The Art of Get it on Amazon

made in meetings, by John Carrie

John doodled through office meetings to keep a busy mind focused. Now his 30 patterns are yours to fidget, shade and color, each one printed twice: once with a head start, once as bare lines.

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Front cover of The Art of Flaws by John Carrie: a hand-drawn pattern collage, half black line work and half colored with markers.

We spend a lot of time trying to get things right. The perfect line. The perfect result. This book doesn't care about any of that. Here, the crooked line is welcome. No masterpiece. No rules. Just make a mark. And if it isn't perfect? Good.

That's the art of flaws.

Adapted from the first page of The Art of Flaws, Volume I.

Same page. Three ways in.

Drag the pen across. Line work first, then hatching, then color. Most pages end up somewhere in between.

  1. Start
  2. Explore
  3. Make it yours

Make it yours.

Go on, make a mark. Color it with a marker or hatch it with a fine pen, then see how John colored the same page.

That’s the whole idea. The book has 30 patterns, each printed twice: once with a head start, once as bare lines.

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The feather page from the back cover. Your colors stay on this page until you reload.
free printable

Try a page in your next meeting.

Get The Meeting Page free: one pattern from the book and a short guide to doodling through a call. Print it, bring a pen, see what your hands do.

Download the page

PDF, 2 pages, 0.9 MB.

Buying for a team? Ten copies make an easy office gift exchange.

Add 10 to your Amazon cart

What’s in the book.

30

hand-drawn patterns

Leaves, waves, scales, sunbursts and shapes that don’t have names yet. Each one twice: partly hatched to get you going, then bare lines to make your own.

  • 128pages to draw, trace, shade and color.
  • 6 × 9inches. Fits in a backpack, a tote or a carry-on.
  • All agesKids, teens and adults. Simple enough to start, detailed enough to stay with.
  • 0screens. Good for waiting rooms, long flights and quiet evenings.

Flip through a few.

Three of the 30 patterns, at different stages. Flick the top page away to see the next one.

Sunburst page colored in purple, orange, teal and blue marker.
Bloom page of leaves, half of them filled with fine hatching.
Shapes page as plain line work, ready to start.
Bloom page with leaves colored pink, orange, blue and green.
Sunburst page with rays filled in black hatching.
Shapes page colored in bright marker.
real pens, real pages

Already in people's hands.

John took the book to art studios and cafés and handed people a pen. Nobody asked what to do first.

  • A woman with tattooed arms leans over a table in an art studio, hatching a page with a green pen.
    art studio, green pen
  • A man at an outdoor table at night fills in a pattern with a red pen.
    late night, red pen
  • A woman in glasses works on a page with a purple pen at a café table.
    over coffee, purple pen
  • A woman in an art studio holds up the book and photographs its cover with her phone.
    first, a photo of the cover

Look closer.

Every hatch is one pen stroke, drawn by hand. Run the glass over the page.

A sunburst of rays, each filled with dense hand-drawn hatching.
John Carrie from behind in a denim jacket and cap, looking out over mountains. John Carrie in a denim jacket and wide-brimmed hat, looking down, with mountains and a lake behind him.

Drawn by John Carrie.

John is an engineer by profession and an artist in music and visual art. He published notebooks before this book, but kept his drawings to himself until the daily stress of the 9-to-5 gave him a reason to share: pages that help a busy mind slow down.

“Do not be afraid to create.”

John Carrie

Before this book, the notebooks.

Before he shared his drawings, John published space and planet notebooks: small, lined, 6 × 9 inches. Each cover opens on Amazon.

See every book
The Art of Flaws, Volume I, front cover.

Pick up your pencil.

The Art of Flaws, Volume I. Paperback, 128 pages, $9.99. A good gift for the explorer in your life.

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