Ruadhán

Illustration & Design ★ she/her ★ @rowanmeierotto on PATREON, YT, IG, etc.

[rowanmeierotto]

May 2026 Newsletter

This May I got back to the basics! Drawing from imagination, drawing to process/cope/heal, drawing FAST. 

My earliest devotion to art was drawing, non-stop, whatever my hand wanted to do. It's funny, drawing is regarded as the art form most closely linked to the mind, as the most essential tool to translating a mental idea into the material world– but for me it so often felt like it was all in my hand. I was just following my hand. Eventually my hand would make enough lines that looked like something, and then my mind would join in, and we'd complete the drawing, once I'd caught on to what it was supposed to be. Ironically, that has proved to be the key to translating ideas in their purest form: removing my mind from the equation at first, and letting my hand work freely. I suppose it's necessary, since ideas really first emerge in our subconscious. When you lead with your conscious brain it can get in the way of what your subconscious is saying. Also, working this way ensures that the act of creating is enjoyable! The hand instinctively works in a way that feels good. That's that thing that children intrinsically understand and that grown-ups work really hard to remember. 

Here's what I did to get back to that kind of drawing: 

I usually write morning pages (a la Julia Cameron) first thing in the morning, but lately I've been prioritizing sketching. I had one too many days where I got right into the business/management side of my to-dos right after writing, and suddenly it was 4 PM and I hadn't drawn a single doodle all day. That is not how I want my days to look. So I make sure I get at least a little doodling done first thing! Then I just do my morning pages right after, and then I can tackle my to-dos. 

I'm trying to cut back on some of my bad habits, and one thing I implemented was doing one Post-It doodle instead of whatever unproductive thing I was itching to do. They were really helpful, almost always I got so invested in doodling that I forgot what I was doing! 

I did a few life drawing sessions online! There aren't really any live sessions where I live, but Zeet Studio Sketch does tons of them online. They live-stream models in costume (usually historical dress or fictional characters), plus a demo-artist who sketches with you. Very cool resource if real life-drawing isn't accessible. I love to do these because they force you to draw FAST, and to just keep moving. It doesn't matter if one sketch didn't turn out, the model changed poses and you need to start a new sketch, anyway. Models hold their poses for as little as thirty seconds at first, up to ten minutes toward the end. Usually by the time they get to ten minute poses, I'm in a fast-drawing groove and I don't even use the full ten minutes, I'll take a few to stretch my hands. 

The paradoxical thing about drawing from imagination is that you need to also draw from reference, often, so that you can learn everything about the subject matter to be able to draw it with only your mind's eye. I've drawn so many people from reference that drawing people from imagination comes very easily to me. Tigers though, for example, are trickier. I've only recently started drawing them, I've probably drawn about twenty from reference in the past couple of months, and I'm only just beginning to pull off a passable tiger without a reference. 

On the other hand, inaccuracy is part of the formula for authentic brain-to-hand connected drawing. Lynda Barry, Ivan Brunetti, Mike Mignola – all masters of comic art, all agree: if you think you don't know how to draw, say, a car… just draw a car anyway. Whatever you make will probably be identifiable as a car, and serve your purpose sufficiently. And more importantly, by just drawing the car, you're keeping the idea pure. The point isn't a realistic rendered car, so you'd derail the whole endeavor if you stopped and tried to find the perfect reference photo and strained to match it exactly. If you just stay with your drawing, and make some marks that approximate a car, you can keep drawing, stay with your idea, and make something more honest and authentic. 

Speaking of comic art, I have been thinking about what a powerful medium they are much more lately. I've always loved them, my dad is a comic book nerd, and I grew up with them. Many of my art influences; Mike Mignola, Jamie Hewlitt, Ashley Wood, Nicolas Nemiri, Tove Jansson (to name a few), are comic artists. But lately I've realized just how unique and powerful comics really are. Especially in this day and age, it's one of the few ways an artist can distribute their work widely without having to do any corporate boot-licking or compromising your vision. The necessary simplicity of the little black and white drawings make comics so universal and allow so many people to connect with your work. Marjane Satrapi, rest in peace, illustrated this (literally) so beautifully with her work. She understood that comics were the perfect way to make her very specific life story universally accessible. It reminds me of this point-in-case from Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud: 

While this has been an especially ink-heavy month, even by my standards, I have continued experimenting. I'm still working out how best to use mineral pigments, and learning how I'd like to use oil and acrylic paint, and testing new watercolors. I just learned who David Choe is, and I've had a lot of fun applying his very childish, experimental, intuitive approach to my painting. I find myself hesitant to be as bold and free as I am with drawing when I'm working with the seemingly More Serious medium of paint, but I've loosened up a bit since doing some painting while watching The Choe Show. Paint is actually really easy to go crazy with, because you can always, endlessly, just paint over anything. You can shift gears and go crazy and make it into anything! This painting was about 4 different things before I finally called it Done. 

So, May was a lot about getting messy, getting experimental, and making something out of it. It's been freeing to let go of the reins a little, and a lovely surprise to find that it's leading me in exactly the direction I'd like to go. 

[rowanmeierotto]

April has flown by over here! It’s getting warmer so I’ve been spending a lot of time outside. Here’s what I’ve been up to:

Much of my free time this month was spent outside, walking trails through forests and wetlands— birding! My boyfriend and I started casual but we’ve gotten pretty into it lately, bringing my brother’s old camera and my grandpa’s old binoculars out almost every day. We’ve identified like 80 species!

One of my resolutions this year was to learn my local wildlife by name, so this has been a great start to that endeavor. We also foraged some wild leeks and Pheasant’s Back mushrooms and made some Alfredo!

I always feel happiest and most myself when I’m wandering around in the woods. It’s been exciting to be awakened to all the life-long neighbors I’ve been overlooking. Kinglets are barely bigger than your thumb and hide in the brush but now I see them everywhere. It makes me feel less lonely. You always have the birds and the trees and the deer.

I finished Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer at the exact perfect time— right as Spring finally hit, right as we began constant wilderness adventuring! There was something very serendipitous about that book all along. I started it during hunting season, last fall, and the book starts with a focus on the harvest season, stories like the three sisters (squash, corn, and beans), then moves through winter (Wendigo stories, snow purifying the world), and ends with springtime— specifically how the Wendigo is, according to legend, defeated in the spring and the summer. I loved the book and I loved the practical optimism she has. I also love to see science and spirit as partners, not opposites. Kimmerer is an extremely educated ecologist, and also a Potawatomi story-teller. Highly recommend it to anyone who cares about the natural world in any way.

My favorite Mary Oliver poem keeps coming to mind, too. Oliver’s poems are famous for her reverence for nature, and The Summer’s Day always stuck with me. The whole thing is worth several readings but this part specifically keeps playing in my mind. I memorized the poem earlier this year, hoping to keep the memory-muscle I built in theater school.

“I don’t know exactly what a prayer is./ I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down/ into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,/ how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,/ which is what I have been doing all day./ Tell me, what else should I have done?”

So all this birding has been sustaining me in a really profound way, and inspiring me (Mother Nature is the ultimate artist). I’m experimenting with photography again to some mild success, and I’m doing doodles and paintings of what I’ve seen and photographed. Here’s a WIP of the blue heron piece:

I made sketchbooks and collected some art supplies for the kids I substitute teach! I work with K-12 and have been pretty bummed to realize that they all spend all day on Chromebooks, so I’m making an effort to get them working with their hands and creating something. It’s been great, they draw some great stuff and it’s been very inspiring and uplifting. I posted a comic about my first day doing art with kids on the Patreon. The fact that the birding theme somehow bled into my school day is not lost on me…

I also had some 5th graders do little index card doodles as attendance, to get them started. They only had 5-10 minutes, so when they had free time later in the day a lot of them asked to keep working on their drawings, and then asked for more paper and so on… in just one day you can see kids gain so much enthusiasm and confidence in creating, and it’s unreal how well-behaved they are when they’re busy with something tactile and engaging, rather than playing the same computer “learning games” they play all day, every day. Here’s some of my favorite index cards!

And that wraps up this month! I’ll check back in at the end of May. Get outside and stay childish!!

[rowanmeierotto]

Spring is here! We made it, again!

This winter was very slow and very quiet for me, which is what winter is for, so that’s fine. Like I mentioned in my essay about creative rest and wintertime, it’s good to take a rest, it’s good to have time to reflect, to let ideas come to you and grow. That doesn’t have to coincide with the seasons but for me, at least, it always does. This year, especially, because I was writing my essay about developing Style. I was looking back on all the art I’ve ever made, trying to write an artist’s statement, trying to reflect and see the bigger picture, trying to understand the higher level “Meaning” behind my art. Why do I make art? Why does it matter, why should you care? What kind of art do I like to make, what subjects, what mediums, and why?? What do I like, and why?

Existential crisis ensued. I’ve never understood why I make art or why I’m drawn to the things I’m drawn to, and then, under the microscope, I was too close to see anything.

However! I’ve had a breakthrough in my thinking that has opened up a world of possibilities for me and has me energetic and enthusiastic and creating art again. I’d like to mention that it’s easier to transition back into a creative peak if you don’t let yourself plunge too deep into a dormant valley. I always try to at least doodle in my sketchbook every day, I guess just so I don’t lose the muscle, and I don’t get discouraged when I have inspiration again but find I’m rusty with the pen.

Basically what happened is: I realized I don’t have to try to make up a reason, or a meaning, if I don’t have one. Every time I try to answer a question I don’t know the answer to, I find that while I’m not necessarily wrong, and I have been able to intellectualize a lot of my passions, interests, MOs, but that’s just it. This isn’t an intellectual endeavor to me, and it feels disingenuous. No, I don’t know why I draw. That actually makes it more exciting and interesting to me, makes it worth doing. Because some force is pushing my hand to draw, my mind to wander, but it’s unknowable. I think it must be the same force that pushes planets to form, life-forms to emerge. I think I’m exploring Creation and the nature of Creativity, and I have found no answers. I don’t know that I’m even looking for answers, I’m just looking to experience and to follow that Creative Force. Where do my drawings come from? Where do dreams come from?? Beats me. All I know is sometimes my hand starts drawing before my mind realizes it, and if I don’t draw I am not happy.

I guess I thought my art must be a finished thought, expressed physically. Art as a statement, or a confession. But really, I think my art is just a thought. I am exploring my own thoughts and feelings through the art. Nothing is a fully finished Statement, it’s all just explorations. I’m coming to understand more and more through each creation— and maybe one day when I’m more mature as an artist some of these ideas will have been fleshed out and I’ll be able to speak on them, but right now I’m just doing archaeology through art. And I think that’s how a lot of my favorite artists work, too, so I’m in good company.

Many artists famously hate to talk about the Meaning of their art— David Lynch, David Bowie, most expressionist painters; and I think it’s because these artists don’t set out to make art with a specific meaning. They let the art guide, let it be what it wants to be, ride the flow of Creation. Meaning may be revealed when you see the finished piece. You may be surprised what it means to you, in the end! And one of the fun things about art is that it may mean such different things to everybody. Artists who work this way usually are much more interested in the process. This is certainly what captivates me, and this idea ties together so many other ideas in my mind. My hand just starts drawing lines because it feels good to draw lines! Mark making is such an enjoyable experience, the joy of leaving marks on paper is all art is when we first experience it. Babies will fill whole pages up with just crayon scribbles because they get it— how great is it that the path of your hand can be recorded on paper, just by rubbing some of this crayon off on it! As I begin to engage more with full-body paints, that’s what’s attracting me to it, how satisfying laying down brush strokes feels. That’s why I like inking so much— every mark matters, is permanent; all ink drawings are perfect records of the process. And that’s why I don’t care for photo-realism! I understand and respect the feat of it, but I’m not interested in art that seems to hide the artist. I want to see the brushstrokes!

Anyway, now that I’ve freed myself from trying to assign meaning to everything, and allowed myself to let the process be my guiding light, I’ve been in a period of furious art-making and idea-cultivating. I feel like I have a direction to follow, but I don’t feel boxed in or limited. And I’m dreaming big! I’ve been working with a Grand Gallery Exhibition in mind. If I had unlimited resources, and time, and space, what would My Gallery show be? And I’m not just a gallery-showing fine-artist. In fact I think I was in one gallery ever. When I was ten. But I’m not limiting my Grand Gallery to fine art, so it doesn’t matter. In my gallery, I’ll be mixing illustration, graphic art, and fine art. Maybe I’ll frame original comic pages, just the ink. Maybe some of my zines will be laid out for you to take with you. Maybe I’ll rip out sketchbook pages and frame them. Maybe some of the paintings I’m working on now will hang up in the show! Maybe some of my animations can play on a loop on some cool old TVs I find. I’ll have big pieces and little tiny ones, and drawings and paintings and sculptures. I’d want it to feel like you’re walking into a museum for some alternate universe, some dream-world or something. And I’d host a live-drawing session at the opening! This big lofty goal has kept me really engaged and excited, and surprisingly, has taken a lot of pressure off of me. While it is a huge endeavor to work towards, I now feel like every little doodle I do is valid, and important, and worthwhile, because it may eventually become part of The Grand Gallery! And honestly, even if it doesn’t, in a way it all feeds into it in some way. And I see so many milestones ahead on the way to the Grand Gallery. Exploring new avenues of creation. Publishing short stories. Doing a whole animated short. Expanding on my portraiture and graphic art. So it’s all very exciting! And I’m finding myself understanding myself better the more I just Make More Art About It. Much more than I could ever get by analyzing and intellectualizing myself.

So! All this to say that I’m going to shift the focus of this newsletter. It won’t be “essays” about art-related topics so much as it will be updates on my art process! I’d like to just talk about what I’m working on each month, what I’ve been up to and how that inspired me, references and resources I’ve been using, that kind of thing. I think that’s what will actually be helpful to me, in learning how to write about my art— because as we have discovered, that’s what I’m more interested in talking about! For March I’ll keep it short, since this breakthrough just occurred in March, and I’ve already rambled enough about all that.

I have moved Grand Gallery work into my XL moleskine. I’ve been using personal sized notebooks in my gorgeous leather journal (that I made myself) which I will never stop using and which I take with me most times I leave home for more than a few hours. I’m really enjoying doing bigger drawings in a sketchbook. I think I needed the in-between, because the personal sketchbook is too small for a lot of things, but committing to doing A Piece on a big sheet of my fanciest paper is the only alternative. So having big pages that are still just for no-pressure sketching has been freeing.

I made a TINIER version of my personal-sized book, so it can fit in my pocket and I can always have some paper on me even if I’m just leaving for ten minutes. I find myself really actually using it, too! I’ve had ideas strike in the grocery store, in the middle of a movie at the theater, halfway through a walk, and actually wrote it down, and now I find the ideas come more often, and connect to each other. It’s like ideas are starting to trust me to do something with them, so they feel comfortable revealing themselves.

I’ve gone through my stacks of magazines and magazine cut-outs and started to organize them. I like to save images to use as references—of people, fashion, environments, color palettes/textures, and I’ve sort of organized them into those categories. Now I’ve been pulling them out to have up while I work!

I’ve got some character designs brewing! The girl and her Companion just kind of happened, and I find myself drawing them over and over again. Same with the Tiger Queen. I don’t have much of a story for them yet, but I’ve got some moods, some themes that I feel fit them. And some environments! I think you’ll start to see more of this place with three small suns and a toxic black ocean (is it Earth years and years from now? An Earth-like planet somewhere in space? An alternate dimension somewhere in time? Who knows!!). These are the kinds of things that I’m really excited about developing and I’m really stoked to see developing ORGANICALLY, without any intellectual intervention on my end.

TEXTURES are something I’m really trying to explore. I like the idea of loose, sketched, lineart, that is then filled in with lots of rich textures. Maybe that’s achieved with different layers of paints, or inking in different patterns, we’ll see. But I’ve been feeling inspired by a lot of textiles from fashion magazines, and rugs and bedding from interior design magazines, and I happened upon this book of rugs at the antique store! I’ve been using it for inspo, for instance with this piece I did of my Queen character. I’ve been really into gathering BOOKS (Physical! Print!) to use for reference, and taking more pictures myself, and getting off Pinterest as my main source of reference.

I’ve found since distancing myself from digital art a little bit that it’s really good for me to have my art up and around. Seeing it all the time has been keeping me grounded and focused, and I think is helping to connect disjointed ideas. That’s one of the major perks of working traditionally. On my iPad it’s so easy for files to get lost and forgotten. And it feels so satisfying to finish a piece and instantly have it in your hands, a tactile, 3 dimensional thing that you made! When I order prints of a digital piece, I get close to that feeling, but it’s not quite the same… and besides, I’ve never been able to afford to print much of my work. Plus it feels poignant or important in some way, to get traditional, in the AI Takeover Era. Certainly the charm of the handmade has become more appealing. I do still try to emulate that with my digital work, not abusing the infinite undo button, letting my hand show itself… but there just really is something to be said for PAPER. Canvas! Holding something, seeing the light hit at different angles, all that.

That’s all for now! Check back in next month!

[cosmicanger]

Art from the artbook “The Art of Edena” by Mœbius

[travelingcryptologist]

Jean Giraud - Mœbius illustrates Dante’s Paradiso (1999)

[rowanmeierotto]

St Patrick’s Day

[free-parking-blog]

Etienne Gros, from Les Mousses, foam polyester 

[aaaangel444]

[rowanmeierotto]

Happy Year of the Horse! This is my first postcard of the year for my monthly mail club on Patreon :-)

The cut out horses are all based on real early-human depictions of horses! It felt fitting for a new year piece, to reference humans making art about horses thousands of years ago, as I make art about horses in 2026. Horse girls rise!!

[rowanmeierotto]

Diana Ross

[estro-boi]

Please make art. You don't have to bare your soul or make a masterpiece, you can be silly and you can be derivative if you want. You don't even have to show it to anyone. Just please make something, it's so good for you

[rowanmeierotto]

Recent works! I've been revisiting old drawings from 2019-2021 and trying them again. I'm picking pieces that started with a strong idea but that I wasn't able to execute satisfactorily at the time. So fun to see how far I've come! I've posted more, plus more in depth explanations of my re-draws over on my Patreon!

[rowanmeierotto]

Sitting Pretty

[snoopyoftheday]

snoopy of the day

[rowanmeierotto]

[rowanmeierotto]

Comic I made about a quote and an idea that haunts me!

[rowanmeierotto]

Comic I made about the end of summer