In early January, I made a terrible mistake and put an untrustworthy water bottle into the bag where I kept my sketchbook. In the dead of winter, at one of the hardest points in my Korean year, I doused all my art, and blank sketchbook pages in weak tea. This image is the first one I completed after that debacle, in a transitional sketchbook that I bought there in Korea. I spent hours and hours on the careful details, a meditative and contemplative practice that–in many ways–kept me sane through that winter.
