In 2017, I did not have color swatches all over my office. I did not have tablets of art paper. I did not have eraser shavings all over my pants or ink splatter all over my fingers.

In other words, I was not an artist. Or anything close to one.

So when The Squirbles emerged in a notebook one (hard) night, out of nowhere, I was just as surprised as anyone. But I liked them. Amateur though they were, I knew right away I wanted to work on them and to learn, one way or another, how to “art.”

And so I began. I watched YouTube videos day and night, and I followed hundreds of artists online whose work I enjoyed. Most of all, I practiced and practiced. I was bad, I knew I was bad, but somehow I just didn’t care. The goal was not to do this for anyone else but myself, and I gave myself the luxurious freedom to fail and fail and fail.

There aren’t many things in my life that I allow myself to be bad at. Normally, if I’m really terrible at something, I move on and focus on what I can do. It’s not about quitting (can we please stop telling people they can’t quit things?); it’s about maximizing my energy. But something about The Squirbles made me stick to art. I persevered.

Then I fell in and out of love with dip pens.

I’ve used a Lamy fountain pen since I was a junior in high school. Sure I was probably trying too hard to be European, but I also saw that fountain pens were much faster for my particular handwriting. (I should note that I am a leftie, and I’ve never had any problems. Contrary to what many people believe, lefties can use fountain pens. Here are some tips.)

So it didn’t take long for me to cruise through my local Jerry’s Artarama and make a bee-line for the dip pens.

I fell in love. Meet The Squirbles, The Gummy Fair, and the original version of The Messy Room were all created with paper and dip pens.

After many years of trial and error, I came to settle on the following as the best products for dip-penning. These are amazing:

INK: Deleter Manga Ink Black 4

PAPER: Deleter Comic Book Paper

NIB: Manga G Pen Nibs

*Laying out the pages of* *The Squirbles and the Messy Room*

The upside of working with pen and ink is that the work can be much more detailed and charming. As your pen moves across the paper, you feel all the little nuances of the grain. You feel the soft glow of your lamp and the callused bump of your nib finger and the smell of the paper and the smell of the ink. Your brain creates a kind of dance with all this sensual information. It is a completely human and marvelously imperfect process, and the results allow the artistic spirit to escape and to breath.

The downside of real ink is obvious: it takes so much time. If you make a mistake, you have to try to delete it with white ink, or you have to start from scratch. As an untrained artist, you can bet I was making a LOT of mistakes!

Then along came Procreate, and my life was changed forever. Procreate is the greatest revolution in art since the invention of pigment.

A couple years into this whole Squirble adventure, I managed to get ahold of an iPad Pro. I had heard vague rumors about an app called Procreate, but I’d never used it. I don’t spend money for apps - ever - so I remember thinking I was absolutely out of my gourd spending $10 on an app. But I bit the bullet.

Let me tell you, that was the best $10 I have ever spent in my life. Having Procreate is like having an entire art store at your disposal. You have any pen, any nib, any brush, any medium, and any COLOR right there at your fingertips!

Artists like Ako Lamble, below, are creating the most incredible works of art that completely change how we think about painting! (For fun, take a cruise through all this Procreate art on Instagram.)

And so now I am a little sad, but also very relieved, to say that the Squirbles are created almost entirely on Procreate. For now. But the amazing thing about this business has been bobbing along for the adventure and not trying too hard to understand any of it. After all, I truly believe the best art is the kind that pushes us beyond where we thought we could go.