I’m happy to say I’ve opened my print shop on Society 6! Check it out.
New prints added each week!
Who wrote this?
I’m a painter, I make comics, and sometimes I do computer stuff!
- Becky Jewell
When Art Isn't Therapy
The problem with art is that it can be whatever you want it to be.
Art can be this dreamy, relaxing thing, or it is an excruciating, nigh-impossible endeavor.
It’s a bit like running - you can go for an afternoon jog, or you can be an ultramarathoner. At some point, you have to jog to get to the ultramarathon. It’s all running at some level. Ultimately, the degree to which art goes has to do with you.
Who wrote this:
I’m a painter, I make comics, and sometimes I do computer stuff!
- Becky Jewell
Daily Blog: April 15 2020: Personal Work
About a year ago I noticed a new term being used by artists in my community: personal work.
"Personal work" entails work that you make for no person, for no reason, and for no money.
Personal work for me is work that comes from the deepest part of me and 'demands' to be made. Most artists make Personal Work their whole lives, and only at a certain point, do we start making commercial work or commission-oriented art.
Personal work doesn’t have to make sense or cohere or be on time, and it often comes from a very deep place. It’s an absolutely liberated form of expression.
Though it is made for no reason and usually for no money, personal work is the most valuable kind of work artists can make for ourselves and for our culture.
Who wrote this?
I’m a painter, I make comics, and sometimes I do computer stuff!
- Becky Jewell
Daily Blog: April 12 2020: Art Therapy is Too Late
It’s worth taking a moment to look at how we talk about our feelings today. I think the current model is flawed, and art is partially to blame, but this can be fixed.
For feelings that are hard to deal with, we have therapists and hotlines, but, why? Why are discussions about feelings something that gets kicked into a secret room, or a confidential phone line? Don’t talk about your feelings in public. We also have art museums and sacred spaces for art. Don’t touch the art.
We try so hard to contain them, but every now and then, art and feelings break free.
Like when song perfectly expresses our feelings, or when we take a perfect photo.
I’d argue not for museums or Art Therapy, or even Art Appreciation, but Art Integration. Integrating art into your life consistently, like good diet and exercise, will bring feelings forward in as they exist, not after, and not always in crisis. Buying a piece of art that makes you happy, or making a piece of art that sings to you, is probably one of the healthiest things you can do.
The point of museums and seeing art isn’t to feel special or fancy, it’s to develop self-expression and self-knowing in an expansive way.
Bring art into your life, see it, or practice it, and you will uncover life's mysteries beyond your wildest imagination.
Related Blogs:
It’s Good if Art Seems Pointless
Who wrote this:
I’m a painter, I make comics, and sometimes I do computer stuff!
- Becky Jewell
Daily Blog: Fan Art Friday!
It was so fun to make these Six Fan Arts on a 60-minute Instagram Livestream last night!
Thanks to all who joined! Be sure to join me on Instagram if you haven’t already, and request your favorite characters.
Props to the Six Fan Arts template!
Who wrote this?
I’m a painter, I make comics, and sometimes I do computer stuff!
- Becky Jewell
Daily Post: April 8 2020 - Toonme Drawings
Lately I have made some photo-to-comic-art drawings, here are all of them so far!
To make these works I ask each person to send me a photo and I draw over the photo in Clip Studio Paint in my comic book style.
It’s been really fun to make these for people.
It’s been so fun to make these. If you’re interested in a toonme drawing, message me on Instagram, Twitter, or comment!
Who wrote this:
I’m a painter, I make comics, and sometimes I do computer stuff!
- Becky Jewell
Daily Post: April 7 2020: In Praise of Low-Stakes Art and Crafts - Especially During COVID-19 measures
Sometimes, I make art about what I think are difficult and serious subjects, like love and relationships and the nature of reality.
Extremely weird, diffusive art that I’ve made
And sometimes, I make Perler bead art.
Most of the time, art involves our very best work and talents - critical thinking combined with communication and a sense of style. Art takes all of this and more.
Sometimes art doesn’t require any of this. That’s the cool thing about art.
Balancing between high-stakes, high-demand art and low-stakes art has become, well, a bit of an art for me in my creative life.
A narrative scifi epic of 100+ pages, Tilted Sun is the result of me writing, drawing, inking, lettering and planning a comic. It’s been a year-over-year project. Comics are usually made by 8 people for a reason!
When you take a step back, a lot went into Tilted Sun and still goes into it each day when I work on my art.
I’ve also done paintings like this one, a 30 foot tall acrylic which hung in Norlin Library at CU Boulder, seen by thousands of people per day.
The other thing about painting is … it’s hard. Even a tiny painting is hard to do sometimes.
To supplement my current work in comics (hardmode) and painting (death hard mode), My recent low-stakes side project is resin casting.
All that I have to do with resin is mix it up, find something to embed in it, and pour the resin and the thing into little trinket moulds.
Now, that said, resin casting isn’t always low stakes - if you want, it can be a huge undertaking. Entire tables can be coated in hundreds of dollars of resin. It’s also possible to encase musical instruments in resin - such as guitars - where if the pour is unideal, the stakes at hand are both the cost and time of the resin pour, and the cost of the instrument. … Yikes …
Anything, any kind of art can be extremely serious if you want it to be.
Yet for me, right now, resin is my little pet project where I make trinkets that nobody, not even me, is worried about.
No clients are wringing their hands over the quality or artistic merit of my extremely average resin casts. If the resin casts turn out wonky, I lose, at most, fifteen bucks and a couple minutes.
It’s great to go after big things in art - it is also incredibly scary and full of failure and twists and turns. So, sometimes, I need to make a smaller thing to have a sense of completion, however small, in the midst of a longer journey.
Low stakes art has been especially helpful for me during COVID-19 measures, where I am staying in or near my house 95% of the time. Small pieces of art help me feel like I am making - at least- something, even though I can’t go out and meet my friends or move my art forward in other ways.
Until next time!
Related blogs:
Why Art Seems to Predict the Future
Tilted Sun - Sci Fi Fantasy Comic
Sketchbook Confessional - March 2020
Who wrote this:
Daily Post: April 6 2020 Kingdom Hearts and My Summer Job as a Roofer
Some of the roofs I worked on in Leadville were old. Well, not this old, but still pretty old!
In the summer of 2005 I left CU Boulder and went back to Leadville to work as an assistant in a local construction business.
My job was to gather up old, discarded roof tiles and put them in my truck, a red 1980s-era Toyota with golf-themed upholstery that my grandpa had gifted to our family.
On my first job I went up on a roof and caulked roof tiles. On the second job I cleaned up a bunch of debris that other roofers were stripping and throwing off of the house. Old roof off, new roof on.
I would picking up slats of rotted roof wood and centipedes would scatter from underneath. Sometimes there were dead animals, creatures that had lived in or on the old roof wood and had been thrown to the literal wayside of each home. Other things would happen - like I would almost accidentally step on upturned nails, or I would scrape myself on dry, unsanded wood, or get a sunburn.
The idea of a desk job seemed nice. Yet at the same time, I loved my roofing job. I liked it a lot.
It felt good to get exercise and to see the tangible effects of my work. I would often talk to the homeowners and they would bring me snacks or water. I’m sure it looked pretty weird - a construction crew of mostly grown men and then a teenage girl lifting and throwing debris into a vehicle. As a roof-tile-gatherer, that summer I learned that there was always high demand for work that nobody else wanted to do.
I would return to my parent’s house each evening fairly exhausted and would play the Playstation 2 in my brother’s room. I spent hours and hours playing Kingdom Hearts, the first Kingdom Hearts. Alice in Wonderland, Tarzan, Hercules, Pinnochio … I can still hear most of the levels in the game. It was simple and familiar enough for me to latch onto after busting my ass on rooftops.
In Kingdom Hearts, the two main characters seemed to be about 15 years old. I was 19 at the time and remembered thinking “Am I too old for this? Should I be more mature by now?”
It was sort of the same with roofing - I wondered if I should be doing some other kind of job, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.
It was a good summer to realize that it was fine to just love what I loved, even if it seemed off the beaten path of my age or gender.
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:
Who wrote this:
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 Dumbo and Pinnochio are weird movies
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
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
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
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
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.
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Books I Didn’t Finish: Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past
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!
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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.
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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.
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 …
