But nothing lasts forever, even cold November rain… …or at least you can wear a yellow rain coat and going in the rain anyway! I mean, those days are hard, aren’t they? The end of summer, the pand3mic, the days going shorter and shorter, bills and taxes… sometimes I just want to say to myself “I want it all to stop right now! I can’t take it anymore”! Is it just me Or it happen to you too? (hit reply and tell me). but then I put all this shitty thoughts in a cosmic garbage can and I send this garbage can out of my window and I watch it bursting into flame and becoming a big cosmic firework diffusing hope and love… I swear I do this and it’s cool to watch, it’s my own personal firework. have you ever tried doing it? To throw away all those parasite thoughts in a cosmic garbage can? My lover thought me this and I love doing it. Try it and then tell me how does it feel . and you know what happens next? I start looking around me, I dare to look around me, far and near, and I have the space to make the love enter. And it feels good. I start small, I look around and I notice the first ‘thing’ that gives me joy, like my pink socks -that my friend Nini gave me- with dog heads on them. I let myself feel the happiness of having such cool and funny socks. I breath in, thanks for those socks. Then I see my cup of coffee and I’m happy and thankful for having the possibility of having fresh hot coffee in the morning. Then I move my sight a little more far… and I see Albert (the rescue dog who adopted me last month) and I remember that our life together feels like a second chance for him and for me. A second chance, this is what we all need. this is what we all want. right? Well I want to take those second chances whenever I fucking want. and I KNOW that someday will be harder and some other will be easier and that’s like this and I just have to remember to trust. Luckily I tattooed this word on my hand some years ago. T R U S T But TRUST doesn’t come naturally… we are so used to control everything that TRUSTING is hard! So here’s for you a quick Exercise: take your journal (or a post it or a scrap of paper) and a pen. set a timer for 2 minutes. write down a list of those times you thought life wasn’t going where you wanted but then, with time, you realized that the “don’t going where you wanted” it was, as a matter of fact, a present! keep writing down everything that comes to mind (like a grocery shopping list) until the end of the timer when the timer ends take a big breath and read the list. smile I’m going to do this exercise too, right now. Because TRUST takes an active will of being passive. It’s a balance between action and immobility. Between going forward and flying above . And it’s a work you must learn to do for you, on your own. And it’s worthy at the end. Or at least I hope so ???? anyway, thanks for following and supporting my work, for opening this email, for always sending me your positive feedback. Thanks for those human that during the months and the years have bought my art, my prints, my classes, my clothes, got tattooed etcetera… your support mean the world to me. You supporting my work it is what gives me the will to continue creating. I love you. Nicoz Ps: make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel (for sneak peek of my Graphic Journaling classes) and to my telegram channel (I send you love text messages) And if you are in a shopping mood for Xmas or for you, check: + if you want to buy original art check out my Shop  become a Patreon now

make love your priority it’s so hot in here partially because it’s summertime but mostly because I’m on fire I’ve been drawing and thrifting clothes and sewing to make my new Strangeland Queer Clothes to be ready to sell before my summer break because I’ll be on holiday from August 5. What will I do during holidays? me, I will “play with FIRE”, whaaaat!? aka: I’ll be translating my Graphic Novel “Play With Fire” from Italian to French! I’m so excited about this, I will tell you more when I’ll be back at the end of August. but let’s go back To our beloved Queer Clothing because the new batch is online! Every model is unique and there will be no second like them! I NEEDED to make some tank tops aka A-shirts because it’s summer and it’s HOT! ???? shopping time!  I love to Upcycle all the Sailor Tshirt I thrift here in france with my Mermaids and some naïf  embroidery View similar products » I’ve hand painted another poppy white tshirt ! Shop the tshirt » And all the trousers are on sale! Check them out

if you draw your own Tarot cards then you want to believe them! am I right? I mean, “meaning” and “signs”  is what you make of them. and those days I want to believe that any sign means well, that any sign is positive and that the Universe is friendly! it’s summer yes but  it’s still fucking pandemic and sometimes  life is hard! but just because we are in deep shi… PAIN, it doesn’t mean that we need to suffer. for this reason I’m going to share with you this Graphic Journaling class about how to use the Tarot’s meaning in your Graphic Journaling practice. and I’m going to make you draw your own Tarot card as well because WHY NOT? ​ we are going to use  the  “Major Arcana” of the Tarots of Marseille as an excuse for Drawing Exercises AND Introspection and it’s going to be  pretty awesome. (never have I  ever drew a graphic journal? you can start  with one class)  take your journal, pens and this hour and a half of self care moment to take the class. this is the first of 22 class. we start with an introduction to the Tarot’s and we directly jump into studying and drawing the first card (which is not, as you will learn, the card number 1) I hope that you will enjoy those journaling exercises and I can’t wait for you to send me mails and DMs with your tarot’s cards if you like this kind of practice  share this email with a friend that may like it! and you can also come and subscribe to my Graphic Journal Club Patreon page as a Student to catch the live class  (from 3 to 20€ a month accordingly on your possibilities) come to the Graphic Journal Club and what about the upcycled queer fashion? you know I own a tattoo studio in #larochelle called Strangeland  right? well I have this dream of turning Strangeland into something that you can wear  but I don’t want to dive into serial clothing making because it demands a business setting that I can’t manage. what I want to do is to make wearable things that are a mix of #upcycling and #handpainted materials. Here as an exemple  some of those items. it’s just the beginning of a dream and any encouragement is welcome ????️‍⚧️ Upcycling the typical La Rochelle  “marinière” with artworks and queer colors is what I like to do the most those days! I buy thrift sailor t-shirts and I upgrade them with my Mermaids and Poppies to make them Balboized go to shop it now  and I like to paint some Nicoz Balboa Poppy! this T-shirt is for sale now and there’s free shipping on the whole store with the code I will give at the end of the page   Shop the sale » this is the iconic rainbow-haired girl head by Nicoz Balboa hand screenprinted by Nicoz himself. when you buy this print You enter a Russian Roulette contest! this means that you don’t get to pick from which series of colors your order will arrive. you may get a print coming from a series of 20 or a series of 1! you’ll see which print the destiny will chose for you. go to shop it now  painted Nicoz Balboa Poppy on your crouch  this time I’ve painted on Work-Trousers  they’re for sale  now and there’s free shipping on the whole store with the code I will give you at the bottom of the page Shop the sale » I hope that you will love to wear those upcycled clothes. doing this means the world to me the upcycled queer fashion is here bye bye and reply to this email or send me a DM on instagram to tell me what do you think about all this ‍

Yay we made it also through our 3rd class and you all where on fire! We started the class with a meditation to set our intention for the afternoon, to recentrer into our purpose. This is so important because often we got lost into habits and patterns and we are so much more than that! Then, while still being in semi meditative state, we worked on our self portrait to embodying our practice even a little more right before the fire start, the Drawing Jam! Each one of the student wrote a word in a private chat, and then had 30’’ for drawing  each word and, in this way, we had all sort of drawing assignments! from “lamp” (twice) to “panties” but also “growth” or “stretching”. It was fun, wasn’t it? For most of us, on a way or another, is rare to go on with an artistic practice once we have lost our baby’s theeth (for Rudolf Steiner once we’ve lost our baby’s teeth we were entered in the “age of reason”), once we begin to think of ourselves as “good at something and bad at something else” we are to afraid to create freely. And sometimes is not even true! But the side effects of this rationalisation of our skills are profound, once we abandon those activity because “we are bad at it” our groove is lost, our freedom of mind is wrecked and it can be for life. The thing is, if you think your drawing is bad, I mean… if you don’t like it, remember that it’s only your ego that’s judging it. The ego is ambitious and sometimes is useful, with 0% ego maybe we won’t even get out of bed in the morning! Ego can be a tool but it can’t rule you. Is like letting a hammer decide on you life, right? The ego want to divide us from the rest, this is true in life AND in our artistic practice. It happens when we judge our drawing because in that moment we are less than the other artists, poor us! AND it happens when we scroll through Instagram and see a drawing and think: “eeewww this sucks!” too! Because in that moment, even if the “other artists” are below us, we still are “divided”. I KNOW YOU DO THIS! We all do this! The trick is: don’t believe what your ego sais! Feeling better than the others is not self esteem, is just the other side of self pity. Self esteem is knowing that you are unique and you don’t need for other people to be less than you to be it. When we judge other people’s work we inhibit our creativity too!  Think about it,  if you judge others THEN you’ll be afraid that others will do the same on you and you’ll find yourself creating out of fear of being judged aka you’ll be creating to have something that people love. And it will happen that you want to do a “cool” drawing just to amaze people AND THAT’S OK, as long as you are aware of it and you don’t believe the hype. The cool thing is, we are working in our journal and our journal is our home and we are FREE. During our timed, crazy, exercises (a house on fire anyone?) we start to learn how to trust our senses and shut our mind off. Sometimes if we only trust our senses, and we go for it, we will see that -wooow!- we CAN ACTUALLY draw! Yes! Everyone can draw, everyone is unique and can bring their own message (I wish they taught me this in art school, I wish I’ve heard that when I was 16, 20 and even 30!) and if you needed to hear that, maybe you would like to consider of becoming a student on Patreon….  After our drawing exercises we finished our class with this Emily Dickinson’s poem that, dunno why, I thought it would be a sort of ode to our journal and our freedom (maybe you’re interpreting it different, hit reply to tell me) It goes like: “He Ate and Drank the Precious Words” by Emily Dickinson He ate and drank the precious words, His spirit grew robust; He knew no more that he was poor, Nor that his frame was dust. He danced along the dingy days, And this bequest of wings Was but a book. What liberty A loosened spirit brings Ah and also: “Emily Dickinson was born to a prominent Massachusetts family and spent the bulk of her life inside her home in Amherst. Only seven of her poems were published during her lifetime, and virtually none were published as originally written until the mid 1950s. (Emily’s odd punctuation, capitalization, and formatting did not meet with standard publishing  ?approval” for earlier editions.)” amazing right? We are so ruling this quarantine like Dickinson: inside our homes, dressing in whit….pajamas and producing art while thinking about death and  covid19. So Dickinson, We rule!  see you Sunday.

Hi fellow subscribers how your week has gone so far? I hope you drew with a lot of pleasure and that you used your (same) notebook for you graphic journaling. Keeping always the same one until the end is important for 2 reasons: you will have forever available at quick view your evolution (graphicwise and lifewise) arriving at the end of a notebook/sketchbook/journal is a satisfaction that I want you to feel at least once in your lifetime 🤓 And even if you made some lines, some drawing, you don’t like, just turn the page! you know, your journal was made to have “wasted” pages and unfruitful drawings and it’s ok with it. do you remember what we said last time about a drawing that YOU don’t like? (a hint: NOTHING). ——- remembering ——- in a graphic journal sometimes we draw what we see but most of the time we draw what we remember (and therefore what we’ve  FELT) and this is WHY this is not a class were I teach you how to draw. I’m teaching you how to remember. there is some “drawing” that is already there inside of you and (even if you stopped drawing when you were 8) it’s still there! and it’s not forgotten, you only forgotten how to remember 🙂 so we are on our journals and we are drawing memories, we are telling our story therefore we are learning to draw a feeling in a narrative way. nothing to do with an art therapy session in wich you act with gestures on your drawing to express your felling, in this class we learn the storytelling of a feeling. last Sunday we started our class with a quick exercise by cartoonist Ivan Brunetti (from his book “Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice”) we divided our page in 4 and then we drew a castle 4 times. first time we had set a timer for 2 minutes, second time for 1 minute then 30 seconds and, at last, for 15 seconds. and the results were amazing! would you ever believed that you were going to draw a castle in 15 (fifteen!) seconds if I told you before? you can do it! you got this! we went on with our lesson by drawing what we did/heard/felt the day before. and for this we had some “going inside our head” exercises to help us remember. your graphic journal will fill with things that you’ve noticed even if you think your day was *boring* because days aren’t  truly boring. why? because what’s boring  is our “unpresent” mind, I mean, sometimes our mind is like a hamster who needs his wheel spinning, and when the wheel spins we can’t see or enjoy anything more. sometimes drawing without an aim can help, you know…the “useless drawing”! those pages we fill up while listening on a podcast or while binging on a  netflix show (by the way, I totally loved FELL GOOD) because your hand and instinct are free while your mind (remember the hamster in the wheel?) are occupied by the shows. —— running after a style, finding your artistic self —— the more we draw and the more *someting* starts to appear: our own style. tadaaan! but what’s “your style”? Your “style” are those lines and shapes that are truly yours, those drawings that comes when you’re drawing from that magical place we called “the groove” and that someone would call “inspiration” but  that I prefer also to call “(en)JOY” (this doesn’t mean you need to be *happy* when you draw). Your “style” are those drawings that appears when you have no expectations and you only follow this flow, this vortex of expression. BUT (there’s always a but) this doesn’t mean that : •you only have to draw while “in the groove”. sometimes you will draw to kill time, out of sadness and loss, because you have and assignment or for a deadline and THAT’S OK. •this doesn’t mean neither that you “style” will always be  100% pure! sometimes you will want to try out new things as an exercise and sometimes you will keep some of those skills and sometimes you’ll let them go and THAT’S OK. one day you may even stumble on a book by that artist that inspired you so much in the past just to rediscover that you had taken from them a certain way to put yellow outlines or a way to draw nostrils. AND THAT’S OK.  actually,  to acknowledge our past masters by thanking them in our heart is a way to grow in your artistic self. —- we continued the class with some self portraits exercises to learn how to accept every sign that may appear on paper, it is important to always accept and see what you just did because you never know where this new sign may take you. ride, follow, the urge to find your own “line”, you own style without judging or rejecting it because you may block your own “line” even before it may had the opportunity to present itself to you :BUT: never identify with what you just did, don’t force it to happen, because it might (and it will) change within time. it’s a balance you have to find: don’t cling on your *style* but don’t push it away just because someone else do things differently. be proud of the artist you are and forget about yourself at the same time. it’s a dance. Does it sound abstract to you? This because the only way of understanding what I’ve just said is by “practicing” and noticing when you swing from one side (judging what you do) or the other (wanting to push to have  your “style”). have a good draw xoxo Nicoz

First of all thanks too all the amazing Artists who joined the  graphic journaling class. We had humans from France, from Italy, from Brazil, Turkish and Germans ones too. We gathered all around  our Zoom screens  and we felt like we were in the same room. It’s beautiful to see how humans beings react in those scary and uncertain times -when they can- they go tap in their creative space right away as an urge (dancing, coloring, writing, singing) And this is the reason I’m organizing those classes, to use what I can do to make your ’self isolation life’ a little lighter. Having artistic and storytelling tools gives us the power to express our feelings. before starting our class, we centered and came back to a place of presence thanks to this awesome short  Deepak Chopra méditation, I put it right here (the name is a link) so you can come back to it whenever you want. in those series of lessons we are going to practice journaling on a graphic side, with images, and we’re going to use art supplies. However we aren’t looking for creating the “ultimate masterpiece”, what we’re looking for is presence and absence of judgment on what’s been created. And how are we going to tell our “story”? with our hands! by writing, drawing, coloring, sticking pictures on our journal. When we tell a story we transfer *something* from our inside to the outside. Doing this means “narrating” and “narration” (or “storytelling”) is a human instinct! We do this since we are kids and we project images and stories from our inside to the unanimated object who are outside of us, how? I’m gonna let amazing artist, recipient of MacArthur “Genius” Grant, legend of alternative comics and illuminated visual art teacher Lynda Barry explaining it to you in her amazing Ted Talk. In those classes we (will) accept everything we move to the outside. You think you can’t draw? Ok, I’d like you to answer to this question: “what is a bad drawing?” And “How old do you need to be to make a bad drawing?” if I give you the exercise to draw a “hairdresser” you will create TWO images: the one in your head  before starting (the drawing you wan to make) and the actual drawing on paper (the drawing you made). To simply see this is mindblowing  because now you can’t unseen it. Until you forget what you were « trying to do », you can’t relax into the actual act of creating . liking (or not) the result can get us blind, but I want to ask you:  «what happens to the drawing  when we don’t like it? » answer : absolutely nothing, the drawing exists whether you like it or not. (you may destroy the paper but then this would be « what happens to  the paper -or to you- when you don’t like the drawing ?») When we follow what feels good, when we’re enjoying our process, we get into the groove and there’s  a magic that happens: we forget if we like our drawing or not and we forget about ourselves. we forget about ourselves (yes I‘m writing this twice) and yet our hand continue to move, and the drawing appears! this is the practice: trusting what feels good, keeping the hand moving  while staying in the moment. and even! Sometimes even STARTING to draw can be scary, like if someone asks you to draw a car why does it have to be as scary as you where asked to jump off a cliff? so, I’d like to finish with a question (answer  it in your graphic journal): « how would you experience the drawing if you knew you couldn’t never fail at it? » See you next sunday XoXo Nicoz   ps: here  the works from the first lesson, in no particular order. (Click on the names, they’re links to the artists’ s Instagrams or websites) Geraldine Joséphine: Vania Passini: Gisela Silestre: Debora Dos Santos: Marie ”Runner Yogi Ocean”: Virginie Rouvière: Giovanna ‘Joni’ Bisoni: Chiara Cavalletti: Agathe and her daughter Stella: Hillary Banks Self: Daily Period: Beckou des Bois: Laura Delune: Sanja: MarieAnne: Anne G. : Claire: Marty Molinari: Alessandra Tisato: Sezgi: ChiaraPredebon: