Justyna Dorsz

Justyna

Assortment of Cats

It’s interesting how random things can inspire us.

I was playing Stardew Valley recently, and in-game you can have seeds that you can plant. One kind of seed is Fall Seeds. When you hover over it in your inventory, you can read the description: “An assortment of wild fall seeds”.

That word – assortment – stuck with me. And I thought, “What would an assortment of cats look like?” because I like drawing cats. And so I drew just that.

That’s the second design inspired by Stardew Valley. I wrote about the first one a few days ago. Maybe I should play more games as an inspiration 🙂

And here is “Assortment of Cats” on a t-shirt:

Assortment of Cats T-Shirt

Edit (2021 June 22): Design moved from my Fox Shiver store to my TRUFFLEPIG store.

reMarkable 2 Review

I bought a reMarkable 2 tablet in January 2021, and I’ve been using it every day since then. It’s one of the most useful devices I own. I use it more than I use my phone. It’s always next to me when I work, and I often take it with me wherever I go. But no device is perfect. Here are my notes after 4 months of using reMarkable 2.

What exactly did I buy?

I bought:

  • reMarkable 2 tablet – $399
  • Grey marker – $49
  • Folio – Polymer weave – $99

The pen is not included with the tablet by default. When you are buying a tablet, you should select a marker too, unless you plan to use the tablet for reading only. There are two marker options: gray, and black. The main difference between the two is that the black one has a built-in eraser.

Optionally, you can buy a folio.

reMarkable 2 – Good
  • Great for jotting down notes and random thoughts during the day. I used to have hundreds of paper notes on my desk, and it was a mess. Now I only have my reMarkable.
  • Good for sketching. It’s easy to export a page to a PNG file, so I can quickly turn my drawings into designs and submit them to online stores.
  • I am more productive! Having my to-do list on my computer is not ideal — I use both my screens for work, and so I need to switch apps to see my to-do list. Now that I keep my to-do list on my reMarkable 2 tablet I can have it always open and on hand. Whenever I start to procrastinate, it’s enough to just look at my reMarkable — showing my next task — to get back to work.
reMarkable 2 – Bad
  • By default, each page has one layer. You can add more layers if you want. For example, you can have one layer with the initial sketch, and then another layer where you add notes. That’s all good. However, a page with more than one layer is very slow. You might not notice it when you just draw or write. But when you try to erase something on a page that has more layers, you need to wait a few seconds. That’s inconvenient. A few times, I thought my reMarkable froze. At this point, a document with two layers is unusable, and so I only ever use one layer.
  • The marker gets dirty easily and is very difficult to clean up. So difficult that despite trying various methods, I didn’t manage to clean it. I ended up having to scratch off the marker’s coating with sandpaper. You could maybe avoid this problem if you bought the black marker instead of the gray one.
  • No backlight. You can’t use it when it’s dark unless you have an additional light source.
  • It’s fast enough for writing and sketching on a page, but switching between pages in a notebook takes a moment.
One of my sketches
Other notes
  • It’s black and white only. It would be great if there was at least one other color for highlighting and important comments. If there’s ever a reMarkable 3 with at least one other color, I will buy it.
  • On their website, they claim that the reMarkable 2 battery can last up to 2 weeks of moderate use. I use it a lot, and I need to charge it every night.
  • The marker has a tip that wears down with use. When you buy a marker, you get 10 tips (one in the marker and 9 spare tips). When the tip gets blunt, you need to swap it for a new one. I need to swap tips every 3 or 4 weeks. The good news is that you can buy additional tips on their website, and they cost about $1.5 each.
A sketch that was later turned into a t-shirt design.

There’s a 30-day guarantee — you can buy and test reMarkable 2 for 30 days and if you don’t like, return it. But be prepared that you will want to keep it.

You can buy your reMarkable 2 tablet here.

Garden progress

I’ve been working on the garden area of our cat book and I wanted to show you how it’s progressing.

Here is one of the first sketches:

I am now adding details and more cats and basically looking for plant references online and drawing them. This is what I have so far:

The right side of the image is too empty — I am going to work on that next.

Our Cat Book: fixing garden composition

My brother and I are making our first book about cats. Today I’ve been working on the garden area. Here is the initial sketch:

Cat book by Justyna Dorsz and Rafał Dorsz (Work in progress)

The problem is that the trees create a kind of frame in the picture, as so:

Cat book by Justyna Dorsz and Rafał Dorsz (Work in progress)

There’s still a lot of space outside those borders made by trees. That’s not a good composition because you can’t really draw anything interesting there. The eye will naturaly see what’s inside the borders and will miss anything that is outside.

To fix that, I moved the whole image left so that there’s not so much of that useless space on the left. And then moved the other tree more to the right:

Cat book by Justyna Dorsz and Rafał Dorsz (Work in progress)

Now I am adding more cats and details but that’s not ready to show yet.

What happened to the book?

You might have wondered what happened to the book about cats that my brother and I have been working on. We had to put it on hold — other projects got in the way. But now we are finally back to it.

A book about cats by Justyna Dorsz and Rafał Dorsz

Above, you can see the initial sketches of four areas that we are illustrating. The whole book is about a house full of cats. Each two-page spread is one area, and there will be seven areas in total. I am now reworking the garden and plan to post an update tomorrow.

“Show Your Work” – Book Notes

Today, I’ve read “Show Your Work” by Austin Kleon.

I wish I had read it years ago. If I did, maybe I would have started my blog earlier than I did.

The core message in the book is to not work in secrecy, to instead share ideas, bits and pieces of work, what you are learning.

Here are a few highlights:

  • “The best way to get started on the path to sharing your work is to think about what you want to learn, and make a commitment to learning it in front of others.
  • “Become a documentarian of what you do.”
  • “Being open and honest about what you like is the best way to connect with people who like those things, too.”
  • “The minute you learn something, turn around and teach it to others”

I recommend this book to anyone who creates things but is afraid of showing them to people. Or who would like to write a blog or post on Instagram but think they don’t have anything worth sharing.

Related articles that I’ve read recently:

Black Cat

I was playing Stardew Valley and I had a cat shirt. Or so I though.

It was in fact a skull shirt. But I didn’t know that. I thought, “I am going to draw a giant cat head”. So here’s my new design:

Black Cat - design by Justyna Dorsz

At first, I drew it like so:

I painted it with white color only — those dark grey areas are just white pixels with very low opacity. But, as I know, those pixels would not be printed at all. There’s no point submitting a design with too many transparent pixels. That’s why I changed contrast, so only the white pixels with high opacity are left.

Black Cat T-shirt

Newsletter overload

I used to like reading newsletters. Not anymore. There are just too many of them. At any given moment I have emails waiting in my inbox. I can’t keep up with them all.

Oliver Burkeman wrote recently about this feeling of being owerwhelmed by all those podcasts to listen to, all the books and blogs to read. There’s a neverending pile of things requiring our attention. The solution is to accept the inevitable — there’s always going to be an overload of information, and we need to realize that just because something is on our “to-read” list, it doesn’t mean that it needs to be read.

For the past week, I have been unsubscribing from most of the newsletters. I definitely have the feeling of missing out on something interesting. But if I want to create things, then I need more undistracted time. I can’t keep thinking about all the emails and articles I still need to do read.

I don’t want to spend my time consuming what others have created instead of creating my own things.