Daily Post: April 4 2020 Judgement Happens, Keep Going

One of the best and worst aspects of studying art or going into the art major is critique.

Critique format would run as follows:

1. You work on a drawing for two weeks, spending 1, 2, 3, 16 hours on it

2. On critique day, you hang your drawing on a wall next to all of the other pieces of other students.

3. The professor and your peers go one by one, talking about and critiquing each piece on the wall.

4. You aren’t allowed to talk during the critique of your work. You cannot verbally defend or support the critique statements that your peers or professor are giving.

Critiques could go well or poorly depending on about a billion x factors: whose piece was next to yours, what the professor ate that morning, who your peers were, if it was sunny outside or not.

In critique of my own drawings and paintings in school, what I noticed was people would say almost the exact opposite of what I had hoped or envisioned.

At some points I got angry and at some points I also cried, but then eventually, I realized the point was to just expose myself and my work to judgement over and over. The point was to be vulnerable, so that eventually you could be tough - and not tough in a dumb turtleshell way, but tough in a sophisticated, smart way.

The challenge is that you might have to be insane, or incredibly tenacious, to keep going in art. After being told their painting sucks, a painting that they’d delicately painted for 40 hours, most people would quit, drop out, or give up.

The good thing about art critique is that at least you are in the same boat as 20 others, each who have tried to take their best shot.

Outside of the art-school world, people who are NOT artists will take cheap shots at your work and ideas. They won’t believe in your vision. Your plans won’t make any sense to them. They will lodge judgements, and basically say whatever they want.

I think this is actually okay - judgement is going to happen and it will never stop.

The point is to keep going despite all of this and to pursue work that makes you a happy and satisfied person, no matter what people say.

Strangely, it is this give-no-fucks mentality, this freedom, that makes the best art.

This is the point of any kind of art education, be it at an institution or not, and it’s most valuable cornerstone.

Keep believing.

Related blogs:

The Artificial Intelligence Engine of Clip Studio Paint

Overcoming Negative Self Talk as an Artist

Why Art Seems Psychic

Who Wrote This:

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

- Becky Jewell

Daily Blog: April 3 2020: Palette Knives

It’s been fun to catch ephemeral moments in painting with my phone camera every now and then. Photos like this are why I tend to paint thick when I can.

It’s very hard to control thick paint or do ‘what you envision’ so you have to be happy with surprises if you paint this way. You also only usually get one shot, just one swipe of paint and that is what must happen. Reworking thick paint ends up looking kinda bad. I am still no master of this technique, which is why I take the palette knife photos - it’s all accidental, yet I wish it could be preserved forever.

Related blogs:

Poodles are chill dogs

How my art changed in school

Defeating Negative Self Talk

Who wrote this:

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

- Becky Jewell

Daily post: April 2 2020: Geddy's Haircut

Like most good art, Geddy’s haircut isn’t something I planned.

A few weeks after we adopted Geddy from a poodle rescue, we took him to a groomer in Austin and said that she should just groom him in the way that she thought would look good, and in a way that she felt creative. It was possibly the laziest dog haircut request of all time. “Just do what you think looks cool” was the art direction for Geddy’s haircut.

Geddy’s hair is now a classic romantic poodle cut, which he has had for four years. He gets compliments and tons of attention. He gets more modeling and influencer gigs than I do, for sure.

Children also love Geddy because he looks like a storybook poodle, he looks like a poodle that you see in graphic designs and advertisements. I will often be walking Geddy, cars will roll by and children will yell “Poodle!” from the window of their parent’s vehicle.

The fact that Geddy brings so much joy to everyone around him brings me joy. He’s just sort of the last thing you expect to see. He’s also extremely friendly and will jump into just about anyone’s lap immediately, put his paws on their chest, and kiss them on the mouth. I am not sure why he is such a flirt, but it is pretty funny. He just loves people.

Geddy is also very emotionally in-tune - If I want to go running, he will get excited. If I want to chill out and play Octopath Traveler, he will chill out and snooze. Whenever I make art in the studio, he’s usually right there snoozing in his bed. He’s even gone to work with me a few times!

Pretty much whatever I am up to, Geddy will follow. He isn’t afraid of firecrackers or thunder. I think he just watches me and decides “Whatever works for her works for me, I will be as much like the human as possible!”

I have no idea where poodles got the reputation for being high strung or only for rich people. They’d be a great dog for anyone. They’re smart, sure, and not high strung. Poodles are like your friend in college who slept on a couch and got lost at parties, who never studied, and kept getting A’s in quantum mechanics.

I think if more people had poodles, more people would be happier. You don’t HAVE to cut their hair in a fancy way. Puppy clips are cute and you get all the same poodly goodness.

Related blogs:

Why making art seems psychic

Why Dumbo and Pinnochio are weird movies

That time I went to Akihabara

Who wrote this:

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

- Becky Jewell

Daily Post: April 1 2020: How my art changed in school

A lot of artists and my artist peers will go to art school or go into the art major and ask “Is this worth it?”

In this blog, I thought I’d share some of my very old art from when I was 18 and 19 years old and just starting out as an art major at CU Boulder.

I found this drawing of a Girl in a Yellow Flying Machine (circa 2005)

I really like this old drawing of mine. The wings of the flying machine look delicate, but believable. I believe the pilot’s excitement. I believe the entire scene with help from the two figures on the right who are watching (or not watching) the flying machine girl from a cliffside.

Another drawing I found in my old freshman year sketchbook was of a Monster Cathedral (2005)

It’s pretty funny and also not bad, the buttresses are now spider legs, why not? The entire thing is asymmetrical - I don’t understand the placement of the tower - but why not?

As I looked through my sophomore notebooks, it was clear I had started to develop a style, and also work more heavily in ink:

This style was my effort to ‘draw strong’ and see how far I could carry a single line. It was all ink, so I had to make strong, permanent decisions in this style.

Here is another piece from 2005-2006 of a breaking egg:

I still draw in this style, many of the elements of Tilted Sun and paintings that I make are true to this style - if not on paper, then digitally.

Here is a piece I made in the style from 2019:

Every time I find myself wanting to knock my education or have ‘artist shame’ I have to remember the drawings from 2004-2006, and that both styles are actually pretty good for a teen. To this day I still have many styles.

So, yes, I think studying art formally was worth it. There is a patent change in my styles and skills from 2004-2005, and each year after that. Studying art formally doesn’t have to mean university classes either - I’ve seen many people improve just by hanging out with artists they admire, or via following youtube. I personally learn new things on youtube and new things from my friends every day.

That’s the cool thing about art - it just keeps getting better.

Catch you soon!

Related blogs:

Why Dumbo and Pinnochio are Weird Movies

Why Making Art Seems Psychic

Folding at Home for Covid-19

Who wrote this?

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

- Becky Jewell

Sketchbook Confessional: March 2020

Welcome to the Sketchbook Confessional for March 2020!

It’s the future and we live in the time of COVID-19, let’s live heroically, let’s live in style. #jewell2020

Art:

This month I was whipped around by COVID-19 measures, but not so whipped as to not join Folding@home. Marc and I pointed 40 cores of our household computing power at COVID-19 research. Our electricity bill for March may be very high, but that doesn’t matter as much as getting work done for these projects.

While stuck at home to avoid Coronavirus/COVID-19, I ended up doing a lot of livestreaming on Instagram, where I made the two images above on two 1 hour livestreams.

March was kind of a lost month for me since I was sick in the first part of March, and then life changed with Coronavirus measures near the end of the month.

While working on comics and illustrations and nursing the weird cold I had in early March, I set up Instagram so that it would post old work from my trip to San Francisco in 2016. This is a nice way to go back through old work and not feel the pressure to post.

Strange as Post Pressure may sound, I do like to entertain my followers and make a lot of good, interesting posts, in addition to livestreams. The Later app helps me out with post scheduling. If you’ve ever found yourself wondering how I slam out 600 word missives on Instagram on a phone … well, I don’t. I use Later to type it all out on a computer, and get those posts scheduled for weeks ahead of time.

Here is what my Later user interface looks like, where I have posts scheduled out across four social profiles for weeks on end.

It’s been really awesome to use Later. I’d recommend it to anyone who balances multiple social profiles for multiple projects or personal work.

Travel:

In March this month, given COVID-19 worries, I cancelled a trip that I had planned to Leadville. I was almost heartbroken, but it would have been more heartbreaking to travel and possibly soak up and transmit illness to those around me.

So.. March has been a month of being at home for me. It’s surreal.

Now, I am not sure when I will go back to the office. Four more weeks? Six? I’ve been at home for so many weeks that now, it will be a surreal day when things get back to normal.

The tough thing about my life in this COVID-19 world is that I’m actually a borderline extrovert. I love being around people, but they have to be the right kind of people for me.

If we make it through this COVID-19 thing and kick it to the curb properly, there should be a national holiday made.

Reading:

In March I stayed indoors quite a bit and finished reading several books.

I finished Miyazaki’s Starting Point, a collection of interviews, speeches, and articles where Miyazaki discusses his work at length. It’s dense reading, but not laborious - fun to read, just big. I’d started reading in February before my trip to the Bahamas. My only regret with this book is that I wish I had run into it earlier in life - but maybe then I wouldn’t have been able to appreciate it. There’s moments where Miyazaki describes how his animation teams would hand-paint 50,000 cells to make a single movie, and other incredible facts which will lend to anyone’s appreciation of animation - even if that appreciation is already high.

Accomplishing art at any cost seemed to be the norm for not just Miyazaki, but also for his peers, role models, and workers. He also takes questions very seriously and answers questions from his interviewers in ways that I did not expect. Now to move on to Turning Point.

I finished The Broken Earth series by N.K. Jemesin, wow, what an incredible sci-fi story. I loved the richness and lore of these books. They’re definitely a bit more allegorical and post-apocalyptic than high escapism fantasy. I dug the hell out of these books.

I finished reading Atomic Habits by James Clear on March 7th, in the middle of a sinus infection that had me checking and rechecking websites about Coronavirus symptoms. I thought this book laid out a lot of interesting strategies on how to reinforce good habits and move bad habits towards extinction.

In late February and March, I started posting about Books I Didn’t Finish - Proust and Melville made the list, and there are a few others that I need to talk about in the future. I’m a recovering over-achiever and have a Master’s Degree in English Literature, and think it’s all right to talk about books that we don’t make it through as readers.

I started Radical Candor by Kim Scott. I started reading it in the midst of COVID-19 panic and feared some of the principles may not ever apply in life-under-crisis, or it would take years to recover as an economy for the leadership ideas in the book to apply, but I think they will apply at least at a high level.

I started reading Book of the New Sun on suggestion from a few different folks - So far I think this book is absolutely wild. I’m not quite sure what to make of it just yet. I also started reading Cradle: Foundation by Will Wright.

Fitness:

This month I didn’t make it to the gym for COVID-19 reasons, and it broke my heart. I wish I could have said goodbye to my personal trainer. I never thought my personal training journey would end due to a pandemic.

That said I did get outside for some jogging and found myself feeling strong and fast. Maryland is outrageously pretty in spring.

Without a treadmill I don’t really measure my speed or time or miles, I just run until I feel like I’ve done a good job.

Maryland went onto Stay-at-home or shelter-in-place orders yesterday, March 30th 2020 - for now it is a beautiful place to be stuck. I run around, dodging people like in a tag game in school, and take photos like these:

At the end of March I started to do Daily Posts on this blog. I realized I write a ton on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, so I might as well transmute some of it and post it onto this blog.

Until next time!

Related Blogs:

Sketchbook Confessional: February 2020

Sketchbook Confessional: January 2020

Sketchbook Confessional: December 2019

Who wrote this?

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

- Becky Jewell

Daily post: March 29 2020 - Why Making Art Seems Psychic

A strange thing started happening in my art a few years ago: The art I made in the past would end up predicting my future. 

I would go through some sort of event, or I’d see something, a building or a place, and think, 'Wow, this moment reminds me of that drawing I made 8 months ago,' and I'd find ways to relate the events in art and in life. 

I wouldn’t say the predictive powers of art are creepy, they are more like a wolf or a snake - an animal that we can view as creepy if we want, but is really just being itself.

The math side of my mind kicks in when Psychic Art Moments happen, and says, "Wait! There's a logical explanation for this! You make art about so many things, that it's only a matter of chance and time before one of them, before one of the pieces, becomes true, before it becomes a real event!" 

This is valid. I paint people, landscapes, animals, events, stories, ideas... Most artists deal with many different kinds of themes.

So yes, there is a category aspect to art that predicts the future: Make art about bunnies, skyscrapers, and football shoes, and eventually you will notice bunnies, skyscrapers, and football shoes in your actual life. It will seem psychic, but it’s more an act of noticing, of calling up categorical memories.

Making art also affects memory and intention in incredible ways. About a billion articles and studies have mentioned that writing down a task or a goal makes the writer more likely to achieve the goal. I think about this a lot when making art. Writing is one thing, and drawing is another.

So, even if I draw something not necessarily wishing for it to come true - if it does come true - then I will remember deeply that I drew it. Or I will notice it.

If I create art around something, I remember it, and I also remember it into the future, which is why the prediction thing seems to happen. I don't remember art that is about what doesn't happen, ie, I don’t remember my ‘faiiled’ predictions.

The last reason that making art can seem like having psychic powers is because artists are sometimes bringing previously-unknown ideas into reality. Painting a still-life is recognizing reality, it isn’t exactly painting the future, but it’s affirming a reality. In art, you can also paint and affirm realities that don’t exist yet.

Related Blogs:

Daily post: March 28 2020

Sketchbook Confessional February 2020

Bahamas Trip 2020

Who wrote this?

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

- Becky Jewell

Daily post: March 28 2020

On a down day, artists have to look out, because all art can seem pointless at times. It can seem especially pointless when there's a big problem happening, like a pandemic, and especially pointless in a culture that over-values productivity.

I think this is backwards. I think art moves us forward in ways that I can't really understand yet. It makes valuable connections out of sheer accident that otherwise would take years to make. It's sometimes all that is left over when a bustling culture moves on.

I'll get back to you on this.

Who wrote this?

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

- Becky Jewell

Studying Interiors in Final Fantasy IX

A list of everything in the image above:

a cat

an umbrella bucket with many umbrellas

a box

three unique handwoven rugs

a large chest

a large clock

a fireplace

a minature hanging lamp

a sled with a chair/platform on top? I really have no idea what that black mage is sitting on

a ladder

a smaller clock

(And there might be more things I am missing!!)

After working on comics for a bit, I realized something about my own art that could be improved:

Set design and drawing interior spaces.

I’m good at drawing people and ideas, and okay at nature, but not.. indoor things.

Chairs? Wtf. Tables? Uhhh…. (draws a blank). Lamps…(not my forte).

I would stare at an empty room I had drawn, and wasn’t sure how to make the room seem ‘lived in’ or ‘believable.’ At first, I couldn’t figure out how to improve this.

To tackle the problem, I thought about art that I had seen where there were believable sets or interiors that I could study for a long time. It turned out that of all the places I looked, Final Fantasy IX has heartbreakingly good and detailed interior sets.

The hotel in Lindblum has a lot to learn from.

Let me just dive in to everything happening here:

The wallpaper is green and diamond-patterened. Each floorboard seems to be unique, not a pattern. Paintings in the hallway of the hotel are a bit crooked. The wallpaper in the hallway seems to be dusky rose. Columns that support the structure are made of stone piled stone and mortar. A lantern juts out from one of these columns in the hallway. The beds in the room seem to have pink silk coverlets, and plaid pillows with handmade wooden headboards. Each room has a different handwoven rug. One room has two twin beds, the other has a queen. The room with the queen bed has a lantern, and a table with a cup on top of the table. The windows in each room are curved at the top and touch the floor. They, too, are a bit lopsided, but I don’t get the idea of poor craftsmanship. I get a ‘handmade’ feeling. Outside, the world looks green and bright, you can see the streets of Lindblum.

I’m sure even after writing the above paragraph and reading it a few times and rechecking the image, there are still a few details that I missed.

This set defines how I feel overall about Final Fantasy 9 - there is an amount of care that went into it that convinces me, despite a slightly cartoony feel, that the whole thing is very, absolutely real. In the same way that there’s a bunch of junk lying around in sets for Howl’s Moving Castle, I believe in the reality that these sets are casting because there is just so very much thought in each one.

There are also metaphorical sets in Final Fantasy 9, like this staircase into a burning red eye, probably the most metal/emo thing I’ve ever seen in my life.

Or this interdimensional twisting bridge and castle, a presage to the folding, twisting landscapes of Inception and later, Dr. Strange.

Let me make a list again for the image above:

grass

cobblestones

stained glass with a mountain motif

stained glass with a fish motif

stained glass with a sun motif

green painting on the center column

ladder

carefully laid radial cobbelestones

(Why is the church actually just a circle with a center column in it?)

Until I started working on this blog, I never took notice of the windows in this chapel in the opening of the game. I tend to focus on the characters when playing, I think a lot of us might. But even after playing this game for years, on Playstation, on my iPad - I never noticed that there was a fish or monsterlike fish in the stained glass of the window.

I made another list for every item I could see in the set below:

Wheel barrow with goods and small signs sticking out of it

a treasure chest

a potted cactus

a large hookah-like bottle.

an anchor

Several other bottles and jars

a canister of some kind

a clock

a massive chest of drawers

a cash register

wall flags with bottles on them (potions?)

posters, fliers, calendars on the wall

a few lanterns on the wall

a large mage hat and cloak on the wall

buckets

hints of an upstairs suite with books, pillows, a bed

Many of the scenes I am detailing in this blog are shops, like the one above in Treno and the image below from the Black Mage Village.

I think the Black Mage Village shop may have even more surprising, random items in it than the one in Alexandria.

I never noticed the dinosaur figurine on the top shelf of this scene until now.

All of these details probably don’t seem to be important, but they matter for the believability factor.

I thought about games where I didn’t really believe in the characters or their world, and this did come up for me often in Final Fantasy 13.

Look at Lightning’s kitchen here -

I don’t get a good sense of who Lightning is as a person from this scene.

I see a lot of repeating patterns in the bottom right, vague apparatuses on the left, and repeat bottles of wine or olive oil, I guess, near a stove, which looks upscale and nice. She seems to have two boxes of the same cereal, perfectly symmetrically together in the cupboard above the stove. And maybe some jars of protein powder.

I want to know who Lightning is, I want to care about her and believe in her, but given this scene of her home, I just don’t understand her. I don’t learn anything special about her.

Maybe the point of the game, for many, isn’t to care about these things, but if FF13 came off as a bit cold and blah at some moments, I think this is why.

Final Fantasy 9 casts a spell of lived-in spaces from the very beginning to the very end. Like this image of the Tantalus crew in the opening scene. There’s a couple’s portrait on the wall framed in twisted cold, a few Shakespearean-romance-play-acting costumes on hangers, and an entire custom rug. There’s a back room with folios hanging off of shelves, an ominous hook, a plant in the lower right corner, and chests abounding.

And then there’s this moment near the end of the game, a clocklike structure with horned creatures peering out at you from each interval.

What are the symbols on the clock? They have a quasi-horoscope feel, and there are also a ton of different spires emerging from it. Zidane seems to be able to traverse the entire space due to the clock falling apart. In the game, the player probably spends all of 5 seconds getting through this screen.

That’s art too - it must take hours and hours to paint each of these backgrounds and consider them and make them interesting, all for a couple seconds for one person to traverse. Art distributed or seen at scale works a kind of time magic, where if millions of people traverse the same clock scene and it takes them five seconds, it ends up being more time than the artist ever spent painting the scene.

In a way, taking five seconds to paint just one more oblong jar into a scene, just one more random potted cactus, goes further than even artists could possibly imagine.

Related blogs:

Shameless Fanart I made: Final Fantasy Weapons

Persona 5’s perfect summation of the art world

That time I went to Akihabara

Who wrote this:

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

- Becky Jewell

Folding @ Home for COVID-19

Marc and I are both running our computers to complete processes for Folding@Home. With a 24 core machine and two 8 core machines we are putting a total of 40 cores towards the effort.

Hope to see you also fold at home!

Folding@Home COVID-19: https://github.com/FoldingAtHome/coronavirus

Folding@Home Webpage https://foldingathome.org/

Books I Didn't Finish: Moby Dick

True confession: I have an extremely fraught love relationship with the writings of Herman Melville.

It’s not even a love-hate relationship, it’s a love-love relationship, but I can’t finish Melville’s most famous book. I have never felt so embarrassed about anything in my life.

Not finishing Moby Dick felt like breaking up with a perfect man - a perfect man who is not only sensitive and funny but also incredibly good-looking and smart.

And he loves to work out and volunteer and help children with their homework. He’s not just a surface, he has depth, man, like real depth.

And I am over here, by comparison, a total scrub, wringing my hands, thinking: “This guy is way, way too good for me! He’s outta my league by like six leagues! Why is he still here talking to me? Is this a kind of joke?”

Like talking about the Perfect Man, talk about Moby Dick in front of anyone and you’ll probably get an overwhelmed groan or an eyeroll accompanied with “Oh, not that fucking guy!”

But hear me out.

Hear me out, Moby Dick is actually great.

Yet, any high school English teacher or curriculum with Moby Dick on the list has expectations beyond this world. Anyone who thinks that anyone, let alone a 15 year old, could read Moby Dick has Galaxy Expectations or Universe Expectations.

Moby Dick is not a book that teenagers or very young people should read, unless the teenager is explosively full of life experience and their favorite thing is to be immobilized for hours with nothing else to do but read Moby Dick.

It’s not intelligence needed to get through this book, its … life experience and an appreciation of life, in addition to extreme diligence and dedication, and possibly drugs that make it impossible for you to move your limbs. Its not that it’s rare to find such dedication in a teenager or a young person - it’s rare to find such dedication in any person of any age. 

Ironically, dedication is what the book is about, only a feverish kind of dedication aimed towards the White Whale. 

Otherwise, how could you stay with Melville’s … anything. There are amazing quotes and sentences in Moby Dick, brilliant moments that just make me fawn and swoon, but getting to the end seems as unreachable as Everest for me. Heck Everest almost seems easier.

The epic Melville book I did finish was Mardi, which I only gruelingly got through because it was for a class. I think I was the last person to pick a book to write a paper on, and the last book left to choose was Mardi. Getting tasked with Mardi as a last resort was sort of like being paired with the last person picked for Soccer Team, but then they end up being the underdog rookie star.

Mardi is a fun and exciting Melville book, it’s like an island-hopping romance novel, where the main character, Taji, just sort of meets different people on different Polynesian islands. He doesn’t aim at falling in love but he does.

Mardi truly reminded me of some kind of video game where you visit different islands, talk to the people on the islands and learn about them, solve a few problems for them, and then you depart, onwards to the next island. If I ever go to Fiji, I will reread Mardi.

In the way that the Poe book, “Arthur Gordon Pym” contains puzzles, maps, and treasures like a proto-videogame, Mardi feels like a Banjo-Kazooie vacation. At least compared to Moby Dick.

In a way you’d rather be Taji of Mardi than Ahab of Moby Dick. Chasing a white whale while you pull down wads of cash on blubber is all right, but what if you actually catch the white whale? Would it matter? What’s funny too is Taji just sort of floats through life and everything works out for him, while we all know what happens to Ahab …

Melville talking about fish in Mardi, he sometimes just goes off about fish for six pages

Ultimately I think I finished Mardi because it made less sense as a piece of art, and I read it hoping that it would eventually make sense. I was hoping the ribbon would bow, but it was just a trail of very alluring ribbon. But that is okay in my book - life doesn’t make sense, either!

Mardi is more free, and looser, than Moby Dick, if less refined. Mardi is a younger Melville writing with younger themes. Moby Dick was an older wiser (yet still exuberant) Melville writing about the crueler themes of life: obsession, those along for the ride of obsession, and the wreckage therafter.

I remember staring at my half-finished copy of Moby Dick on my nightstand in Boulder and thinking “What will it take?”

What would it take for me to finish this book? I love Melville so much, I just … physically can’t. It’s like loving mountainclimbing, or loving ultramarathoning, and crashing at the last mile. Physically can’t.

I think if you told me that if I finished Moby Dick, that Keanu Reeves would come to my house and look at my paintings and say nice things about them, yes, I would do it. But for anything less than that, the white whale goes free, forever.

Related blogs:

Books I Didn’t Finish: Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past

Can’t Hurt Me

Who wrote this?

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

- Becky Jewell

Cheap Food in Tokyo - From My 2019 Trip!

There’s a moment in Stephen King’s Dark Tower where Roland, a gunslinger from a mythic land, finds himself in a modern-day New York City and tries a Coca Cola. He’s so amazed at how sweet it is, so floored at how brilliant the Coke tastes, that he wonders why and how anyone could ever get addicted to drugs.

How could anyone become a heroin addict, when there is something as great as Coca Cola?

I though of Roland as I roamed Tokyo and tried tastier and tastier food. Peach Coca Cola while jetlagged is like getting a bucket of champagne dumped on your head after hiking through the desert.

The pursuit of money, power, sex, drugs, rock and roll - all of these pursuits seem like a moot quest when you can buy happiness in the form of 80 yen candies. Seriously the discount candies at a 7-11 in Shin-Koenji were the tastiest candies I’ve experienced all year. Maybe ever. This peach treat from the Dragon Quest Lawson at Akihabara was pretty good:

I have no idea what this is

IRL I’m a pretty tall person and I spend a ton of energy on making art, walking around, and throwing my brain at nigh-incomprehensible problems. I tend to graze, or, lost in thought, I forget to eat for the entire day and eat a giant dinner. I’m no coward when it comes to wolfing down an entire veggie burger and fries. My pattern of forgetting and wolfing is easy - too easy - to do in the States, where it’s so easy to lose yourself in ideas and social events, and monster truck rallies. Andy Warhol was so popular, he ate three dinners each night to get all of his friend groups and social events covered.

In Tokyo, everything is tasty, but usually tiny. I found myself making double orders of everything. There were several points during my trip where I worried if I was getting enough calories. I hadn’t worried about the too-few-calories problem since being an iron-deficient distance runner in high school.

Like this sandwich - looks pretty normal at first, but it’s about the size of a Starbucks biscotti:

To get enough food, I found myself drawn towards melon buns, which seemed like the biggest and cheapest pile of carbohydrates that I could get for myself without straight-up purchasing a birthday cake.

During the day I mostly ate at 7-11 so that I could splurge at Ramen places at night, which worked pretty well!

Since I was jetlagged and fatigued for a few days, I also found it hard to know if I was getting the right vitamins while abroad. I don’t take supplements and do my best to get all vitamins directly from food. To achieve this, I usually pump up on juice that contains vitamin A, B, C, and if I can, D and Calcium.

I couldn’t even understand Japanese nutrition labels enough to know how much protein was in anything. Japan does not seem to have the “Percent Daily Value” scale that America has, which is probably because they are way ahead of us. There is no completionist status bar on food in Japan, no “20% of your daily sodium” or “50% of your daily fat” - all of which barely work for anyone, except maybe some guy who lives in Michigan named Ted.

So, when I saw an ad on the subway for energy gels, with the vitamins clearly listed out, I figured I should try a couple and found the energy gels at a 7/11:

I knew I was already dehydrated after flight and Tokyo ended up being a bit more dry than I thought, with dust wheeling around Shinjuku Park and UV rays pummeling my skin. Vitamins would make me feel better on some level, at least.

At breakfast spots, I often ordered two pastries instead of just one.

I also ended up trying a couple beers and alcoholic drinks too! With the above, I figured anything with a cat on it was probably good.

With the Kirin beer below, I was so infatuated with the pink can and the racing white dragon that I totally did not see the 9% alcohol clearly on the label. Oops.

It ended up making me extremely weepy, and if anyone had been there, I surely would have been hugging everyone and being extremely confessional and probably would have made everyone look at photos of my dog. Kirin the Strong is like a Mike’s Hard Lemonade but not as tart, also it didn’t feel like it was searing through my body straight into my bloodstream. It was a gentle 9%.

The White Dragon on this peach-flavored Kirin drink started to remind me of my poodle back at home, Geddy.

Crepes in Harajuku were good and the intimidatingly long lines die down after 6 pm where the younger crowd seems to disappear and go home (Where do they go? Home to work on homework? The club?). Either way, in the evening hours in Harajuku it’s a good time to grab a crepe or a giant hammer of cotton candy. There is even a small outdoor cafe where you can grab a beer near Laforet mall. 

So what is the point of eating all of this cheapo gas station food? It was to have enough energy to walk through two art museums a day and also have enough yen for dinner, which was well worth it.

That’s the cheap food I ate in Tokyo! Surely it is nothing special to Tokyo residents, to me it was out of this world.

Catch you next time!

Related Blogs:

Akihabara Mix

Origami Kaikan - cool Origami center near Akihabara

Day and Night in Shinjuku

Who wrote this?

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

- Becky Jewell

Medium Moment: Holbein Gouache

I started working in gouache, a medium which, for as long as I can remember, had been trash-talked as “impossible” “weird” and “annoying” by peers throughout my art career - so I had stayed away from it. Wow that was dumb! Never listen to the haters. Paint with gouache.

More importantly, I’d say paint with Holbein gouache because it is the best.

Sometimes I need a lot of ramp-up time and practice with a new medium before I use it for production-level images or comissions. So, when I started testing gouache in the images below, I wasn’t aiming to make any kind of super realistic drawing, and just wanted to test the colors out and make simple swatches to see what happened. I was blown away.

The colors here are just … to die for. I have never seen any other kind of paint do this. For this kind of luscious vibrancy, a close second might be color inks or alcohol inks, but they aren’t as opaque or as capable of coverage as this medium.

After seeing this, it might be hard for me to go back to oil paints.

The paper in the image above is Legion Stonehenge Aqua Hotpress.

I picked up a couple different sets of gouache, the 5 color set, which comes with a handy graphic on color mixing.

I also picked up the 10 color travel set, and took gouache with me to the Bahamas lately, it was easy and fun to travel with these super small (.5 oz) set of Holbein tubes.

To take gouache with me on my travels, I downloaded the 4 pages of documentation from the Holbein website just in case - 4 pages to travel is much more even than an emotional support animal, but I didn’t want to have to jettison any of my paint. Security let me through with no questions asked, but I just didn’t want to risk it, and I would never advise anyone to travel with paint without having documentation that the paint is safe for air travel.

It's an AMAZING travel medium because it dries quickly and you don't need to set up a miniature chemical lab (cough cough oil paint!) in order to get it to look good.

While painting on the mall in Washington DC, I remember finishing an oil painting and screwing it into a painting carrier, then taking the metro to Five Guys and sitting around eating french fries while I was worried that fellow Five Guys customers and little kids might knock my painting over, or that someone might drop peanut shells on it. I’ll never have that issue with gouache.

In addition to the sets, over a few weeks, I bought a couple stand-alone colors which seemed impossible to mix from either set. These were admittedly a bit expensive so I did not take them with me on my travels. Even though they are low in ounces, the idea of having to jettison one of these at security made me wince.

Each larger, nonset tube is anywhere from 18 - 22 dollars, or higher, which puts them at the level of watercolors. Small and mighty, tiny and precious.

I have yet to make anything that is, well, anything with gouache, I’ve just been making swatches, which is very relaxing.

Probably the most interesting surface for goauche so far has been Yupo paper, which ends up surfacing this filmic quality:

The above is gouache on opaque, solid yupo.

Below, gouache on translucent yupo:

No filter was used on the photos above. The colors are just endlessly pretty and true, eyemeltingly vibrant, and pure. The pigment in these Holbein paints is very, very strong.

So that’s my first run at Gouache testing and getting gouache going in my studio!

I hope to have more blogs and info and tests on gouache in the coming weeks. Overall if you’ve never tried gouache or have ever heard that it is too ‘difficult,’ I couldn’t recommend it more, especially with Holbien gouache and yupo paper.

Related blogs:

Bahamas Trip 2020

Medium Moment: Ink on Mylar

Medium Moment: Oil Paint on Yupo Paper

Who wrote this?

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

- Becky Jewell

Sketchbook Confessional: February 2020

Welcome to the Sketchbook Confessional for February 2020!

It’s the future, let’s enjoy it #jewell2020

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:

This month I started working 100% of my time on Crow-Magnum, a comic collaboration with author Laurel McHargue. It’s a small town psychic thriller!

I tried tackling this project last year but wow, I had my butt handed to me while i was also working on Tilted Sun. It’s a good idea for me to pick one big project and work on that project, and intersperse the project with smaller quick wins.

So, a ~50 page graphic novel is a big project. Interspersed with this project, I’ve been working on small commissions in the Toon Me dimensions, like this one of Joe here below:

In making comics and illustrations, what’s great about having almost 100 pages of Tilted Sun under my belt is that every difficult experience, every minute struggle of drawing a square panel or lettering bubble, every time I struggled to draw characters in sequence, has added to my experience in creating comics.

I think overall, my path was a good way to approach comics: I just made a comic for free, kept making it, and eventually I got new projects and assignments. It’s not a way to make a million dollars, but it is very, very rewarding. I’m sure this model would work for most people.

In February I also started working more heavily in gouache, a medium which, for as long as I can remember, had been trash-talked as “impossible” “weird” and “annoying” by peers throughout my art career - so I had stayed away from it. Wow that was dumb! Never listen to the haters. Paint with gouache.

Gouache turned out to be the perfect medium to travel with. Oil paint is fun to use but unfortunately it cannot work for international trips in my case - transporting a painting that is still wet strikes me as something I don’t want to do.

It’s not that it can’t be done, many people do it - I haven’t found a good way yet.

So, Gouache, a sumptuous medium which dries quickly and also appeals to being ‘drawn’ with, turned out to be perfect for travel.

Travel:

This month I was able to get away from DC for a bit and visit a cool place I had never been before: The Bahamas!

I was able to get some beach time in and also was able to do some volunteering with my friends. To volunteer, my friends and I built food boxes for those recovering from Hurricane Dorian. I wish we could have done more. It was one of those moments where something that seemed very small went further than I ever thought it possibly could have.

As far as ‘why volunteer’ I’ve always thought that chances are very good that we all have skills that we take for granted, which are very, very helpful to others. Even if it’s packing boxes.

Full Bahamas blog here!

Fitness:

I was able to hit the treadmill near the end of the month and I hit my goal of running 6 miles in 60 minutes.

6 miles in 60 minutes was a huge, painful push for me this month. My entire body was screaming at me at the beginning and end of the 60 minutes. It really did NOT want to fit in those miles, it was yelling, crying, pleading for me to stop.

I hope that someday 6 in 60 becomes more of a baseline for me instead of a shining, mountainously triumphant goal. I’ll keep running and see. While I don’t use fitness apps, it’s worked for me to post these images in blogs so I can keep track of where I’m at and what I accomplish month-over-month.

This month, a new order of Newton Running Shoes arrived in the mail. When the box containing my Newtons arrived at our doorstep, the box was so light and airy that it felt almost like an empty box! That’s just how lightweight Newtons are.

That’s it for this short, short month! More soon. Until then, see you Space Cowboy …

Who wrote this?

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

- Becky Jewell

Books I Didn't Finish: Remembrance of Things Past

Recently I was chatting with some friends about books we'd never finished, and I decided to turn this into a blog series!

Here is how I did with Remembrance of Things Past.

I started to read Proust's Remembrance of Things Past on a trans-Atlantic flight to Paris two years ago.

This would be romantic, right? Reading Proust en route to Paris! Plus, what else could I do on the plane - I didn’t have a computer or cell access, and had never been overseas before, so, why not Proust?

I made it about 3/4ths or 500 pages into the first volume.

The goal of the book seemed to be about remembering the past in detail, you know “Remembrance of Things Past” or “In Search of Lost Time” and all that, and so many zealous passages about paper lanterns, traveling across the French countryside, relatives who are ill, and other unavoidable parts of childhood.

The paper lantern was the most visually memorable part of the opening of the book for me, where imagining a child having a paper lantern 100 years ago, and it being the most interesting thing to the boy, is pretty wild. The paper lantern is always moving, and light and shapes emerge from it.

About 200 pages in, the narrator or Young Child in the book starts talking about Swann, and this is the interesting part - Swann is just some guy the narrator knew tangentially.

The narration moves into Swann’s life instead of the child’s life.

Swann meets a girl, Odette, that he just loves, falls head over heels with, because ... she looks like a painting he saw once? He's head over heels, only to find that she is bisexual and also dates many men, who sort of keep her afloat in an Instagram Sugar Daddy kind of situation, only again, this is 100 years ago.

Swann seems to meet up with Odette almost to prove to himself that she is real, even though each meeting hurts him because he wants himself to be ‘the only one’ and he's just not. Odette needs multiple relationships to keep up her rent and lifestyle. It’s as if each time he sees her, he can’t possibly believe she is bisexual, then he feels bad about it, then he sees her again anyways.

Finally, Swann gives up, because he sort of realizes she is just not the idealized woman that he had in mind. This is about when I gave up on the book and never finished it.

What’s sad is Swann could have just accepted that Odette would never be what he was expecting, but he couldn’t get out of his own way on this. And there are all kinds of other things happening like class structure and aristocracy and “you can’t be seen with that kind of woman” kind of things too.

The book may fool you, because it seems to be about a boy trying to remember every detail from his childhood, then it launches off into this total other Swann guy being a complete nerfball.

Never date someone based on a painting, I guess? It's possible that Swann makes the fatal mistake of mixing art and life. It's possible that Proust makes the mistake of mixing life, and life.

Or, mixing life and life is not a mistake. Perhaps, this is the point, where what we remember of others, or at least what they tell us, is the actual world.

The Remembrance of Things Past isn’t individualistic, it's a remembrance of a collective past. The literal translation of the book’s title: “In Search of Lost Time” is particularly poignant in Swann’s case.

Someday I hope to finish this book but I don't think I ever will.

I ended up donating it to our local Little Free Library. Good luck, next person!

Related Blogs:

Art Reads: Can’t Hurt Me

Art Reads: Letters of Vincent van Gogh

Best Art Store in Tokyo

Who wrote this?

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

- Becky Jewell

Bahamas Trip 2020

On a whim I went to the Bahamas with a friend of mine in February 2020! The trip was awesome. Here are my photos and places I went.

Clifton National Heritage is a pretty place to visit on Nassau - it’s on the very west side of the island. The best thing about Nassau is everything is about 15 mins of a drive.

Overall I couldn’t get over how blue and clear the water is, it was such a pretty turquoise that it almost did me in. I didn’t know what to expect in February, and it was perfect!

The photo above is from the more touristy area on the north part of the island. It was touristy, but not very busy at all in February.

I painted a bit while on Nassau and mostly went with Bahamas-inspired colors and abstract shapes.

The small gouache tubes ended up being great to travel with, each one was about half an ounce and full of color and each tube goes so far - I had about three separate palettes over the four day trip to make small abstracts in a notebook.

Here I am in the water at Jaws Beach, a very pretty place.

Jaws Beach was a cool place to visit to get away from the more tourist-packed areas, which weren’t that packed to begin with. They seemed eerily empty - I wasn’t sure if it was the off-season, the post-hurricane climate, Coronavirus travel scares, or a combination of all three.

I was surprised to find that the Casino Baha Mar mostly had free everything, free pools that you can bask by and a beach where you can hang out. I played some slot machines but did not win - I think if you play blackjack for a bit you have a good chance of making back anything you put in plus a bit extra to pay for drinks or souvenirs.

Here I am at the Baha Mar beach!

Baha Mar also has something that you’ll likely see in just about any feed of #bahamas instagram posts - this amazing swim-up aquarium where, yes, you can swim right up to a tank of amazing creatures. Sharks, turtles, stingrays, and blowfish were all in this tank. I ended up watching them for several minutes.

Aside from Baha Mar, the other big casino on Nassau, Atlantis, has many more aquariums and sea life that you can view. It was free to go in the casino and about $20 to get valet parking. There were some areas that were private but for the most part the entire casino can be explored.

The Atlantis Casino had … the biggest Chihuly sculptures I have ever seen.

Here I am thumbsuping in front of this massive Chihuly

Baha Mar had these very cool comic book and magazine bodices. I searched for the artist or a credit, but unfortunately could not find who made these. If anyone knows, let me know in the comments!

The koi pond at Baha Mar was also nice, the fish seemed very happy, lively, and even … friendly? They may have thought I had food…

Beaches are what I had in my head most of all when I thought of the Bahamas, and after actually going there, I realized there is much more to the place than just sandy beaches and bright, clear water. Most surprisingly, the jungle forests of the Bahamas were so fun to look at and be around. While I didn’t get much off-road hiking in, very old trees were alongside modern roads.

The island of Nassau had a feeling of the deep past, of explosive nature co-existing with laid-back communities.

I also got the chance to do some volunteering at the Bahamas Red Cross. My friends and I helped move some office equipment and Dengue posters/flyers, and also helped assemble boxes of food and supplies for families suffering the aftermath of Hurricane Dorian.

The Bahamas are a fantastic place to go, I loved every moment of it! It’s even a better place to go if you are an artist, super chill people and places, and ideas for your art!

Who wrote this?

Related Blogs:

Plein Air Painting at Harper’s Ferry

Leadville Summer 2019

Best Art Store in Tokyo

Who wrote this?

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

Sketchbook Confessional: January 2020

Welcome to the Sketchbook Confessional for January of 2020! Woo hoo #jewell2020 the future is here!

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:

Tilted Sun, my creator-owned one-woman epic sci-fi fantasy comic, reached 97 pages this month, and I placed the series on break to work on some other comics and projects! I’m very happy with finishing 97 pages of a comic on my own. There are many things I learned from this process of creation, and you can read them here.

Overall, if you ever feel like criticizing a comic or a movie or TV show, I would recommend that you try making your own, first. You will see and feel with your own two hands the idiosyncrasies of making HARD directorial decisions, editing, and creating things like shots and settings. Please know that comics artists, letterers, and editors do not get enough credit. Hug/message/support an artist near you today, while they are still alive!!

In other comics news I am cranking along on Crow Magnum, a collaboration between me and author Laurel McHargue! Crow Magnum is a small-town psychic thriller.

Life:

After journaling all of 2019 in a Hobonichi Techo journal, I ordered a 2020 Techo journal for this year. Last year I filled my journal with one-line events like meetings, dinners, or people I met on certain days. This year my goal is to journal in a more long-form way in my written/paper journal, in addition to these blogs, where I can fire off words on a keyboard much faster than on paper.

I started journaling seriously after I visited my grandpa’s house in Houston last year and realized he had all of these amazing journals that he had saved.

While his journals were not longform-written texts or detailed expositions of his day-to-day life, he did have written down events of each day, people he’d met, meetings, and projects he was working on as an executive at Shell.

I thought about how great it would be to have a decade of journals, physical pieces of paper about time, and I decided to go with the Techo as my journal of choice year-over-year.

My Dad is also a journaler, though we don’t know the extent of his journals yet, he has mentioned in many letters to me that he only wishes he had started journaling earlier in his life.

On Marc’s side of the family, we have access to family letters and documents going back as far as the Civil War, including this mysterious book from one of Marc’s ancestors where the ancestor says you may peruse his book of photos, but you must add your own photo to the book:

https://twitter.com/beckyjewell/status/1114529776906264576?s=20

(That book should really be in a museum!) Seeing it made me realize that journaling is a good idea, no matter what time you live in, and no matter who you are. At some point, it all adds up, and at some point, journals, like art, like letters, are all we have about life.

My Grandpa of journaling legend passed away on the morning of January 30th, 2020. After getting a call from my mom at about 9:30 in the morning, I returned from my office in Crystal City to my home. I sat in my art studio, reading and re-reading messages and posts about grandpa from many cousins, aunts, uncles, and extended family members.

Suddenly there was a knock on the door from the mailman - I signed for the package, which contained the 2020 Techo from Japan that I had ordered. It was like some kind of sign - as if fate was saying ‘Keep track of this, you must remember. ’

I was so lucky to see my Grandpa last year in Houston. He was all smiles and very at peace.

Grandpa was so transcendently intelligent and before-his-time that the world almost didn't know what to do with him. He skipped grades, he passed every test, he ended up being not just an executive, but an engineering executive. I still remember looking at some of his mathematics books in the attic of his house in Houston, and just being blown away. That, and finding a slide rule lying around in a closet, and I start to have the smallest glimmers of just how bright he was.

All of that and he was so incredibly kind, and loved his family. He surprised everyone! On the surface, he just looked like this smiley dude, but if he touched your life for just a second, you'd walk away smarter and better. He was a champion for anyone in his life. In his final year, he could still describe in perfect detail memories like his first date with Grandma, people he met in Hiroshima after the bomb dropped, my Mom's first steps as a baby, and memories of his own mother struggling through The Depression.

One of my best accomplishments as a teenage artist was making paintings for my Grandpa of some of his travels, and he would walk by the painting in his house each day. The best art is this way - it is a part of life.

We will miss you, grandpa, King of our Hearts.

Reading/Watching/Playing:

I ended up getting a cold midmonth - I sat in bed for three days and read a few more books than usual as I eagerly awaited getting back on my feet.

Reading: I finished Reboot by Jerry Colonna and also a classic by Susie Moore: What if it Does Work Out? Both of these books are great if you are a leader or entrepreneur - Reboot is better for you if you’re a Director/VP/CEO or executive in charge of a team.

I really liked Jerry’s writing about deep emotional work as a leader and as a coach of leaders - and I wish there were more books like Reboot, but I don’t think there ever will be. It’s unique. 10/10 would read again, and though I want to give away my copy to a friend, I also want to reread it myself as time goes on.

I attended one of Susie Moore’s webinars a long time ago about blog writing, and I found her to be a fun and exciting speaker, so I figured I would read her book. The book is the same way - it’s fun and helpful to read. The very title of the book screams optimism, “What if it Does Work Out” is like asking yourself “What’s the BEST that can happen?” Even if you’re not itching to develop a side hustle, the side hustle “What’s the best that can happen?” mentality is worth adopting if you’re into Servant Leadership, leading from abundance, and stepping people/ideas out of negativity patterns.

I also read Man’s Search for Meaning immediately afterwards, which becomes a good read because no matter how bad your life may be, you will probably find yourself spared the misery of a concentration camp. There are moments of honesty in the first part of this book about human nature that put a lot of things in perspective, and will also just expand gratefulness.

In the second part of Man’s Search for Meaning, the author goes into his actual field of study, a type of psychology called ‘logotherapy’ which still feels very pertinent today. I’d never run into this kind of thinking before. It seems to be refreshing in ways that are strikingly modern, a compelling counter to Freud and Jung. Meaning is very much still the final frontier of modern life - not many people have it or have enough of it.

A friend at work gifted me the Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin. I’m only through Book 1 and wow, fantastic. If you are into Sci Fi/Fantasy and you are not reading these books, you are missing out. I can’t say much else without spoilers, just read them if you haven’t!

I loved most of all N.K. Jemisin’s afterward, where she wrote so transparently of her writing process and even struggle. The book itself is like an ice skater, it looks so fantasticly perfect and intricate, yet from what I take from Jemisin’s afterward, it was years of hard work and effort. As artists, I think it is important to talk about when things are hard. Otherwise it just looks like we are dancing through life, pumping out novels like magical faeries. We are more like shadow faeries who just don’t give up. Haha.

Fitness:

Earlier this month I started seriously hitting the treadmill, and, I only hit the treadmill because it is still a bit glum in Washington DC. Otherwise I’d be running outside.

I find the treadmill and workouts with my personal trainer help me keep cheerier than I would be otherwise, and I have more energy to crank through the day and get stuff done.

I hit the treadmill so hard that I ended up getting that cold, and, in the words of Ru Paul, “Catching a Cold is your body’s way of saying, Bitch, you need to sit yo’ ass down.” So I sat down for a while and ended up playing and reading all of the materials detailed above. I wish I could have worked out more, but I was deep in a Theraflu state of mind.

I did recover end-of-month and reached 5.83 miles in 60 minutes on January 28th, very close to my goal of 6 miles in 60 minutes. Eventually I want to run a paced half marathon and other races, not just do the race but do well in my own little lane.

Treadmill stats on 1/28/2020

It helped me to start thinking harder about exercise in November of 2019 - it’s nice to remember that you don’t have to wait for a new year to go after something you want, like fitness, better relationships, or having more fun. There’s something special about every month of the year, too. Now is always a good time.

Until next month, ra!

Related Blogs:

Follow me on Instagram!

Sketchbook Confessional: December 2019

Sketchbook Confessional: November 2019

Who wrote this?

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

- Becky Jewell

Akihabara Mix

Photos I took of Akihabara while visiting Japan in 2019! It took me a while to publish these - so much fun.

footage of me trying to get into the Ghibli museum in Tokyo

On the day I went to visit Akihabara, I took a train earlier in the morning to the Ghibli museum on the other side of Tokyo. Sadly I couldn’t get into the museum because I had no advance tickets. It was like that moment in Final Fantasy 9 where Vivi can’t get into the opera because his tickets are fake.

With sad feelings of “No Tickets for You” I went to Akihabara in a sort of dejected state, only to fall in love with it deeply. It was like getting romantically rejected by the prom king only to find out that the raver kid writing poems in the corner of class is The Actual Fucking Best. I went back to Akihabara two more times in my ten-day trip to Tokyo.

Inside the shops in Akihabara there was just … so … much … stuff. I couldn’t believe how many things there were, how many characters I didn’t recognize.

I felt like I had gone into a coma and while I was sleeping, Pokemon had been invented, pogs had come and gone, and Harry Potter had gone through all seven books, but I hadn’t been around for any of it, and all of it was coming at me like a Hokusai tsunami of pop culture. I didn’t have a chance and ended up spending something like $500 on things that I do not understand.

I like the things I bought, but I don’t know exactly why!

One of my favorite things I bought in Akihabara was this acrylic stand of Miku, a hologram music performer. Let’s see, how can I explain this …?

Miku is a hologram, but she is kind of like a person, she is an entity, and she was involved in some kind of popup for a race car promotion so naturally I fell in love with ‘Racing Miku.’ Just the fact that she existed made me happy. With Racing Miku on my desk, I feel like I have won some kind of award, the award of trying to understand what Racing Miku is.

In the words of the King in Katamari, Akihabara has a lot of things, yes. I wrote more at length about different parts of Akihabara in the blog below:

Comics and manga culture, and how art is alive in Akihabara:

https://beckyjewellart.com/blog/2019/4/2/animate-in-akihabara

And in other moments all I did was take photos, like this Dragon Quest themed store.

I also loved Harajuku and many yen departed my wallet there.

Sketchbook Confessional December 2019

Welcome to December 2019’s Sketchbook Confessional!

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:

December is a bit of a glum time in DC/Maryland/Virginia so I ended up subliminally drawing a lot of artwork with eye-melting bright colors.

When making the piece above, I was thinking about Disney movies and how princesses always have this part where they sing and they are surrounded by friendly animals, like Ariel and Flounder in The Little Mermaid, or like Belle and her horse and other farm animals in Beauty and the Beast.

I began thinking wow, life sure is not like that at all, most animals are pretty rough - the animal kingdom is often as cruel as ours. Even birds can be absolutely terrifying. So, I envisioned a princess who makes friends with predators. Weasels, snakes, tigers, hyenas - all of these are the ‘evil’ or ‘bad’ animals of pop culture, but why? What if we could be friends with the ‘bad’ animals, and, what if they aren’t really that bad? It’s not their fault they’re eels.

The four-winged vulture was just one I threw in there because, you know.

This month I also did a bunch of art from Die Hard! There’s a full mini blog of these drawings here:

DIE HARD DECEMBER

I was lucky to get a large iPad Pro for Christmas from Marc. He looked into Wacom and other tablets, and the ipad eventually won out . I have a smaller 2018 iPad Pro 2 that I won, miraculously, by playing blackjack, somehow?

While I love my mini iPad for riding on the metro, I’ve named my 12.9 inch Big Boi and it stays at home with me in the studio, planted on a stand. The real estate of the larger screen does matter - I already feel like a more powerful artist who can see quite a bit better. There’s no parallax and the drag is perfect. No need for a screen protector or drag-enhancer to make production art.

The first thing I made on my new ipad pro 2

Tilted Sun is finishing the year at 92 pages. It’s become a bit of a Russian Doll of stories, with characters experiencing the thoughts and memories of other characters as time goes by. The year’s final panel of Tilted Sun:

I feel very happy with how Tilted Sun is turning out. There’s always more to be said and done, and none of it is full circle yet, but I’m glad I just started and just kicked the tires on making comics instead of waiting for a publisher or a kickstarter or someone in the industry to say yes. I’d recommend this approach to anyone. If you want to make something, just do it.

Tilted Sun is my science fiction/fantasy comic of absolute creative freedom, where I can talk about anything, and it turned out to be a place where I talk about computers and technology. At this time in 2019-soon-to-be-2020, computers are something that are fully integrated into our lives. In Tilted Sun everything is just a bit further along, where computers are absolutely entangled with people and also the natural world. That’s about as much as I can say without spoiling it. :) You know I love surprises.

One of my friends said to me lately “Scott Adams did computer stuff and made Dilbert, and you made … this”. There are so many absurd, funny, heartbreaking moments in working with computers, but there is also so many fabulous, ‘I-can’t-believe-we-made-that-work'' moments. Maybe I haven’t had my heart broken enough yet, but I think I actually have, over and over again, and this is what I do anyways.

I think the best art comes when artists are fully in their own world and producing what they truly want to produce. Commissions are great, but the best thing you could ever do with an extremely talented artist is just hire them and say “Make whatever you want to make” and turn them loose on a project. The best people I’ve worked with have done this for me, and I’m grateful.

I’ve started putting up more posts about my comics-creation process on Instagram. Since I save everything I do, I figured Instagram would be a good platform to show some of the work that goes into the final product.

To fire off 1000-word microblogs on Instagram, I use an app called Later to type out posts on a computer with a full keyboard. Later has helped me save a bunch of time, because I can type faster than I can tap, and since posts are scheduled I can block out an hour and get posts done for an entire week, and not spend as much time fussing over Instagram. It also has a cool planner function so you can see how your spread of posts will look. This is important since I’m trying to be more consistent and make blocks of consistent content in sets of three - for example, three lifestyle posts, three drawings, and three paintings.

Why do all this planning around Instagram? I started working harder on Instagram because I realized my Instagram profile actually gets as many visits as this website. It’s a pretty fun place to engage and I do an occasional livestream there so ff to follow if you aren’t already: https://www.instagram.com/beckyjewell/

This website is a great place for high-level tutorials, 4000-word journals, longevity, and step-by-step writeups on art tools, but for everything else, for everything new, Instagram is great.

Playing:

I’m watching a bunch of Death Stranding and made some fanart of the part where Norman Reedus puts on the dreamcatcher necklace. A couple of my friends messaged me to say that Death Stranding reminded them a lot of Tilted Sun, just in a darker sense. I do see the similarities - the main character is named Sam, and there are all kinds of unexplained mysteries and concepts. I was so flattered by these messages because even if Death Stranding is a bit opaque to me, Hideo Kojima is an artist’s artist.

The game started creating a pretty eerie feeling in me since I live in Maryland-shy-of-DC and the scenes about presidentiality and goverment started to feel very close to home. I think this is just part of living somewhere iconic - movies like Independence Day and National Treasure have a new tint to them if DC is your home, it’s like romantic background noise that you’re trying to cut through as you’re stuck in DC traffic or on the metro.

I am not going to lie, I do NOT understand Death Stranding at all, but I am onboard to try to understand it. Maybe understanding isn’t the point, and though sci-fi audiences deeply want to ‘get’ and ‘know’ and be experts of scifi universes, there are some parts of both life and fiction that just won’t make any sense, or, some that will depend on you to piece things together.

I’m not sure when scifi got so explaination-heavy, or when it became an expectation that everything had to be logical or planned. It might even be remake-culture at work, where we are so used to certain universes that, the second that something new comes along in pop culture, we can barely handle it in a critical way.

It’s like when the most gleaming, dazzling minds of my life call artwork and stories ‘property’ or ‘content.’ The part of me that loves what is wild and free just reels. It just reels.

Fitness:

Well yes, December has been pretty glum, weatherwise, in the DMV, so I’ve been hitting the treadmill at the gym. I’m ramping up in confidence and am just running for about an hour in a sportsbra and leggings, pumping the jams on Spotify. What’s good about the gym and jams is it keeps me in a good mood even if the weather is miserable. Occasionally I will run hills in our neighborhood in Maryland just to get some out-of-the-gym chaotic experience.

I’m still working with a personal trainer once per week, which absolutely kicks my ass, but its moving me in a good direction artwise. When I work out midday, I find that I have more energy when I get home and I crank through more artwork than I would have otherwise. I’m not a get-up-early person anymore, so, midday workouts seem to be what I can do in my current life in a way that makes sense.

Until next time, Space Cowboys … let’s DO THIS 2020!! I love you all!!

Related blogs:

Sketchbook Confessional November 2019

Sketchbook Confessional October 2019

Sketchbook Confessional September 2019

Who wrote this?

I’m a painter and I make comics, I also travel! I love writing about art and seeing art in the world. I live and work in Maryland-shy-of-DC. Catch you next time …

- Becky Jewell

Art Reads: Can't Hurt Me

Have you ever had a friend who is very direct, yet unjudgmental?

David Goggins is the to-the-point friend that we all need.

Early in ‘Can’t Hurt Me’, Goggins has reached a breaking point of misery and suffering as an overweight pest-control technician. He looks in his bathroom mirror and tells himself “You’re fat.” (Among other blatant call-outs).

Throughout ‘Can’t Hurt Me’ Goggins refuses to lie to himself, and, therefore, you know he’s not lying to you.

This is what is so magnetizing and great about Can’t Hurt Me. You get the feeling Goggins is doing something revolutionary by the most direct path of all. He’s not being trollingly-judgemental towards vague groups of people in a way that we are used to seeing in blogs and other self-help books. No comments about millennials or boomers or kids in this book. No comments about things we can’t control. He aims his judgement and action entirely at the one thing he can change: himself.

Ken Chlouber has a famous saying surrounding the Leadville 100 “You can do more than you think you can.”

The simplicity and enormity of the quote is also David Goggin’s belief in Can’t Hurt Me - Goggins believes that most of us are only doing 40% of what we are really capable of. You can do more than you think you can, and where our mind thinks we are at 100% capacity, we’re really only at 40% capacity.

In Can’t Hurt Me Goggins goes into the mental pitfalls of being “The Only” as in, the only black person, the only woman, the only gay person. Being The Only means it is super easy to see yourself as a victim or as special, but you can’t let let the mentality set in - you can jump into the 60% and keep going despite being The Only.

In Goggin’s case, not only is he is often The Only, but he comes from a world of pain. Goggin’s early life is punctuated with abuse after abuse from his father. It’s horrific, intentional abuse - something of the past, something he can’t ever change. So he changes himself, and his future. His take is that If he can mentally rise above, we all can.

And yes, wow, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been The Only woman in school or in art, and in my professional life or wherever - I think at some point in life, everyone is The Only of some kind. It’s nice to turn the course of action back towards self, back towards what can be done rather than what can’t be done.

After reading Can’t Hurt Me, I definitely wanted to know more about this person - I wanted to breathe and live in the Goggins mentality as much as I could. Luckily, I’m far from the only one, and there is an expansive Goggins universe of podcasts and Youtube videos out there.

It’s been great to follow David Goggins on Instagram, where he will write surprising at-length blogs on each photo post, and is impressively delivering his messages in video form while doing jumprope or running on a treadmill. I find his feed so different, so compelling. I can barely livestream on Instagram without getting out of breath, so I admire how Goggins can run and jump and also talk at the top of his lungs.

I knew I had found a home on Instagram with David Goggins when he put up a post and said, Hey, sometimes, you might be saying “They don’t like me because I am xyz” but it could also be because you’re just not good enough!

It’s this kind of self-ass-kicking that I gravitate towards, and I think most people who like David Goggins like the same thing about him.

Because ultimately, I know I can’t change thousands of years of sexism or racism or homophobia, I can’t change how people perceive art as an idea, but I can change my mental take on it all. Goggins did it, so, I can change myself and my own life. Which is the paradox and the truth - by changing yourself, you change the world.

Goggins gives us the chance to transcend anything - abuse, being The Only, health conditions - via self-accountability and undeniably excellent. Sometimes you’re fat. Sometimes you’re wrong. Sometimes you have to get back up. This, and the 40% rule is the most hopeful message I can fathom when adversity is high.

I also like how Goggins deals with his haters and naysayers, too, where he says to “step out of hate,” because hate dearly wishes to engage you. Stepping towards hate is letting it get closer to winning.

Every now and then, I’ll get an occasional hater on the internet - they’re usually faceless (no profile photo, bogus username). And I will think to myself “I can’t believe I have done everything I have done and gotten so far in life and art, and now a faceless person with no name is yelling at me, calling me names, telling me I am this or that.”

Whenever I tell my friends about my haters, they almost can’t believe I have haters. Why would I have haters? I’m not controversial. I don’t tell people what to do or how to live their lives. I make space fantasy comics and paintings of cats.

But it’s the same for David Goggins - he doesn’t tell people what to do or how to live their lives - he just does it, he is an action-taker first, a speaker second. He still has haters.

Sometimes people just hate you for existing. In Can’t Hurt Me and in the Goggins world, it’s patently true that haters will find you for having done nothing other than existing beyond where you were statistically expected to exist. Sometimes you exist, and people get mad or jealous, and it is 8000% always about them, not you. That’s why I am in the Goggins court of living heroically in your own ever-expansive lane. I’m cool with looking at myself in the mirror and saying “You’re lazy” when I haven’t done a marathon yet, or finished an art project.

There’s really nothing else to do, except the remaining 60%.

It was no surprise to me when Goggins ended up running the Leadville 100 near the end of Can’t Hurt Me, and that the main thing he had to say about the town was meeting the people there who had traveled far to see him run. He’s touring the country almost constantly, running ultra races and races that didn’t even exist five years ago. In both his life and philosophy, he is on a kind of grand tour of transcending limits. The Goggins universe may not be for everyone, but there’s no reason it can’t be.

Related blogs:

Leadville Summer 2019 Photos

Plein Air Painting in Leadville

Sketchbook Confessional November 2019

Who wrote this?

I’m a painter and I make comics, I also travel! I love writing about art and seeing art in the world. I live and work in Maryland-shy-of-DC. Catch you next time …

- Becky Jewell