Tiny Desk Tour: Estee Zales

Necessary supplies, affirming post-its, and understanding trinkets

Musicians give tiny desk concerts for NPR, and artists give tiny desk tours for The Museum of Small and Important Things. Today’s featured artist is Estee Zales of Journal Rash! Estee is a creative force and one of my favorite artists on Substack. I’m often inspired by her mixed-media newsletters and reflections on the creative process. Here’s Estee’s bio:

I’m a Spanish mixed-media illustrator and writer who loves to find stories hidden in everyday life and to dream up worlds where the small and strange come alive. As a self-taught artist, I’ve grown through curiosity, happy accidents, and the influence of artists whose work continues to inspire me. From picture books to editorial, fabric design, and florals; I love diving into new projects.

Estee invites us into her creative process with this tiny desk tour, sharing nuggets of wisdom that have shifted the way I look at my own process. It was validating to hear that I’m not the only one who experiences drawers as voids of forgotten objects and projects, and I needed the reminder to keep projects and supplies visible as someone who suffers from out of sight out of mind disorder.

Without further ado, Estee’s desk tour!

Here’s what works for me: surfaces. Horizontal, visible, cluttered. Here’s what doesn’t: drawers, containers, any organizational system that puts things away where I can’t see them. Anything that goes in a drawer enters the void. I’ll open that drawer six months later and find the exact scissors I bought replacements for, the tape I swore I’d lost, the pen I mourned and eventually accepted as gone forever.

Post-it notes have to be already in place. Notebooks have to be within reach. Not across the room, not on a shelf I’d have to stand up to access. I keep multiple in rotation, theoretically each for something different: work notes, personal writing, quick sketches, things to remember... This system lasts about a week before they all turn into the same notebook: half-finished sentences and to-do lists.

The sketchbook has to be open to the page I’m working on, or was working on, or abandoned three weeks ago and might return to. Closed equals finished. That’s the rule my brain has made. Open means in progress. Even if the page is blank. Especially if the page is blank.

Most of the time I sit down with no idea what I’m supposed to be doing until something triggers it: a pen I forgot I owned, a particular shade of green, a book spine with the right verb in the title. And then it comes back. Oh. Right. That.

Other people can work from coffee shops. From libraries. From their kitchen table, clearing it each night and resetting it each morning. My friend does this. She seems perfectly content. I would rather quit than do what she does.

I’ve moved often. Small apartments, smaller tables. Once, a table with wheels. Right now, I share a table with my partner. It’s large, wooden, positioned in the living room where the light is good. He works on one side. I work on the other, except I’ve slowly taken over his half too. A notebook here, a stack of papers there, until one day you look up and realize I’ve colonized his entire workspace. He says he doesn’t mind. He’s a motion graphic designer, which apparently requires less physical sprawl than whatever it is I do.

I’m still figuring out the ideal setup. In my mind, it involves multiple tables: one for the laptop, one for collage, one for projects I’m not working on yet so I can leave them mid-process, waiting. A large shelf. Maybe an entire additional table just for books. A wall for posters, notes, and the affirmations I currently keep on post-its stuck to the back of my partner’s monitor.

I have trinkets on the table. Small objects I’ve collected, been given, or borrowed from other rooms because I needed them nearby. Most of the time, they fall, nudged by an elbow, displaced by a notebook asserting its dominance, and migrate elsewhere: the bookshelf, the floor where they wait to be stepped on. I need their space, you see. They understand. Or they don’t, but either way, they move.

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Thank’s for the tour, Estee! Be sure to check out Estee’s work and subscribe to her Substack here.

Thanks for reading! I’m an independent freelance artist, writer, and illustrator. If you liked this post, one of the biggest ways you can support my work is by subscribing, sharing, or liking this post. If you’d like to check out more of my work, here’s my website and my Instagram.

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