Be It Resolved: I will be patient
Drawn 12/27/2012
Be It Resolved: I Will Be Diligent
Drawn 12/28/2012
Be It Resolved: I Will Be Humble
Drawn 12/31/2012
Be It Resolved: I Will Be Charitable
Drawn 1/1/2013
© 2025 Marty Coleman | napkindad.com
Gift Giving Note #3
To give and then not feel one has given is the very best of all ways.
Drawn 12/12/2012
Gift Giving Note #4
Giving the gift of the mutual enjoyment of time passing is timeless.
Drawn 12/13/2012
Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a consiracy of love.
Drawn 12/2/2016
Jesus associated with outcasts. He spoke with them, touched them, ate with them, loved them. Merry and Happy.
Drawn 12/20/2011
Be blessed and be a blessing. Merry Christmas!
Drawn 12/25/2011
How many observe Christ’s birthday. How few,his precepts.
Drawn 12/28/2016
Be it resolved: I will be kind.
Drawn 12/26/2012
© 2025 Marty Coleman | napkindad.com
The Napkin’s Guide To Happy Living: Transform your obligations into your opportunities
Drawn 12/31/2013
Things to tell your kids: Make good friends and keep good friends
drawn on 12/1/2016
The best time to make friends is before you need them.
drawn on 12/6/2016
I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.
drawn on 12/15/2011
An ordeal is an ideal that isn’t yours.
drawn on 12/16/2011
Gift Giving Note #1: How you give is more important than what you give.
drawn on 12/10/2012
Gift Giving Note #2: A child cannot give what she does not receive.
drawn on 12/11/2012
“Worry is like a rocking chair: both give you something to do, but neither gets you anywhere.”
drawn on a napkin, 12/6/2011
“The only people you should try to get even with are those who have helped you.”
Drawn 12/13/2011
“Great works are performed not by strength but by perseverance.”
Drawn 12/5/2017
“The Napkin’s Guide To Happy Living: Act and Think in Terms of Love”
drawn 12/10/2013
The Napkin’s Guide to Happy Living: Develop the Courage to Say and Do What You Love
drawn 12/11/2013
The Napkin’s Guide to Happy Living: Creat a Physical World That Makes You Smile
drawn 12/13/2013
Day 13
The Napkin’s Guide to Happy Living: Educate Yourself So You Can Explain Yourself
drawn 12/16/2013
These are napkin drawings I’ve done in December over the decades. I am posting them daily on social media but am combining them here to post weekly.
“Pain makes people think. Thought makes people wise. Wisdom makes life endurable.”
Drawn 12/11/2000
“We would often be ashamed of our finest actions if the world understood all the motives which produced them.”
– La Rochefoucauld
Drawn 12/04/2001
“Destiny is what you are supposed to do in life. Fate is what kicks you in the ass to make you do it.” – Henry Miller
Drawn 12/13/2002
“Confusion is the welcome mat at the door of creativity.”
Drawn 12/8/2010
“The distance a goldfish swims is not controlled by the bowl.”
Drawn 12/14/2009
“Patience with others is love. Patience with self is hope. Patience with God is faith.”
Drawn 12/12/2011
© 2025 Marty Coleman | napkindad.com
This woman is a worship leader at our church. She sings on stage but when not singing she sits on side row with her family. Today her son was intensely interested in a stretchy rope that he brought with him and spent a while sitting in front of her playing with it. She did a great job parenting him, using a nice combination of letting him do his thing with reminders to behave and pay attention. She didn’t enforce, just reminded.
I found myself in church sitting next to Natalie and her family from my community group. I usually don’t sit right next to people and if I do I certainly don’t usually draw them. But I know Natalie and I know that her whole family are church doodlers so I felt comfortable drawing her. When I painted the drawing later I didn’t remember the exact color scheme except she was in light clothes and there was pink here and there. So, that is what i imagined and I chose the colors.
When I am sitting in church, cafe and waiting room and have finished a drawing I often will not start a new one from observation. I will just start making something up and draw that. I will often just start with a long line and then let that tell me where to go. The woman’s hair in the front was the first long line. I did that one then just started repeating the shape of the face and the hair, adding in variations just to see what expressions and looks I could come up with. I added halos and all of a sudden they were saints.
Sometimes I see someone’s face and something stands out that I am attracted to. In this case I just happened to glimpse a woman with a very distinct nose. I wasn’t able to see much more of her so instead of trying to draw her from life I just started with the curve of her nose as I remembered it and made up most the rest. I also remembered her hair style and incorporated an stylized version of that as well. When I draw from memory and with no exact reference I will often turn the person into a museum piece of some sort. In this case she became a sculptural bust. But she was on the right side face left and that left a big blank space on the right. So I thought it would be fun to draw her looking at a painting of the rest of herself.
We had a guest preacher a few weeks back. He was a snappy dresser so I started to draw him. However, I didn’t really like his message, it was too preachy, formulaic and simplistic for my taste.
This woman was in front of me at church. Once I finished drawing her profile I lost interest in drawing the rest of the church scene so I started making up a story about her using images instead of words. What she thought, what she said, what she actually was living and how different they were.
I was scanning a sketchbook from 2020 recently and noticed a pattern in a number of drawings. There were a number of nudes with arms raised in joy, ranging from the simplest of stick figures to full nudes in a domestic setting. I thought they all looked happy so I am gathering them together and showing them to you.
Part of the reason for showing them is because I saw the pattern. But another is that happy nudes are a rarity. Most of the time when a nude is presented in art, they are meant to be seen as serious or sensual or sexual or erotic or romantic or beautiful. Not many are created to be seen as happy. But happy is just as legitimate an emotion for someone who is nude as any other emotion or feeling.
© 2025 Marty Coleman | napkindad.com
When I was 17 I found my mother almost unconscious on the landing of our staircase at home. I recognized she was drunk. I brought her upstairs so she could go to her bedroom and lay down. She had her hand covering her forehead and as I left her at the top of the stairs she turned to me and dropped her hand. She had the most massive angry purple bump on her head I had ever seen. I knew immediately I had to get her to the hospital, which I did. She had had a massive brain hemorrhage with results very similar to a stroke. She spent 6 months away from home, first in the ICU, then a general ward of the hospital and then in a convalescent hospital. She came home with a slightly palsied right side of her body, a limp and some slurred speech.
I knew why this had happened. It was because she was an alcoholic. But during the entire 6 months recovery that was never mentioned or dealt with by her or my father. As a matter of fact, when she returned home she started drinking again. I was absolutely livid that my father was allowing alcohol in the house when he knew this was what almost killed her. I said so to his face a number of times. I also told it to my mom. I told her that absolutely, completely, without a single doubt in my mind, that if she kept on drinking she would kill herself. My older sister Nancy also knew and said the same. Even my younger sister, Jackie, who was only 9, knew it.
But my mom didn’t believe she had a problem and my father didn’t want to face that she did. The consequences were too great to their way of life. But finally my father changed his mind and realized there was no alternative but that she go to an in-patient rehabilitation hospital and get sober. We all went together to drop her off. She was as angry as I had ever seen her (and I had seen her plenty angry). She thought we all hated her and she hated all of us. We all cried as we left. It was horrible and more.
But I was never more relieved in my entire life. I knew she had to face it and I knew she wasn’t going to at home. And she did face it. She was there for 12 weeks. She plan was no contact for the first month and then only once a week I think. But less than 2 weeks after she went in I was blown up on our boat and almost died. I faced my own trials at that point, recovering from extensive burns. The rest of my family obviously had these serious events they also had to face.
But it was my mother who had to face the darkest of times. Not only was she just beginning her journey of sobriety, she had to deal with that while knowing her son was perhaps dying off in some hospital in Brooklyn, NY and she could do nothing about it. She wasn’t even allowed to call me for over a week. It was all just so harsh and so overwhelming for her.
So what happened? When she finally came home after 12 weeks (I had been home from the hospital for about 2 weeks at that point) she was a changed person. She was sober but it was much more than that. She had faced every possible demon, angel, heartache, abandonment and hatred of herself and others imaginable. And she had come out the other side at peace. How did that happen? She told the story that she was just going through the motions at the hospital, reciting the various 12 steps, the various sayings and truisms of AA, without much enthusiasm or true belief they were helpful. But when she heard I had been hurt that all changed. Then she completely gave up control and believed in all her heart the saying ‘Let go and let God.’
That is when it all made sense to her and she turned the corner. She lived 15 more sober, peaceful years and that healed and redeemed so much for our family.
I tell this story for two reasons. One, to illustrate the quote that you must face something to change it. There is no way around it. But the other reason is to also illustrate that you cannot orchestrate what that facing will look like. You may think you can see the mountain and all you have to do is climb it. But you don’t know what is just beyond your vision. What valley could heal you, what river could drown you, what bear could eat you alive, what human or divine being could save you. You don’t even know if you will be successful.
But you know for damn sure you will not be successful if you don’t turn your face towards the mountain and start climbing.
© 2025 Marty Coleman | napkindad.com
What is behind the lust for money? Perhaps it’s:
Whatever is behind it, the danger of caring too much about money is you end up caring too little about value. I don’t mean value as in a bargain at the store. I am talking about what is of true value – relationships, creativity, art, love, mercy, compassion, trust, environment, justice, law, peace, knowledge, education and more.
Just remember, what you pay attention to is what you become. We can see the results all around us, for good and bad.
Pay attention to the good.
© 2025 Marty Coleman | napkindad.com
Have you ever had big ambitions that didn’t come to pass? I have. For me it was to be a famous fine artist and to be a professor of Art at a University. I came close to reaching both but neither of those things happened. There are many reasons why. Most, but not all, had to do with me. Of course there were decisions about employment and gallery representation that were beyond my control and I don’t give those vagaries of fortune much thought. But I do think now and then about what I did control and how if I had done this or that differently maybe those things would have happened. When I do think in that way I have trained myself to quickly change focus and think instead about what I did accomplish.
To use the metaphor of baseball, I didn’t make it to the major leagues but I did make it to the minor leagues. I was having local and regional exhibitions, being highlighted in local publications, getting a number of grants and awards and teaching at the community college level for 9 years. I helped found and lead a photography club for 8 years as the director of education, giving lectures and leading hands-on outings.
The result was that my art was seen and made an impact. My knowledge of drawing, photography, art and art history was given to hundreds of students. All that was wonderful and fulfilling just as it’s fulfilling for a minor league player to play for a crowd, no matter the size.
But here is the ironic part. Who would figure that the littlest thing I ever did in art, the least consequential, the least impactful to the smallest group of people, the one where I was planting the littlest of seeds would be what got me the most fame and the greatest following.
And that is what you are looking at here. A Napkin. I started drawing on napkins in 1998 to put in my daughters’ lunches. It’s now 2025, 27 years later, and I am still doing it. I got national attention, I got local attention, I got invited to speak at conferences and to lead workshops. I sold work. I live streamed drawing napkins as hundreds of people watched from around the world.
My point in telling you this is to help you realize that no matter how seemingly unable you are to make big things happen, you are ALWAYS able to make little things happen. Doing something little isn’t defeat, it’s progress and it’s growth. Nothing big starts big. It starts as something little.
Go do little.
You can read about the beginnings of ‘The Napkin’ here.
© 2025 Marty Coleman | napkindad.com
