The Habit of Art by Kelcey Ervick

I highly recommend drawing your delights. (Or writing or photographing or singing them.) The next zoom hangout is this Saturday Sept 5 at 11am ET. Maybe you’d like to draw a delight to share! Registration link can be found at my paid subscribers info page. I’ve got some events coming up in September (how is it almost September?): Saturday, Sept 19, 2026 in Indianapolis: The Indiana Writers Center’s Gathering of Writers Writing Conferenceat the Indiana State Library, 9am-4:30pm.

At my last zoom hangout with paid subscribers, I asked the group which creative seasons they were in. Here are a few of their lovely and relatable responses: Crop rotation season Transition season What’s next season Slump season Get everything done season Go-Go-Go season There’s power in naming these seasons. And in remembering that, for better or worse, they aren’t permanent. The whole point of a season is that it will END—and that it will also RETURN.

Fun news: I recently heard from my editor that my graphic memoir The Keeper is going into a second printing—1000 more copies! That means the current ones available are “First Editions,” which sounds fancy. Paid subscribers: I miss you! I’m sorry we didn’t have our monthly zoom hangout in July. Let’s meet next Saturday, August 1 at 11am ET. Link here. Cheers to the side quests! Thanks for reading The Habit of Art by Kelcey Ervick, a Substack Featured Publication (twice!).

I’m thinking less about the psychology of rejection (it sucks, we get it!) than about the strategy of submissions. And it might be worth making some quick notes about QUANTITY, QUALITY, and COURAGE in shooting your shots. Whether you want to score in the World Cup or apply for grants and fellowships, you have to shoot a lot of shots. I applied for 5 grants/awards and got 3 of them.

In conclusion! I’m continuing with my New Year’s Imperative to Think Small, which will include 10-minute daily drawings, but I’m doing a general reset: 1. Cleaning my studio/office. 2. Instead of thinking I have to decide HOW to tell the story, I’m going to do a bunch of “tiny experiments” (I have the book but haven’t read it yet) to see where it leads. 3. I’ll focus on going deeper into WHAT story I’m telling and WHY. 4. More friends and family.

The next day: I’ve been writing this while still experiencing the trip, so I’m not sure that I even scratched the surface of why it felt so transformative. One thing that strikes me is that when the idea was floated on a zoom call a while a back—let’s all meet up in Maine together—we all just said YES. I kept thinking it would fall through, but it didn’t. And I’m so glad The other thing—and this could/should/may eventually be its own post—is that we are all self-identified Type-A artists.

The answer: make nature comics! Hello dear reader: I find the idea of nature journaling pretty intimidating. Nature journals tend to be filled with beautifully and accurately drawn flowers and bird species—often accompanied by elegantly lettered dates, locations, latinate terminology, serious scientific information, and deep thoughts. So when I was invited to give a workshop on “nature notebooks” for a local park district a while back, I was excited but I was also concerned.

Dear Reader, My friend K. Woodman-Maynard is doing a great series on her Substack, Creating Comics, about her practice of making diary comics (I’ll link to it at the end), and it got me thinking about my own occasional practice and how I’d like to do it more intentionally this summer.

After each class session, I took a picture of my students’ drawings, and at the end of the semester, the peer mentor for the class (Hi, Dublin!) traced over the drawings to make digital copies in Procreate, which I repurposed here. Big thanks to Scoot McMahon for letting me share an inside look at his workshop. Check out his awesome comics here! And follow him on Instagram.

The fact is: I love April in all its Aprilness. It’s my birthday month. It’s a rainy rainbow month. I love how, as Edna St. Vincent Millay says, “April / Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.” April fills you with an urge to make art—then does all it can to stop you. April is so chaotic that last week I forgot to run my weekly Letters to Dead Authors & Artists post.