For her Zócalo Sketchbook, Ng takes us below the waves to experience her near-hallucinatory ocean dwellers. “The inspiration for this series of cartilaginous animal illustrations stems from the intricate textures, fluid forms, and delicate details of creatures like snails, octopuses, and jellyfish,” she tells Zócalo. “Their graceful yet powerful presence in the underwater world presents a captivating blend of mystery and beauty, ideal for exploring in a minimalist, illustrative style. “

Ng’s illustrations combine stylized line art with gently surreal color choices to create an illusion of detail and specificity in our minds—by showing us less, Ng makes us see more.

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For her Sketchbook pieces, Holländer explores the subject of balance, a theme that she tells Zócalo has become increasingly important in her life. Her playful collages reflect on the space between work and play, routine and spontaneity, hard and soft. “It is not an either/or,” she explains, “it is a balance between poles, sometimes a wobbly act on a thin rope.”

Consider how each composition takes what could be a strict juxtaposition and rearranges competing symbols into precarious Jenga towers of philosophy. It’s an everyday balancing act that aptly captures life in the year 2024.

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Kuo’s Sketchbook visualizes the beauty of the dishes prepared for a Pān-toh, the traditional Taiwanese roadside banquet. “I put the chef’s art into illustrations in the hope I can connect hundreds and thousands of people with art as the chef does with food,” Kuo tells Zócalo.

To achieve the organic look of her illustrations, Kuo takes her digital drawings, prints them out on a Risograph printer, a high-volume color copier that uses ink instead of toner, and then rescans the prints. Risograph printers, which originated in the 1980s, produce prints that are recognizable by their grainy, but vibrant colors that are often slightly out of register, giving the work a rougher look than modern offset printing. In recent years, many old units have been modified into networked printers and have become popular with artists and designers.

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Take a close look at each object: What might appear to be leaves reveal themselves to be silk and velvet; stalks and grasses are rendered from cotton and corduroy. “I used vintage fabric samples, scraps from altered pants, and other materials I had been hoarding,” Lazarus explains. “The red flowers are from ‘An Intimate Evening with Pamela Des Barres,’ the pink flower is from my late great grandmother’s rose bush, and the mosses are inspired by those I met in Eugene, Oregon, on a recent family road trip.”

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Wood’s Zócalo Sketchbook imagines “what nature might look like if it insisted on innovating itself to extinction.” The series was inspired by OpenAI’s release of Sora, a way to generate photorealistic video sequences based on text prompts, earlier this year. 

“As a creative, it chilled me to my core,” Wood says. “When I saw where we are headed, I thought, Why are we so addicted to relentless innovation? Why are we absolutely determined to ‘improve’ our way to extinction? It got me thinking, Would anything else in nature act the way we humans do?”

Wood’s Sketchbook considers the impact of the increasing incursion of generative AI on society. Rich in narrative details, each of his illustrations acts like a doorway into classic science fiction stories that ask us to reflect on our own actions in the world.

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For his Zócalo Sketchbook, Katrodia brings us a vibrant burst of springtime energy. This comes in the form of complex grids of form and exuberant colors, which bring his stylized plants and butterflies to life. “Looking at the natural world, I’ve always been fascinated how simplicity forms the complex,” he says of his Sketchbook pieces. “In these illustrations, I’ve aimed to depict nature’s intertwined and interconnected life through a delicate balance of shapes, lines, and colors.”

While Katrodia produced this work digitally, keep an eye out for how he uses visible pen strokes and colors that are slightly off from the outlines to maintain the feeling of a human being making human marks in physical space.

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For her Zócalo Sketchbook, Franson offers a snapshot of fall in Bryce Canyon in pencil and watercolor. She includes a Golden-mantled ground squirrel, sharing with Zócalo a humorous encounter she had with one while walking in the forest behind her cabin—catching the squirrel with its cheeks stuffed, “busy storing seeds for the cold winter ahead.” She also includes all three of Bryce Canyon’s species of Nuthatches (there are only four species in the entire country). “They can all be seen out our front door, busily caching pine seeds into the thick bark of the ponderosas, hammering away like little carpenters,” Franson says of the Nuthatches, adding that they “create the soundtrack of the season.”

And, of course, her Sketchbook features illustrations of the seeds themselves—“an essential part,” Franson says, “of this interdependent web.” She describes the seeds to Zócalo as “lovely, thin-winged like cicadas, that spiral down to the ground, sometimes getting caught in a beam of light.” The forest floor is full of them now, Franson continues, “as if the trees threw confetti everywhere.”

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For her Zócalo Sketchbook, Glasson presents a series of abstract compositions that represent the natural world in the tactile intricacy of her chosen materials. “For this series, I have abandoned the realism of my portraiture work and am using natural and synthetic inks to create playful abstract shapes,” she tells Zócalo. She describes the process as “totally different” from how she usually works: “With these, I give all my attention to materials and colors,” she says. “They are wildly fun to make, and at times even meditative.”

Glasson’s Sketchbook invites you to zoom in close to get lost in the fjords and forests of her paint, or to stand back and find yourself face-to-face with ethereal creatures from other worlds or dimensions. Glasson finds pleasure in how open the work is to interpretation and how the shapes can “sometimes reference the natural world and other times seem otherworldly or just slightly ridiculous.”

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For her Zócalo Sketchbook, Yamazaki gives us a series of flowers and the caterpillars and butterflies who love them. Her playful style combines the looseness of children’s doodles with sophisticated compositions and color choices. “I wanted to play with the idea of bringing the natural world indoors in an imaginative way,” she says. “I used the imagery of blooming, metamorphosis, along with smiley faces to share a hopeful message of growth and positivity.”

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For her Zócalo Sketchbook, Moon puts a psychedelic lens on the natural world, rearranging the birth and adolescence of five animal species into bright kaleidoscopes to delight the third eye as much as the first two. Note the details in the artwork—the color shift in the cocoons, the delicately rendered leaves framing the firefly, and the subtle color glow around the black lines.

“This series attempts to capture the beauty of the ever-changing and adaptive natural world,” Moon says. “The theme was inspired by metamorphosis—the magical ability to physically restructure oneself into an entirely new entity.”

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