I have a set of twins and not much time for anything. But when i have time i draw monsterdrawings on post-it notes… it is a little window into a different world, made on office supplies.

A little window into a different world, made on office supplies…

Filed under: Post-it notes. (via @oh_steph)

A nice little photo-essay on reading

Everywhere I go in the world, I see young and old, rich and poor, reading books. Whether readers are engaged in the sacred or the secular, they are, for a time, transported to another world…

Shirley Jackson’s sketches of Hill House and other locales

Jackson’s great-great-grandfather, Samuel Bugbee, designed beautiful Nob Hill mansions, and her grandfather was a prominent San Francisco architect as well. Jackson was sufficiently imbued with an architect’s brain to draw rough schematics for the houses in her fiction, unbuildable but detailed enough to guide her thinking about where Aunt Fanny would stumble in the family gardens to have her apocalyptic vision in The Sundial or which rooms Eleanor would run through to reach the tower in The Haunting of Hill House’s penultimate scene.

These drawings, found in Jackson’s papers at The Library of Congress, inspire a particular form of creative thinking and planning. Rather than creating a structure for a world of words, Jackson envisions structures that she will then use words to describe.

Emphasis mine. Would have fit perfectly into my senior thesis, which was all about using visual thinking techniques to build worlds for literary fiction. (Translation: instead of starting with a character and building worlds around that character, starting with the world first, drawing its details, and then populating it with characters.)

Above, her sketch of a garden for her novel, The Sundial

via @maudnewton

James Baldwin:

“The place in which I fit will not exist until I make it.”

Photo from the UCLA archive Changing Times: Los Angeles in Photographs, 1920-1990

Richard Thompson blogs some pictures of “The Language of Lines: Imaginary Places In The Comics” show going on at the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, CA.

“What is a knowledge game?” by Dave Gray

Really great little post that lays out the difference between play and a game. (I myself was confused about the distinction…) The sketch above, to me, also shows the process of art: the artist imagines the world, he creates the world, then the viewer or reader enters the world, explores the world, and leaves the world.

Definitely worth a read. See also Dylan Horrock’s essay, THE PERFECT PLANET: Comics, Games and World-Building.

UPDATE: This illustration is featured in Dave’s new book, Gamestorming.