{ "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1.1", "title": "Maggie Watson Studio - Weekly Updates", "language": "en", "home_page_url": "https://www.maggiewatsonstudio.com/blog/", "feed_url": "https://www.maggiewatsonstudio.com/blog/blog/weekly.json", "description": "Hello! I'm Maggie, and this is my blog where I'll be talking about what I make each week.", "authors": [ { "name": "Maggie Watson" } ], "items": [ { "id": "tag:maggiewatsonstudio.com,2026-09-26:/blog#121BE032-F9DE-40A9-A5F3-A035BA237266", "url": "https://www.maggiewatsonstudio.com/blog/starting-something-new/", "title": "Starting something new!", "content_html": "

This week: Zines, a little bit of play, and the creative experiment that is this newsletter!

\"Marker

Hello and welcome to the first edition of my newsletter! I want to say thank you to all of you who are here at the very beginning. It means a lot to know that you want to see my art in your inbox every week. I'm glad you're here!

This is an experiment, with two main goals: To give some structure to my art practice, and to get more comfortable sharing my work. You are all now my accountability buddies, and I'm committing to showing you what I make every week, which is a commitment to make some things to show you every week! And I'm also committing to showing you (just about) everything—works in progress, sketches, messy work that will never see the light of Instagram.

We'll see how it goes! I'm figuring things out as I go (including whether I should be calling this a blog or a newsletter, lol). There may be changes to the structure or the schedule, but for now my plan is that every Saturday I'll tell you about three things: What I made this week, what I'm thinking about, and what's next.

Without further ado:

What I made this week

First of all, this newsletter! I've been working on the setup slowly for a couple months, with the help of my dad, who has done all of the software setup for me with a mix of open-source tools and stuff he coded himself. (He's very cool. Thank you dad!) It's been a lot of decisions and random introductory things to write and then writing the emails / instagram post that you all saw that invited you to sign up. And now it finally exists!

My other big projects at the moment are a couple of zines. Neither of them has emerged into the physical world yet, but I've been working on designing/drawing them and I'm hoping to have some copies printed in time for A2CAF next weekend (more on that later.)

One is an informational zine about the Creative Commons. I have a list of "more people should know this, I like explaining it, I should make a zine about it" topics and this one got bumped to the top by a friend responding positively to an offhand comment I made about the idea. The core of the zine is an explanation of the different abbreviations for Creative Commons licenses:

\"A

This will be done as soon as I stop being picky over the wording (this is technically a legal topic, I don't want to be misleading!) and I'll share the print file for free under a CC license! I'll try to put it in next week's email.

The other zine I'm working on is titled "this time we sent poets." It's a zine about the Artemis II mission last spring, which I followed very closely and had a lot of emotions about.

\"Zine

The title comes from a quote from Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders about his experience flying around the moon: “We should have sent poets… because we did not have the language to express the grandeur of what we had seen and felt.” Anders is also the astronaut who took the famous and beautiful Earthrise photo.

\"Earthrise

Watching the live broadcast of Artemis II as it launched, took a 10 day trip around the moon, and returned to Earth, I heard plenty of beautiful words from the crew about what they saw and felt. I couldn't help but think that Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen were the perfect people to send to communicate this experience to the rest of us on earth.

\"Photo

I'm using images from NASA (the fact that almost everything NASA produces is in the public domain is an enormous boon to me as an artist) and writing some of my favorite quotes from the mission over them in procreate. I started off with more normal straight lines of text but I've switched to trying to use the space creatively and make it feel more doodle-y. I'm going trying to capture the "moonjoy," as someone in Mission Control named it.

Last but not least, I made a few little marker & pen drawings. I've been making a lot of work like this in my sketchbook recently.

\"Marker

I started mostly to play around with some new pens and test them out in combination with acrylic markers, which have been my favorite traditional medium lately.

\"Marker

I don't really like any of the ones I made this week, but that's alright. It's hard for me to find ways of making art that I can do freely without worrying about the final product, and I'm proud of finding this process that works for me, even when I'm not particularly proud of the drawings.

\"Marker

What I'm thinking about

Lots to do in the next week! I'm a little stressed and I need to remember that in weeks like this, "rest and take care of myself" needs to also be an item on the to do list.

The fall equinox was this week, and sunset is getting earlier and earlier. I've been trying to get outside in the afternoon / early evening when I can, to soak up the sunlight before it's gone. I was feeling exhausted and stressed on Thursday, but made myself get up and take a walk to the nearby pond and saw a heron, who was glorious and made it all worth it. My phone camera absolutely could not do it justice but here it is anyway so you can appreciate it, even as a blurry little white mark on the water:

\"Blurry

I'm hoping the terrible photos and my memory of it will be enough to draw it, so I can try to hold on to the memory of how much it brightened a hard day. I took some other photos on my walk, too, which may become references for my next round of little sketchbook drawings. Getting out in the world and noticing things is part of my artistic practice, too, something I should remember and do on purpose more often!

What's next

Exciting news: Next Saturday I'll have a table in the artist market at the Ann Arbor Comics Festival (A2CAF)! This will be my first time tabling at A2CAF and definitely the biggest art fair I've tabled at ever, so I'm excited! It's the Small & Indie Press event so there will be lots of people with zines, small independent comics, etc. If you're a zine person, bring some zines—I and likely a lot of the other vendors will be open to trades!

I'll have copies of my sci-fi comic Time to Destination about a spaceship befriending a human mechanic, lots of zines (including hopefully both of the ones in this newsletter), and small prints of a few of my recent marker illustrations. If you're free and in Ann Arbor on Saturday, October 3rd, between 11am - 5pm, stop by the Downtown Library and say hi!

I'll be busy in the next week preparing, so next week's entry may be a short one, but it'll be scheduled to go out on Saturday. See you then!

Until next week,

Maggie

", "date_published": "2026-09-26T00:00:00Z" } ] }