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Last month, I went to Venice to draw a cartoon dispatch for the New Yorker about the Biennale. You can read those here!

I brought two sketchbooks and tried to just capture as many atmospheric/funny/beautiful things as they struck me naturally. Some were just for myself and some I thought might make it into the piece, but didn’t.

Below are some sketches from one of the sketchbooks (a 7x10 Canson XL mixed media). (Soon I’ll be posting paintings from the second sketchbook, as well as the New Yorker pitches that did not make the cut. If you’d like to see those, be sure to subscribe!)

I travelled with my friend Martina who was actually born near Venice.

after this trip I will never feel pain when i have to pay more than 3 euros for a beautiful glass of prosecco

We stayed in a place with a beautiful terrace overlooking a canal. So many swifts flying overhead.

I went to Biennale previews laden with art supplies and did a lot of atmospheric drawing that didn’t make it into the published pieces.

i loved these 2 strangers — a young, tote-bag-toting Biennale attendee and an elderly Italian man, connected by their affinity for bright red accessories

I found it really hard to draw the scenery.

The most amazing happy accident occurred in an antiques market, near the end of the week. I found this beautiful, almost mint-condition folder of 12x18 prints from the 1960s…

… which happened to contain a drawing of the EXACT piazza where my friend and I were staying!!! :’)))) (You can see that it’s dated 1965!!)

I was CAPTIVATED by the linework —

The artist (who I can’t find anything about online) was able to capture the architecture in a way that I was finding impossible to do.

I found this folder at the bottom of a box full of old, half-finished drawings of Venice from the 60’s to now…

Seeing these made me feel better about my many failed attempts, and it’s so fun to think about how the scenery has always screamed “PAINT ME” but it is so hard to do because it doesn’t look like any other place you’ve ever been.

I bought the drawings from this dog

and then tried, unsuccessfully, to draw my own version of the piazza during a rainstorm on my last day.

Fun fact - you can’t even draw that same scene anymore because over 60 years, the tree has grown so tall as to obscure the bell tower from view :)

I also wasn’t able to draw people in a way that felt good until the second to last day of the trip — maybe because the stress of the assignment had passed, and i had emotionally transitioned to sadness about my imminent departure (nothing like wistfulness to sharpen the senses)