded art with.

My happy feelings about A2CAF were tempered only slightly by the fact that I came down with a cold literally on the drive home. It's been a restful week of recovering from illness & recent general busyness, but I still found energy for some art!

What I made this week

Maggie's hand holding a stack of small blank pieces of paper, spread out like a deck of cards.

I've settled on my personal art goal for October: 30 small artworks by the end of the month, with any medium and subject matter I feel like. I cut out all my little 2.5 x 3.5" rectangles of paper and the stack of them feels full of potential. This week I made the first three!

A small artwork in abstract blues, teals and purples. It's full of overlapping textures, speckles and waves, with a sort of underwater look.

First steps are hard and I thought it might be easier to start with something abstract, so I couldn't hold myself to accuracy. There's an abstract color exercise I did in college with gouache paint that I really enjoyed, and I thought I'd try to recreate it with a mix of alcohol and acrylic markers. Turns out it works much better with gouache...the textures I can make with a brush-tip marker and blending only on the page are a lot more limited. I also completely forgot until afterward that part of the exercise was working with a pre-determined color palette of something in nature, and I think improvising the colors instead of choosing the constraint of a palette beforehand made this messier.

As a result, this piece had a very prolonged ugly middle stage where I overworked it into muddiness. Here's what it looked like a few steps before I decided it was done:

The abstract blue and green piece, with more muddy colors and less distinction between the different layers.

I think I rescued it but there's certainly room for improvement. I may try this again with a better color palette and/or with actual gouache.

A small artwork with a simple representation of a red abstract scultpure made up of intersecting lines and curves. The background has the shapes of clouds and the ground filled in with simple parallel hatching in blue and green.

My second ATC is drawn from a reference photo of Orion, the large public sculpture by Mark di Suvero that stands in front of the University of Michigan Museum of Art. It's perhaps my favorite piece of public art on the campus, in large part because its shape evokes the constellation Orion, which is also my favorite (easy to spot and always visible from my childhood bedroom window in the winter).

I'd like to get more comfortable working in pen with techniques like hatching. There's a precision and simplicity to them that I really like, but it's a difficult skill to develop when my two modes are "obsessing over every detail to the point of unnecessary stress" or "loosen up and do everything fast and messy." As a small-scale experiment with really basic parallel hatching this turned out okay, although I wish I'd used fewer colors to really let the red be the main character.

A small marker drawing of an open tulip, looking into the center of the flower. The edges of the petals are bright yellow, with warm orange and red in the centers. The background is green and textured like grass.

I've been experimenting a lot with the sliding scale of realism vs stylization when it comes to acrylic markers. You can technically blend these but I prefer to avoid relying on that, so I have a limited number of mostly-solid colors to work with. It's an interesting challenge to figure out how to adapt the colors and lighting conditions of a photo to a really limited palette.

This one was drawn from a photo of a tulip, to see if I could get the distinction between the inside and outside of the petals to look right. It also had a very blobby middle stage, but increasing the contrast with some stronger highlights and adding the dark background helped it come into focus.

The tulip drawing in process, with the background still white and slightly less detail in the petals. The lack of contrast makes the shape less distinct.

I'm very happy with these so far. The small scale helps them feel like experiments—easy to see to completion and also easy to make another attempt if I want to try something different. I think I might try more versions of all of these approaches as the month goes on. Right now I'm still having fun with experimentation and variety.

What I'm thinking about

Allow me to show off my A2CAF spoils and talk a little about the lovely artists I met there!

A spread of comics, zines, and other A2CAF acquisitions.

I didn't have much chance to walk around and shop, as I usually do at A2CAF. But I still came away with a wonderful stack of comics and zines, largely from trades with my fellow vendors! Trading is very big in the zine scene, and I love that that extended to A2CAF: Small & Indie Press, which does have a lot of zinesters but also more traditional comic artists who I wasn't sure would want to trade. I was happy to find that it was very much a part of the culture among vendors!

My half table was shared with Jon Iñaki, a cartoonist from Toronto, from whom I received "Brainerd St. Cloud," a beautiful little riso zine about seeing lightning out the window of an airplane, and "Bat Shit," a visual essay zine about the manga Billy Bat. On the other side of me was Patrick Dunn, who traded me his horror comic "followed" when I asked him to recommend his favorite work.

Other close neighbors to my table were Chandu and Timi Tennety, who I made sure to introduce myself to due to the wild coincidence that my brother had met them days before in Ohio because they are the parents of one of his college friends! They were incredibly friendly, and Chandu kindly gifted me a Hadestown print when we found out we were both fans of the musical.

Two former classmates of mine from Stamps were also tabling, so of course I made sure to stop by their tables. I got volume one of Bella Spagnuolo's comic "fangs," and from Audrey of crablegscomics I traded for an anti-data center poster and a very clever zine titled "The Fallacy of Inevitability: Why AI is not inevitable, as told by a tomato that gets thrown by a punk at a data center town hall."

Last year at A2CAF I spoke to Abby Haywood and her mom Jennifer, both of whom gave me advice that was very helpful as a college senior looking ahead to my professional art journey. I was excited to see them again at this year's A2CAF and tell them I was tabling this time! I traded for a couple of Abby's excellent stickers and Jennifer's zine "What to Expect When Your Spider Plant is Expecting."

I also met fellow vendor Grace Abe, who traded me her poetic and meditative zine "Roving" and a zine of silly little comic strips.

A couple non-vendors stopped by with things to trade as well! The first was Bane, who traded me his very clever & funny comic zine "Robin to the Wild." The other was Angie Berkley, who runs Zines & Beans, a little free zine library / food pantry in Ann Arbor! From her I got a zine about Zines & Beans and several other mini-zines (all of the Long Furby ones in the photo). (I must shout out that Zines & Beans has a PO box and you should send them zines!)

I also got to say hi to AADL's adorable groundhog mascot, Akako G. Shins. If your local library doesn't have a mascot, you're missing out.

Akako G. Shins, the AADL mascot, standing in front of Maggie's table in the library and making a peace sign. Akako is a very round and fluffy groundhog mascot with glasses, a hat, a puffy vest and an AADL staff lanyard.

I had many other lovely visitors, including old friends, fellow Stamps students, and new faces. Special shoutout to the space nerds who immediately honed in on my Artemis II zine, the fellow Maggie who I went to middle school with, and my 5th/6th grade teacher, who saw my newsletter invitation and surprised me (hi Leslie!). Overall I felt like I and my art were appreciated, sought out and remembered, which was a truly lovely feeling :) I'm grateful for the chance to table at one of my favorite local events & I hope I'll be back next year!

What's next

27 mini artworks to go! Once I get over my illness and the leftover post-A2CAF organization work I should be able to lock in and make a bigger dent in the challenge.

I'd like to break out some different art mediums I haven't used in a bit, like watercolor and gouache. I'm also interested in more mixed media experiments. We'll see where my whims take me!

Until next week, Maggie