When Words Won’t Work, I Make Art

Jesse Lawrence
3 days ago
5 min read

Not every day is a writing day, especially over the last few months. While it ebbs and flows over time, my chronic illness causes brain fog that interferes with writing (and everything else). This used to frustrate me. Now, I turn to digital art to keep my mind creative.

This is a drawing of my dominant hand after I digitally improved it and overlayed it on a gradient.

When I hit roadblocks, I don't just take a detour, I find a new path for a different adventure. Sometimes, writer's block or brain clogs mean jumping from one writing project to another. Other times, it means switching to different types of projects.

ARTISTIC BEGINNINGS

My creative story began the same as everyone else, with crayons, markers, and finger paint. For whatever reason, I gravitated toward making art more than most kids. As a dyslexic kid, I was more into doing things than reading about them. I still couldn't read much by 4th grade. Meanwhile, I learned to do stuff that my friends and classmates couldn't.

Denial: I used to deny I was artistic. It was just something I did. It seemed like anyone could create what I could. It turned out this wasn't true.

My creativity and skills took off in my teens. Tolkien and D&D filled my head with mental images that inspired painting, pottery, sculpting, and leatherworking, among other things. Consuming and creating fantasy became a large part of my life. I drew monsters, painted miniature figures, sculpted strange creatures, wrote lyrics, and even got into costume design.

It didn’t matter if I was good at it. Art was an outlet, a way to channel emotions and ideas, and a way to explore, create, and escape.

Hot Take: Most people start out artistic and creative as children. It takes work to keep it going into adulthood.

As with many artists, I drew on my surroundings. Growing up in the redwood forests of California, I had a beautiful environment to capture, whether as part of my fantastical projects or more down-to-earth nature scenes.

TECHNICAL SKILLS

I took extracurricular art classes during college to get my head out of studying. Maybe I always knew it, but during these years, I learned that art calmed me and reset my mind. I had fun with everything from bronze sculpting to jewelry to painting to graphic design.

In the early days of the internet, I taught myself to build websites, first for fun, then for professors, computer labs, and others. It was an untamed medium back then with slow-loading pages, wildly incompatible browsers, and no real design standards. It was both frustrating and weirdly thrilling.

I learned how to solve design problems with what little the web could do at the time.

SCIENCE AS ART

When I started my PhD in geophysics, art took a backseat. Between fieldwork, coding, and academic papers, I didn’t have much time or energy for doodling or painting. But creativity snuck through the side door.

I started noticing beauty in scientific data: the shapes of seismic waves, the patterns in earthquake maps, the challenge of visualizing abstract information clearly and intuitively.

Presentations became my new canvas. I obsessed over slide layouts, fonts, and color schemes. It wasn't just aesthetics for aesthetics' sake, but to make complex science digestible. I wanted people to easily understand what I was saying.

Here is an example of the imagery I created for my PhD thesis. It may not seem beautiful, but it takes a certain kind of art to boil down years of fieldwork and data analys into one image and two sentences.

EARTHQUAKES AS ART

One of the more unexpected artistic chapters of my life came while developing an earthquake rapid-warning system. We monitored sensors on computers and phones to quickly detect earthquakes. By treating our network like a nervous system, we collapsed huge data streams into a single image pushed to nearby people. Here's an example of condensing hundreds of shaky signals into an aesthetically pleasing advanced warning to the surrounding towns.

These rings map out how much warning the surrounding areas received due to an Earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand.

STARTUP YEARS

Later, when I shifted into the tech world, I had the amazing opportunity to learn from extremely skilled graphic artists/designers. I participated in building a handful of company brands, mostly as a tag-along. I leaned toward clean, clear, minimalist designs, with consideration of form and function. Each project taught me more about the art of simplicity.

Here are a few logos I created over the years.

CHRONIC ILLNESS

Then, my body broke down. Chronic illness stole my mental and physical acuity. With the deteriorating function of my dominant hand, I gave up on all forms of art and turned to writing.

I started getting back into art by drawing characters with old-school pencil and paper. It took a lot of effort learning how to sketch with my other hand, but it was good for expanding what I could do with it.

This is one of the better pieces I drew, then tweaked digitally.

AUTHOR WEBSITE

I learned that I needed an author website from the amazing authors I met on X and Facebook, which pushed me back into digital design work. Building a visual brand around me as an author forced me to think about myself and my art in a different way. Without having enjoyed this form of creativity earlier in life, my new brain wouldn't have been able to pull it off. For fun, I'm in the middle of another webpage update, shown below.

Note: "Lawrence" should have been in ALL CAPS, and I didn't see it until I pasted a screenshot here.

BOOK COVERS

I have enjoyed making covers for my books. For me, the art is both creative and structured. I have relearned tricks with each one. Each book needs a genre-specific look and feel. Every title needs to be readable. There should be consistent elements across all my books. The artwork has to fit paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats.

A wonderful artist began the cover design for DAY AFTER INFINITY, and I took it from there. I drew on stock background images the rest of my covers, tweaking color, brightness, and a thousand other things to make them just right.

I even created fonts for I NANO and ENDED.

Recently, I revisited my covers and created a more consistent brand, which was a fun challenge.

CREATING FOR OTHERS

With my recent brain block, I’ve found joy in helping other writers by giving them graphic art that I designed.

Logos: I drew and designed several logos for friends on X. It's a challenge to come up with something that will resonate with another artist. But when you get it right, it's almost as good as connecting with a reader.

Social Media Banners: Authors struggle to come up with the right artwork to place at the top of their social media profiles. Being somewhat detached, I find it fun. Here are a few I created.

MOSAICS

One of my favorite recent projects was assembling a mosaic of indie book covers. It sounded simple at first, but it required a surprising amount of finesse: sizing, spacing, visual rhythm, balance, and more. I put out a call for covers from indie authors, then assembled them, arranging them by color and shade. You may or may not like how it turned out, but I’m genuinely proud of it.

Here's a higher-res PDF version.

I hope to make other artwork for the indie community soon.

GROWTH

I guess all of this is to say that I'm more than an author. I'm a creative who can't stick to one medium to save his life. When my mind and body won't let me do one thing, I do something else. I have a bunch of unfinished projects I'll probably never get to, which is fine because I do this for myself, to calm my mind and relax my nervous system.

I'll keep you posted as I finish more art projects.

As always, I appreciate your support of indie authors. In the name of putting myself out there, here are a few of my works.