My Plein Air April Recap (and some Plein Air Philosophy)

I saw the Plein Air April hashtag going around for the first time this year, and thought it would be fun to make an extra effort to get out and do some plein air.

Here I am on Christmas Day in 2020, I made this photo after doing a quick livestream of getting some plein air painting in.

Plein air is, perhaps oddly, one of my favorite things to do. I love it. I’ve done plein air on my birthday and also Christmas Day, both are days where I think about what I would like to do most. Plein air painting also got me through the end of 2020 and 2021. I was incredibly lonely during the lows of the novel coronavirus crisis, and being outdoors and making art was something that was decidedly safe.

A plein air painting I made near a river in El Dorado canyon in 2021

It’s an odd thing to love, because by my own assessment, my plein air paintings are usually not good. I might have a good one that I do, one out of five outings. It’s terrible odds. It’s a highly ineffective way, for me at least, to make pieces that might be good, or that might sell.

But I keep doing it because I enjoy it. I enjoy plein air painting because every time I go out, I learn something new. I love learning, and plein air is a high-intensity way to learn. It’s more likely for me to fail at plein air than succeed, and that’s where the learning comes from.

Even if the plein air painting I make on any given day isn’t good, it’s still the best possible painting I could have made at that moment. When I’m painting en plein air, I find I am doing my absolute best with what I have. Plein air is a way for me to leave it all on the field.

Plein air versus studio time reminds me a bit of how a science experiment can be structured in the world or in a vacuum. The studio is like the vacuum, it’s a resistence-less environment. The plein air environment is like stepping out of the vacuum.

Maybe the thing about plein air is that it pushes me so far out of my comfort zone that I get stronger and faster in ways that I couldn’t have imagined. Beyond the frustration and the gear obsession is the kind of artist growth that can’t really be put to words.

One of my first plein air paintings in April was this one, facing the flatirons from Wonderland Lake. I had a lot of fun making this. It’s small, I think it’s a 5 x 5 claybord painting.

Apparently Claybord is a little unusual to use for oil painting, but I didn’t know that! Gessobord is supposed to be better than Claybord since it is less dry, but I didn’t have any issues with the Claybord

This next painting I was able to make at Chautauqua. It was fun to get out, I went with my baby. This one is also about 5 x 5 inches:

I did a painting on Pearl Street too (photo at the top of this blog, haha)! The tulips on Pearl are a can’t-be-missed kind of situation each year. City paintings are something I’ve never done before. I had a lot of fun. This was a slightly larger painting than the first two, and on plexiglass instead of Claybord. I ended up scratching this painting a bit somehow, which is pretty fair game for plein air, yet very easy to fix eventually!

The next plein air journey I went on in April was to the Red Rocks trail in Boulder, one of my twitter friends went with me and we painted for a while. My baby also went along for the ride. The red rocks are always a fascinating rock formation to paint.

I ended up getting some dirt on this painting, which is pretty typical for plein air, which I will brush off when the painting dries completely.

For the last day of Plein Air April, I went back to Wonderland and painted some hills from a different angle. I ended up liking the painting I made a lot, it’s drying now so I will try to get a photo of it soon. It was pretty toasty out so I packed up relatively quickly after unpacking.

I actually tried an acrylic painting first on this outing, which is the panel that is in the photo above. The acrylic painting I tried was so terrible that I gave up almost immediately and switched back to my usual medium of oil. I think my brain was in oil-paint-mode which doesn’t work well with acrylics!

So that was my Plein Air April! I really enjoyed participating in this hashtag/month/event. The good thing about plein air painting in April is that it has geared me up for a summer of painting, which I am very excited about.

Until next time, thanks for reading!

Wonderland Lake September 2023

Here I am with Baby Jewell, my 1.5 month old, getting some painting in! A kind passerby took this photo and sent it to us.

When I think of painting, I think of relaxing. It’s great to get out and just let go. However, I will say that plein air painting is an exercise in chaos management: everything is fine and dandy until the wind comes up and blows dust on the canvas, or when several bees get attracted to the paint colors, or when, suddenly, it rains.

Sometimes I run into animals, or Baby Jewell burps up on my clean shirt, or he needs an impromptu diaper change on the trail. I never know what will happen next! That goes for the artwork, and for the act of getting to a nice painting spot.

There’s so much to prepare regarding bringing the right supplies, and planning for anything and everything. If I plan well and consider tools carefully, almost any kind of chaos can be under control. If I forget a crucial paintbrush or leave behind an outfit change for Baby Jewell, I have an opportunity to learn and do better next time.

Maybe the most important thing I’ve learned in painting plein air with a newborn so far is that the messy process is just as much of a treasure as the painting is once it’s done. The outcome or the painting is (usually) cool, but simply getting outside and going on the journey is an accomplishment. Even if I get dirt in my carefully arranged paints or if I’m only walking for 5 minutes before getting rained on, everything good is in the art of the trip. Each day that I decide to get off my butt and go outside is a good day, and now I get to do this with my best buddy! <3

Like most new parents, I was a little worried about what would happen to my life once I had a baby. Would I still be able to do art? What about my career?

Luckily all of these anxieties have gone away - through taking action, careful planning, and creative thinking, we’ve been able to find harmony together.

I made several paintings I am happy with while at the lake lately, a couple are above. I’ve been using gouache in the Traveler’s Notebook and it’s been going well. While the Traveler’s Notebook paper that I am utilizing right now is meant more for writing than painting, what I do after painting is I flatten the entire book under a couple other books to get any ripples out of each page. If a piece is really good, I consider removing it from the journal to make as it’s own framed piece.

Above is my exciting Art Mom Gear!

Traveler’s Notebook from Two Hands Paperie

iulie watercolors - the best, love these

JMFT Industries mini zip pouch

Himi gouache - within reach pricewise and high quality

Melanzana skirt - get them in Leadville!

Cotopaxi backpack - best colors ever!

A cup from my grandpa’s house

Ergobaby carrier - very comfy for me and Baby Jewell

Huggies - perfecto

You might notice the Himi gouache looks a bit dried out in the photo - it still works great when rewet! And I think it works very well with the iulie watercolors.

I’m very excited about my Art Mom Gear. It’s very heavy and I haven’t put any thought into making a lightweight setup, but that’s ok, I’m used to taking things pretty slow. With Baby Jewell in his carrier and backpack, I carry an extra 25 pounds, and I’m sure this will increase as Baby Jewell gets bigger or if I get some heavier paints or a big sketchbook.

After lifting Baby Jewell all over the place and carrying him across the countryside, I feel very strong. It’s hard to measure exactly how I’ve changed strengthwise before and after giving birth, but I will say that I feel strong, maybe because it has been like I have effectively carried a watermelon around for several months, up and down various stairs and trails. I’m just getting back into running and am taking it slow, running 1.5 miles or so at a time.

More painting on the way! I can’t wait to show what I’ve been up to lately on the trail.

Plein Air at Chautauqua Park in Boulder

After about an hour of hiking and taking the long way around Chautauqua, I was lucky to get to this sunset at a breaking point in the trees right above the park trailhead.

Sketchbook Confessional April 2021

In April, there was a mix of snowy days and warm days in Boulder, so I was lucky to get out and do some plein air painting around Colorado.

I was able to go to The Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs and paint some of the monumental rock formations there. Even though I grew up in Colorado, for some reason, this is one place I’ve never been. It was very accessible and easy to walk around. There are a few places slightly off the trail where I could set up the easel without straying too far or disturbing the local ecologies.

There are a ton of interesting moments to see and paint at Garden of the Gods. It is fun to puzzle over the many layered formations and also paint the terrain around the formations.

It was cool in the morning at the Garden of the Gods, yet the clouds burned off and the weather became quite toasty. I had water but should have packed even more.

In other paint efforts in April, I was able to get out and paint around Boulder too.

This view of Mount Sanitas is so pretty every time I see it. It’s not as iconic from this angle as the flatirons, yet you get to see so much of the valley from North Boulder if you look south. It is very fun to watch the sunset from here and paint the dramatic shadows on Mount Sanitas and the nearby rolling hills.

I also painted right in Chautauqua park! Occasionally I will complete training runs in Chautauqua Park and get benefits from the elevation and hills. I have never painted there before until this April.

I was able to knock out about 6 paintings of the flatirons on this day, some are definitely the kinds of paintings to take back to the studio and work on a bit more. Others were very good, in my opinion, for having been made on the spot. Not every plein air painting is perfect, yet it is always nice if a few of them are.

Lately I’ve been painting with gouache, which has been transformationally easier to do than painting outdoors with oil paint. Oil paint is tough to paint outdoors with because usually you have to have turpentine or makeup wipes to clean brushes. Turpentine is terrible, almost nothing will make turpentine better. That is why using the makeup wipes seems better to me for oil paint.

But that doesn’t matter in these photos since I’m using gouache! Gouache is so nice because it is such a bright paint, and, it dries fast! Painting with gouache is a lot like drawing. It’s also very easy to layer and add different colors on top of one another.

Lessons I learn from plein air painting:

1. Planning - Where does everything go? In what order should I paint which colors? Blue is a stronger color than yellow, so I should probably paint the sky first, and then the middle ground, and finally the foreground.

2. Chaos Management - The wind might come up and throw a bunch of dirt on the canvas. Bugs might get stuck in the paint. Bees are attracted to bright colors so painting can involve a lot of hornet and bee encounters. 

3. Communication - What does the painting say? What does it fail to say?

In other art efforts, I sprinted to get some abstract patterns done and uploaded to Society6 and also the POD service running on this website. I laid down quite a few swatches of gouache on yupo paper and uploaded the designs to Society6. Here are some of the swatches:

I took a Saturday and sprinted to see how many designs I could upload in one day. This involved a lot of reformatting and ascertaining the quality of the file sizes. My record for daily design uploads is 12!

Uploading ~12 designs onto ~70 products turned into about 850 unique product listings generated by Society6. The designs can be had on clocks, towels, shower curtains.

It was fun to turn uploading art into a game like this. There is definitely some downtime involved in making a big upload, since I would wait for Clip Studio Paint to make the files ultra-large, a lot of watching-of-loading screens and shuffling files from Dropbox to my computer. It’s fun to listen to podcasts while I am doing the not-art part of art. I hope to make a similar effort in the future where I try to upload as many files as possible in one day.

The funnest part of uploading these abstracts onto products is that I usually have no idea how the product will turn out, and after a couple tunings, iterations, and reuploads, the products look… amazing, like look at these backpacks:

You can find all of these backpacks and other products on my Society6 store here: https://society6.com/beckyjewell/backpacks

My other products on Society6 are still ‘good’ but abstracts are going to be more accessible for everyone.



Reading Watching Playing:

I’m still playing Dungeons and Dragons with some friends online on Zoom. We’re up to something like session 35 after starting a game in July of last year! It’s been a ton of fun to play our campaign.

Arlina the Changeling Bard is my character in our Dnd game. She’s really fun to play and has had some good Vicious Mockery moments. Now that she and the party are level 4, she’s able to deal a bit more damage in battles, where previously she was kind of just a healer, she can now do more like 8-10 damage instead of paltry 3s and 2s.

During the last couple days of April, I was able to get some Warhammer miniatures and build them. Earlier this year in March, I painted a D&D dragon miniature and had a bunch of fun. I never really ‘got’ model painting until I painted that dragon. Painting models kind of looked like a strange hobby to me, it didn’t make any sense, until I actually tried it and loved it! It is quite a lot like coloring, in 3D, and just like a coloring book, you can kind of take it as far as you want it to go. You can go hyper-detailed, or you can diligently follow the suggestions on the box, or, you can kind of go wild, and paint the figurines whatever you want. Technically there is no rule against the Gryph-hounds having rainbow feathers. I think when Robin Williams played he had a bright pink character, which is endlessly sweet to me.

I find building and painting the models to be very relaxing because a lot of the other tasks I do all day are so incredibly heady - looking at big swaths of data, figuring out 40-part problems, bug triaging, ect. Painting feathers on some Gryph-hounds, by comparison, is very relaxing. Plein air painting is relaxing too, yet, there is more puzzling to be done because nothing is done when you look at a blank canvas. In painting a gryph-hound, the gryph-hound is already created for you.

As far as actually playing Warhammer I’m still a few weeks away at least because there are so many figurines to build. Who knows, I might just like to paint the figurines, and that will be the extent to which I take the hobby. We will see!

I’m reading What I Talk About When I Talk about Running by Haruki Murakami. It’s an interesting book, and very easy to read. The other two big running/go hard books I’ve read in the past couple years are Finding Ultra from Rich Roll and Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins. Where Rich Roll and David Goggins go into their upbringings, Murakami’s book is a bit less about his early life, it’s more about running in general. He’s a little grumpy about some topics, but he usually only gets grumpy at himself in terms of running. I’d say the highlight of the book is when he is running a 100k race and he has a couple interesting experiences. I won’t spoil it though.

There are also a couple other running books out there I want to read. I am not sure if many books like this are by women, but I’d like to get a running book by a woman in my reading schedule soon. Maybe that is a book I could write someday.

Fitness:

This month I completed a couple big training runs for my race on May 1!

I was very happy with my low 11s pace on this 18 mile run:

My high 10s pace on this 15 mile run was pretty exciting to me as well:

If you’d like to follow me on Strava, check out my link here: https://www.strava.com/athletes/60020136

In April I was also able to get my first shot of the Pfizer vaccine. This was exciting to me. 2020 was a wild year for me as I moved from Washington DC back to Boulder, Colorado. A lot of the positive changes in my life probably wouldn’t have happened if the pandemic hadn’t struck. I was taking running more seriously in January of 2020, but I probably would have kept drinking and plugging away if it hadn’t been for Coronavirus. With everything else going on in my fitness world, I almost forgot that May 1 is my 11 month no-alcohol sobriety milestone! I quit drinking sometime near the end of May in 2020, so I rounded up a bit and decided June 1 is my formal anniversary.

Even with cutting alcohol and celebrating the freedom and clarity that came with it, I had some major challenges this year and getting my first vaccine installment cleared up a lot of stress and worry for me. Immediately after getting the vaccine, I started to think about my comic, Tilted Sun, once again, as I was driving in my car home from the hospital.

There seems to be a limit to how many things I can mentally think about at one time. Tilted Sun is a big project, and it my guess is it was too complex to manage while trying to stay safe and get some of my basic needs met. As soon as one more worry was removed, I was able to consider a complex project again.

One of my fitness-category art efforts in April has been ‘running’ for Maxim Covergirl 2021. This is a very fun and exciting thing for me to do. I uploaded my favorite swimsuit photos of myself to my profile and am asking my networks to vote. What is super cool is that if a dollar is donated to vote, the dollar goes to Wounded Warriors, which is a super important cause to me.

It was exciting to make the top 15 of my group in the first cutoff on April 29th. As of writing, I am in second place in my group and hope to make the top 10 next.

If I win I am planning on giving the $25,000 prize away to art programs for kids and teens in Leadville. I did some thinking about what was the most important thing I learned in life as a young person in Leadville, and I realized that the most important thing was having environments that encouraged and supported my creativity. This is why I plan on giving the money away to art efforts for young people in my home town.

If you’re reading this blog, thanks for all the support on this project and my other efforts!

The “Sketchbook Confessional” Is a blog that I write each month where I write down all of my accomplishments in that month in terms of my chosen categories of Art, Reading/Watching/Playing, and Fitness. Like a retro meeting on a project, it’s a way for me to observe my accomplishments and progress, or a ‘done’ list rather than a ‘to do’ list. In some months, I meet my goals and succeed, in others, I fall short of what I hoped to do. These blogs help me identify places where I can improve or where I may be spending my time in ways that I can change.

Thanks again for stopping by! Ra, more art!

Who wrote this

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

- Becky Jewell

Sketchbook Confessional September 2019

Welcome to another Sketchbook Confessional, where I get all of the art out of my system.

The Sketchbook Confessional is a place where I post and describe all of the art that I did in one month’s time, an effort to reel in the chaos of art and objectively know what I did and did not do.

Art:

I drew on my iPad on the Washington D.C. Metro as the train carried me away back and forth across the Potomac each weekday. For some reason this month, I had a lot of seatmates who were fans of art and who asked me questions about art.

This doesn’t always happen! Usually people are a bit more shy and watch me draw with a couple flicks of the eye and they go back to playing Bejeweled as the car goes screaming past the Pentagon. Either way, it was nice to meet some people on the train. One fellow rider told me I should be a tattoo artist, and I thought yeah! I could design tattoos, just not jab them into people.

The stabilizer tool in Clip Studio Paint does a good job of letting me draw even, smooth lines even as the metro car jolts and jives.

So, I stuck to simplicity when drawing and drew pretty repetitive things, like these crystals:

As I was having pretty much the busiest professional month of the year, I realized that I’d kept kicking the re-release date of Tilted Sun into the future, and that there would never be a perfectly good time to relaunch it. Like every point on a sphere being equidistant from the center, every time would be a bad time, so I might as well relaunch at will.

If every day is total chaos, why not do it today?

And so on September 10, Tilted Sun went live again! 75 pages of Tilted Sun are now out in the world.

If you haven’t read, start at page 1: https://www.tiltedsun.com/comic-1/2018/5/5/page-1

New pages update every Tuesday and Thursday and you can check the newest page on TiltedSun.com any day. <3

Alex and Lambda the cat from Tilted Sun

In September I also worked on more drawings with themes of love and romance.

And, I kept up some practice on hands and other challenging things to draw, like glasses. Ever try to draw glasses? Holy smokes.

Travel:

Earlier in September I went to Harper’s Ferry to paint en plein air.

I’d never seen so many tourists in such a small place. Online guides all mentioned that it would be crowded and that parking offsite was the best thing to do, and I didn’t quite believe it until I was riding into the city on a bus packed with 40 other people from various countries, India, China, Europe, all to see Harper’s Ferry.

The floor at SPX

I also went to Small Press Expo, or SPX! I spent wayyy too much money, or, the way I see it, the exact right amount of money on amazing creations from indie artists and authors.

It was so great to meet new and old internet friends and also a few comic artists I’d been following for years. Super to meet Henry Barajas, Tom Siddell (Gunnerkrigg Court, bottom right) and Chloe Giroux (bookmark to the right is from her!).

The panel at SPX with Jessica Abel about working efficiently and organizing your time was amazing. The full title was “Butt in the Chair: How to ensure your comics projects get the love they deserve.”

Of all the comic book topics you could talk about at a convention, a seminar about being diligently organized probably doesn’t seem like the most exciting thing on the planet, but it was the most energizing panel I’ve ever attended. It was even better than learning how to draw Ninja Turtles.

Abel's approach to documenting time and responsibilities was the most realistic take I'd ever seen on art life - way more realistic than hoping for a savior project, or cranking out grueling, unattainable hours under a #neversleep mentality. One of her slides is below: "You act your way into thinking differently. You can't think your way into acting differently.”

The headliner event for Saturday evening was a panel between Chris Ware and Eddie Campbell. It was a pretty funny conversation, I remember a moment where Eddie Campbell said he was in the process of coloring From Hell and had to keep himself from fixing 'mistakes' or what he perceived to be mistakes. Chris Ware was great. He described some idiosyncracies of artist life where at one point his wife found him on the couch as he was sewing mockup dolls for Jimmy Corrigan and was busy stitching together doll clothes. I think most artists relate with these kinds of moments, where what you are doing makes perfect, logical sense in your art world, but to the rest of the world, it just looks like you are agonizing over tiny brown pants.

Related Blogs:

Plein Air Painting at Harper’s Ferry

Tilted Sun

Sketchbook Confessional August 2019

Sketchbook Confessional July 2019

Who wrote this?

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

- Becky Jewell

Plein Air Painting at Harper's Ferry

This Jullian easel has been with me for almost 15 years as it was a high school graduation present from my dad to me. It’s heavy, but it carries everything. Whenever anyone asks me how I became so fit, sometimes I want to answer “Painting” but I know they wouldn’t take me seriously, so I usually tell them I am just genetically blessed. There’s a part in van Gogh’s letters to Theo where Vincent is basically beaming at the fact that his doctor mistakes him for an iron worker. It’s something no one would believe after years of being pummeled by ‘art is weak, math is strong’ pop culture. Painters have to be incredibly strong.

Painting itself is an effort to understand the world, space and time, and to interpret it in a way that is interesting to others, or interesting to you. Sometimes, the only goal is to just try, and to accept that nothing is perfect, no art happens in a vacuum, flies will get in the painting, people will say it’s an ugly painting, but it’s still important to try.

At the top of a small hill in Harper’s Ferry there is a monument to John Brown, but the whole town is a monument to him, with a structure at the bottom of the hill being dedicated as John Brown’s Fort. Almost every building has a placard and a historical marker. After a while you realize how well-preserved the town is despite seeing what must be millions of visitors each year.

The coffeeshops and the restaurants of the town were packed with visitors from across the USA and international visitors alike.

Viewing the local stonework is also worth a visit at Harper’s Ferry. The fact that people used to make structures this way absolutely blew me away. Where did they find all of this flat stone? Was it chipped out of the mountainsides? Hauled out of rivers? Both? Each stone is like it’s own story - imagine someone laying mortar and applying these stones, layer after layer, hour after hour. In many cases, it would have been an effort of several months or years of piecemeal expansions.

I found myself staring into the details of each wall, and each one was unique, and built up over years with different mortars, different composites of stones.

Harper’s Ferry is a place which rewards a slower, more careful eye - which is easy to have given the sheer ancient feeling of the place. Aside from cliffdwelling ruins and other Native American structures, and there aren’t many old places in America left.

Wandering between the old rail tracks and the river, you can find this fenced-off garden. It isn’t clear what grows here. I struggled to understand why it was there - it was one of the few structures in Harper’s Ferry without an explanatory placard. I liked this - I’m one to go to the museum and not take the audio tour and I never read artist statements. With historical structures, since they aren’t exactly art, it’s probably better to try to read up and understand what a structure was, but I liked the mystery of this garden. Who knows what someone was trying to do with it? It’s fun to think about.

A few years ago I read a book on pictographs and pictoglyphs in the American West, and one photograph showed a man standing next a boulder with a drawing of a human figure on it. The rock was at the site which would become Lake Powell. The man was standing on ground which would be covered in hundreds of feet of water soon. I was floored at the injustice of it all - some artist had carved the rock probably 5,000 years ago, and here we were, burying the pictoglyph in water.

But then again, what else could be done? The artist’s rock was in a remote place - you couldn’t exactly haul it in a truck bed to the nearest art museum. You couldn’t even chip the rock into pieces safely and take just the slab. So, the pictoglyph stayed, and now it’s still at the bottom of Lake Powell.

It’s not hard to imagine someone in an impossible future diving into Powell and looking at the pictoglyph at the bottom of the man-made lake, or someone in an even further future walking up to it after Lake Powell has dried. Harper’s Ferry feels like that pictoglyph at the bottom of a lake - it’s a part of the past where people tried, it’s in an inconvenient place, a man-made thing which can’t be moved into a museum.

Related Blogs:

Plein Air Painting in Washington DC

Plein Air Painting in Leadville

Van Gogh’s The Rocks

Who wrote this:

I’m a painter and I make comics, I also travel! I live in Maryland-shy-of-DC. Catch you next time …

-Becky Jewell