Sketchbook Confessional November 2021

In November I made hundreds of bookmarks featuring paper birds, and also some larger paper-on-canvas pieces and paper-on-paper pieces (like the above.)

I had tons of fun putting together these birds. I visited Two Hands Paperie in Boulder with friends almost weekly to pick out papers and find new exciting grab bags of paper to see what I could work into my paper art.

I first started making paper art when I lived in my apartment in Austin, TX, after having moved from Boulder to give a new city a try. I tend to make paper cats and paper birds, and I seem to fire up my collage engines about every fall when it gets cool.

In November I also worked on getting photos of some of my texture paintings and uploading the photos to Society6.

I’ve really liked how the textures appear on various products.

Tilted Sun:

I finished about three pages of Tilted Sun and released them in September. I plan on releasing more as I can, however I’ve been so happy with painting outside and with my paper art, that I do not think I will stick to a regular schedule with Tilted Sun.

Feedback I’ve had from my peers is that they do like the webcomic format for Tilted Sun, but, it is a bit hard to navigate. Being 100 pages already, it’s hard for readers to flip back to different parts of the comic and put together connections that may otherwise make more sense in a print format.

If I start a Kickstarter to get Tilted Sun in print soon, I hope you will support it - though I didn’t plan Tilted Sun to be a print book and wanted it to be a webcomic, it sounds like the people have spoken!

NFTs:

Earlier this year, I really enjoyed working with the team at Gacha Gacha Art as an artist, and decided to try releasing a few NFTs on my own.

In a way, I think I’ve always been an NFT artist. Projects like Tilted Sun are extremely difficult for me because in my assessment, I am more of a cover-artist or a splash page artist than a sequential artist. It’s hard to move things in sequence, in color, and make them look perfect and good.

I’ve enjoyed making GIF art specifically for NFTs and also re-formatting old GIF art and making the art a bit more special for the NFT format.

I’ve also purchased a couple NFTs on Ethereum and also Tezos. It’s been exciting to learn about how crypto and art work together in this domain.

^ a couple of the NFTs I’ve bought - I thought both of these were cute and funny so I bought them.

NFTs seem to appeal to the same part of my brain that has always loved things like Gachapon machines, Happy Meal Toys, and blindbox toys where you never quite know what you’re going to get, but it will probably be pretty cool.

When I visited Tokyo, I would buy a few gachapon at a metro station, and sometimes I would open the capsule and have no idea what it was that I was looking at. The plastic character would be from some show, or a game, and often one that I had never seen. I really liked what I got anyways. I think there is something worthwhile in being open to characters that people love so much.

I think it’s too late to be calling NFTs, Web3, or the Metaverse a trend, I think it will become a part of most of our lives more and more as time goes on.

Reading, Watching, Playing:

I’ve gotten really into watching documentaries in the background while playing Stardew Valley on the Switch.

Stardew Valley is so fun and I could play it all day tbh. It’s one of those games where there is always something to do.

I love Stardew Valley

I still play a few DnD games with friends online, and make art for our campaign.

Since my last Sketchbook Confessional was in June of 2021, I’m behind a few months on all the drawings I’ve made for fun for the campaign.

Exercise and Running life:

November fitlady photo :)

I took most of October and November completely off from running, I went out and hiked with my easel a bit but otherwise took it easy. I think this is a fair thing to do as I felt I needed a bit of a rest.

As of Dec 1 2021, I’ve not had alcohol for about a year and a half. I barely think about it anymore, as I have almost no social life and stay home most of the time for COVID purposes and also because I really like staying home, making paper birds, and otherwise just chilling.

I spend most of what would have been my beer money on buying crypto and diversifying my investments. It’s been fascinating to learn about. I never buy so much crypto that I risk my life savings, what I do instead is I spend $50 here and there, money that I would have otherwise been spending on going out. This seems to be the amount of risk that works for me.

Hiking with an easel!

Taking a couple months off running doesn’t seem to be a bad idea at all since I was so into it earlier this year, finishing the Collegiate Peaks 25 mile run (very slowly). For training, I was doing a half-marathon or more just about every weekend. So I think it is good to take some time off every now and then for me. Maybe it is not the same for other runners and they train year round without missing a beat, but for me I really liked taking a bit of time to rest my joints and focus on maintaining health with walks.

I plan to get much more back into running in December and early 2022, wow it feels funny writing that, haha!

Catch you next time, see you Space Cowboy -

Becky

Sketchbook Confessional February 2021

In February I continued a series of oil paintings of Mt. Elbert near Leadville and also lupine flowers. I will keep painting these as time goes on.

I also tried something new this month and I wasn’t sure if it would work. In the first week of February, I painted a D&D mini of a dragon using the oil paints that I usually keep in my studio.

A couple of quick google searches revealed that yes, oil paint would be all right for these minis. Turns out oil paint is almost preferred, as long as it is thin.

Overall, painting the dragon mini was really fun and relaxing. It felt a lot like coloring in a coloring book. All of the hard parts of the artwork are already solved if you paint on a pre-built mini.

I couldn’t help but thinking that the dragon kind of looked like it was very happy and smiling, so I made a few instagram stories where the dragon was singing.

I ended up liking this so much that I bought another dragon to paint.

I sort of bought the dragon on a whim. I went into a game shop in Boulder and was so bummed about how empty everything seemed. The game shop, which would normally be full of people playing Magic and tabletop stuff was just empty and dark. I had to buy … something … so the dragon was what I picked out.

In other Dnd and ABBA related art realms, I drew a picture of myself, my Elder Scrolls Online character Averle, and my DnD character Arlina having gal time together with Geddy the Poodle.

I had an active and busy mid-February so it was fun to unwind with this silly just-for-fun drawing.

In a way, I do spend a lot of time with Averle and Arlina. I realize that this is sort of like looking at a grown adult who has imaginary friends, yet they are also extensions of myself. It’s fun to play Arlina because she can change into any kind of character, however, for my next Dnd character, I want to try to vastly branch out and play a character who is much different from me IRL, maybe an orc or tiefling one of the new 5e nonhuman characters.

Reading Watching Playing:

I’ve been very into Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. I started reading this book in April of 2020, and it gets more and more interesting with every page.

There are so many moments in this book that would be fun and challenging to draw. I’ve made a list of things I want to draw from the book

Severian and the Star Men

Severian and the Avern

Severian and Dorcas in The Green Room

I mapped out Severian and the Star Men below, haven’t gotten much further and I sort of want to model this one out or pose to get it right.

Fitness

In February I got some nice training in at Leadville, CO with trainer Alex Willis. I did a couple miles running around Harrison Avenue in Leadville, and a few miles of skiing at Mt. Massive Golf Course. Getting up to Leadville from Boulder always seems to take a lot of energy from me. Even though I was born in Leadville and grew up there, it is still difficult to go from 5000 feet to 10000 feet and exercise a lot. This might go to show you that elevation is an incredible challenge no matter who you are.

I was able to knock out a couple big runs in February, like a 9 mile and a 10 mile. I hit my best efforts on a 10 mile and 15k. The scariest thing about the 10 mile run is that it goes … relatively fast. Mentally, it doesn’t seem like a drag at all, I sort of go into a mental state where I am not experiencing any stress while running, I seem to be somewhere else. Here are some results from Strava:

I also became “The Legend of Wonderland Lake” on Strava, which sounds pretty badass, haha!

It’s nice to have all of these stats and times in Strava and to have had them for a while. I can look back at my times from running in DC/MD/VA and compare notes. In the DMV I was running 12-14 min miles almost every mile. In Colorado, it looks like I am a lot faster in Colorado, about two minutes per mile faster on average, with 11:30 min miles being around my average. Given that Boulder is a lot higher in elevation than DC, that’s pretty good.

I don’t see myself as very fast, but I am able to endure and persist through just about anything. At the end of 10 miles, I feel like I could go 10 more.

In other fitness news, things are going well with sobriety. It is a lot easier to hit my goals with running and fitness by having alcohol just be automatically out of the picture. I’m still very hooked on caffiene - this might be something I work on kicking next, but at this time I don’t see any health benefit to doing so on the same level as kicking alcohol, so I’ll probably be sipping coffee for a while.


Thanks for reading!! xoxo


Who wrote this:

I’m a painter, I make comics, and sometimes I do computer stuff!

- Becky Jewell