Ask Iwata - Words of Wisdom from Satoru Iwata, Nintendo's Legendary CEO

This is a really sweet book with simple principles for bringing more happiness into the world.

I won’t spoil them, but the book also has a couple anecdotes about the development of Earthbound, which I found interesting and hadn't heard before. Earthbound always struck me as quite a different game from others, and part of the reason why might be explained in this book.

The Hobonichi Earthbound cover and the Ask Iwata book go together pretty well!

This book was interesting to read after the Reggie Fils-Aime book, and in reading both, it’s easy to see how the different strengths of each leader contributed to making consistently interesting products come out of Nintendo. Iwata acknowledges the power of disparate strengths in the book.

I like to make a study of Nintendo as a company because the feelings of happiness I’ve received from Nintendo games have been so consistent throughout my life. The way I see it, an organization that makes such touching games has to have some principles driving it, principles that care deeply about people having fun and being happy. It’s not simply that Nintendo creates quality devices and products, it’s that the quality products also contribute to so much joy and happiness that I find them worth studying, to the point of writing these blogs and discussing the books when I get the chance. Apple is a company that puts out quality devices, but does it always make people so happy? The same question could be asked and answered in the same way for dozens of game and technology companies.

Here is another simple statement from Iwata:

“What makes work so interesting is the chance to meet people driven by anger and people driven by happiness”

The book is full of simple statements like the above. I found this to be very refreshing. There’s something very humble and also very direct in the writing style here.

I also liked the simplicity of what Iwata had to say about drawing:

“A person who likes drawing is going to draw regardless of whether anybody asks them to, and people will praise them for that. As this cycle continues, they’ll get better and better at drawing.”

A key takeaway from this book for executives and managers is Iwata’s leadership style of interviewing each person at his company twice a year. It sounds a bit like a performance review, but it’s more of an interview. I thought this strategy was very refreshing, and it worked to keep Iwata close to the people he was leading.

Ultimately this is a good book, it’s a short read and has many anecdotes to enjoy upon a second look. Ask Iwata is one of those books that is good to read in full and also take off the shelf from time to time to revisit. Open to just about any page and you’ll find a simple, compact statement about life as a leader or a designer.

Cat Collages

Lately I’ve been getting into making more paper cat cutouts! Here are some of them

Ultimately I put these into bookmarks

Products with these cat patterns on them can be found on my society6 shop:

Travel Mug

Tote Bag

And tons more!

Hiking Mama: Hiking during late pregnancy

Hiking has been a fun and exciting thing that I can do in pregnancy.

I fired off a couple runs in the first trimester and quickly lost steam after that in the second trimester as far as running. Running around with a baby bump just didn’t feel right for me, though I did get the second wind that many women talk about in the second trimester. It was a good time to do tasks like organizing and moving and nesting.

In the third trimester (as we speak) I feel energetic but not like a power woman or anything, so, hiking and walking have become my favorite activity.

Hiking at 36 weeks

It’s been useful to get a pair of hiking poles and use the poles while on my hikes. I need to go slowly to hike, the poles help me with balance as I have gained 40-50 pounds and I gained at least 10 of those pounds in the last couple weeks of the third trimester. It’s not easy to balance with such rapid weight gain, my brain isn’t used to how difficult it will be for me to do things like crouch and get back up again.

For some, I hear it can be embarrassing to use hiking poles, because some of us associate poles with canes, but I figure that pregnancy itself can be the same way if we let it. I find it is much nicer to be out and proud with my belly and to be unapologetically pregnant and wielding poles. This is where I would insert a shrug emoji but I don’t know how to do that on this website, haha.

Another 36 weeks photo from an amazing hike near Brainard Lake

For the most part, I stick to flat terrain or terrain with gradual inclines. If something is too steep, I won’t do it.

Something that is kind of funny is that being pregnant and hiking reminds me a lot of hiking around with my painting easel - it’s a big unweildy thing that sets off my center of gravity in ways that can be tricky to deal with. Fortunately for both being pregnant and hauling an easel across the land, developing and maintaining core strength is something that can help with both. It sounds weird to want to keep up with planks in order to just, walk, haha, but it ends up being useful.

Hiking at about 35 weeks

I am able to hike up to 5 miles, and while it sounds like a lot, I go pretty slowly. The 5 miles might take me 2 hours to do. The important part is that I am getting outside and getting the miles in. And, on many days, I’ve only been able to have time for 1.5 miles or even just 1 mile up and down the road.

I’ve gained quite a bit of weight during pregnancy though it may not look like it - before pregnancy I was usually weighing in at around 130 lbs, and in these final weeks of being pregnant, I am more like 175 and at night, 180. My height gives me a bit of a pass, as gaining 50 pounds across 5’11 doesn’t look like 50 pounds on someone not as tall. And fortunately, most of it seems to be purely the baby and blood volume or water weight.

But, I would have lost more of my fitness levels without hiking and walking. Weight is one thing, but losing my previous levels of fitness any more than necessary would be a bummer.

Finally, what I’ve loved most about hiking while pregnant is that it gives me something to see and think about that is beyond my computer, my art, my work, or health. I turned out to be one of those moms who likes to google just about everything in my early trimesters, causing me a bit of anxiety at some points. When I get outside, I don’t have to worry about anything - it’s nice to just look at rocks, plants, and landscapes and think about those, instead of whatever battery of tests and appointments that I have coming up. (Though, I am grateful for modern medicine and all of those tests, too!)

So, I hope this blog has helped share some of my love of hiking with you!

To sum up, here are my Hiking Mama takeaways:

• Flat and shady terrain is great

• Hiking poles make everything 100% better

• Time doesn’t matter, just getting it in is enough!

• The mental benefits of hiking are as good as the physical benefits

Medium Moment: Coliro Iridescent Watercolors

To get started with using these iridescent watercolors, I thought about different animals that had iridescence in their plumage or scales. The animals I decided to paint first were hummingbirds and also fish - each creature has a kind of shine to it that matches the properties of the medium.

For me personally, it is fun and useful to make palettes of what each color looks like like in the photo above. This helps me understand what the colors look like on paper - sometimes it can be a bit of a surprise but with these particular colors, there’s nothing too shocking. Coliro also provides palette examples of what the colors look like on both black and white paper.

Depending on the lighting, these watercolors photograph a bit differently and I found it was a good idea to take photos in different lights, different times of day.

The particular paper that these watercolors are on is handmade paper made from recycled t-shirts, and it has a decent amount of tooth and depth - the pressing on the paper resembles canvas, which creates extra texture and shadows.

In different lights, the light may or may not fill all of the tooth on the paper, and this can affect the way the iridescent watercolors look.

I made a second, larger rainbow trout with almost exclusively the Coliro Iridescent colors - the only color below that is not Coliro is the black for the fish’s eye and spots.

Overall I really like these watercolors and I think they are definitely worth trying. I bought 2 sets and also a couple singles for palette diversity’s sake. The colors also mix and layer well with other watercolors and gouache paints.

Starting my Journey With Watercolor

About a year and a half ago I stopped oil painting and moved over to gouache. I was a bit overwhelmed by the amount of solvents that I personally utilized to oil paint. Have you ever gone into a polluted area and felt that it would be very bad for your body to stay there, like you could feel an accumulation of bad chemicals in the air? That’s a bit how oil painting made me feel at the end. I was in love with the textures and colors, yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that oil painting was bad for me or my future self, and that my health would be better if I stopped doing it.

To add to this act of self-preservation, in November 2022, I knew I was pregnant and my decision to stop oil painting a few months earlier helped me feel even better about my choice. I read countless blogs and articles on what doctors thought was best to do with painting. It turned out that many of the posts and articles I read agreed that oil painting should be avoided during a pregnancy, and watercolors and acrylics were much better mediums for moms-to-be.

In pregnancy it seems like everything that is near my body needs to be double-checked. Everything must go through a sort of pregnant-lady TSA. Foods, and even cosmetics that I love, or beauty treatments, are highly monitored and are recommended against. This is all well and fine to me, being a person who has already stopped drinking a few years before, giving things up has been easier than I thought it would be. I think most moms-to-be are prepared to give up things like alcohol, but what surprised me was … some sunscreens aren’t okay to use? It all seems very good to err on the side of caution.

The caution of pregnancy around paints formed an opportunity to revisit an art medium that has always, always, always kicked my ass. It confounded me as a teenager. I tried it again in my 20s but couldn’t make anything meaningful. Somehow, working with acrylic ink was easier. Oil painting was way less daunting.

That ass-kicking medium: watercolor.

Aside from reading blog after blog about watercoloring instead of oil painting during pregnancy, what helped me get better with watercolor is something I’ve always loved: reading. For me at least, and maybe for others, watercolor is not the sort of medium that one can just squeeze out of the tube and produce masterpieces. I had to read a book about it and educate myself on techniques, steps, paper types, and more.

The book that got me feeling confident with watercolors was this Jean Haines book, which I picked up on a lark at Barnes and Nobles.

I find Haines’ writing in this book to be very compelling. She describes exactly what she does and she talks about materials and brushes too.

What also helps is that there are thousands of youtube videos out there on watercolor, yet, I think the Jean Haines book is still very valuable, because she is so articulate about her painting. She has a whole series of books, and I picked this animal-based book because the topic seemed approachable to me.

It is hard to find people in life who are highly skilled at something and are also able to communicate very well about their skill. I find this to be true in many sectors, from tech to painting, to topics like mechanics and dentistry. This is why I appreciate Jean Haines’ work and her writing so much.

For my first watercolor in many years, I made this picture of Geddy:

I am pretty happy with this painting of Geddy. I see a lot of opportunities to improve, also. What I thought after making this watercolor was that it would be a good idea to paint something that isn’t predominantly white. Even though Geddy has some blue fur and has pink undertones, he doesn’t make for the most exciting painting subject unless he is against an exciting colorful background. (sorry Geddy!)

So, I moved on to mountains and flowers.

For Memorial Day, I painted these poppies. This was very fun to do, and I used different watercolors than the ones I used for the Geddy watercolor. The paints I used are the Yasutomo Sumi-e Watercolor set - I got them at Guiry’s.

The paper for the poppies above is handmade paper made of recycled T Shirts, which can be found at Two Hands Paperie in Boulder. I really like this paper for watercolor. I was not sure how it would look at all, and I’m not sure of the paper’s weight or if it is considered hot or cold press. Whatever it may be, it has a very pretty effect when painted with these watercolors.

I also found the iridescent watercolors, Coliro watercolors, at Two Hands Paperie. Two Hands Paperie also carries many other handcrafted watercolors. The world of handcrafted watercolors is brand new to me, and it’s very fun to get into. I’m mostly just excited that this is a thing that people do - they make their own paint and sell them online in small batches. It’s much like people who make handcrafted journals or sketchbooks.

No dis on big paint brands, but there is something so fun about looking at and buying small batches. I feel a bit like I am wielding a magic potion, and in a way, that’s exactly what handcrafted watercolors are.

To figure out a bit more about how colors worked on the paper, I painted a swatch.

I painted a few more poppies, this time layering a bit of the Yasutomo paint and adding just a small accent of the Coliro iridescent paints to the flowers. This was really fun.

My next project with the Coliro paints will be iridescent animals, I’m thinking of animals like hummingbirds or even beetles that have shiny carapaces.

Overall, I feel like I am off to a good start with watercolors. The key for me turned out to be not approaching it blindly and just buying paints and brushes, but sticking with a book and reading as much as I could about it, and getting quality paints and paper that I could get excited about. To sum up my approach:

1. Don’t give up!

2. Get a book with good writing and inspiring art. Ideally the book will say exactly what kinds of papers and brushes to try, and sometimes, paints

3. Paint different subjects with different colors.

4. Making swatches or small test areas of colors is a good idea to understand what the colors look like on certain papers, and how the colors behave or ‘set’ on the paper

5. Try something a bit new - iridescent and/or handcrafted watercolors are a fun place to start

Pycon 2022 Recap!

It was great to meet the people I met at Pycon and to see all of the talks. I enjoyed Salt Lake City a ton - I wasn’t sure what to expect, never having been to the city before other than passing through as a kid, and I was delighted with how pretty Salt Lake City is.

I wrote this quick recap on the conference, and, since it will be in Salt Lake City again next year, I added some notes about what I liked about Salt Lake City.

Conference Format and talks

What I liked most about each of the talks was that they were only 30 minutes each. No questions were taken at the end of each talk, due to covid guidelines. Perhaps oddly, I did like that there were no open questions at the end, because each speaker usually encouraged audience members to ‘find them in the hall’ instead of ask a question in front of 200 other people. There was a kind of approachability here which I really liked. I’ve been to some other kinds of conventions where the speaker gets on stage, gets off stage, and virtually runs away from any audience members. I’m sure there were some hallway-shy speakers at Pycon, but for every talk I saw, each speaker encouraged audience members to meet up or ask questions in the hall.

Keynotes

I loved the talk from Sara Issaoun, which you can view on youtube below!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6SWPjdxvEI

What I thought was most interesting about this talk was the worldwide collaboration needed in order to get the imaging completed. I won’t spoil much more than that! Watch the talk!

Salt Lake City

I loved walking around Salt Lake City. Everyone was very nice, to the extent that some local passerbys helped me figure out the parking system utilized by the city when they saw me standing around looking confused. A person whizzed by me on a sidewalk on a scooter and shouted “Sorry!” and I said “Sorry!” and they said “Sorry!” again. Usually, in other cities, cough cough, scooter-riders nearly mow me over without a word.

There are tons of restaurants to check out in Salt Lake City if you’ve never been there before, or recently. We didn’t have a lack of places to eat or areas to check out over the weekend after the last conference talks of each day.

I was surprised and happy to see that there is a Cotopaxi store in Salt Lake City, and it’s right by the convention center. After getting my Cotopaxi jacket and backpack at REIs in DC and Colorado for a few years, there was nothing quite like getting to go to a store where ALL of the selection is Cotopaxi. I picked up a new backpack and some smaller packs to carry things like my brushes and paints.

The best place to stay for this conference is probably the Marriott, which is across the street from the conference center. I do have to say I loved our little Air Bnb, it was super close to the conference center, but we found ourselves calling an Uber/Lyft a few times as the area is hilly and takes a bit of walking.

I hope I get to go back to Salt Lake City in 2023 but we will find out if Baby Jewell (due date August 4!) will be okay to travel or not by then. I did see a couple other parents of babies at the conference but not many. It’s hard to get those little guys on a plane or across the country by car. Fortunately, the venue did seem as kid-friendly as possible.

The only bad thing that happened at Pycon was I didn’t win the raffle that Amazon had going for the super cool LED python, I would have loved that thing! Overall the conference was a blast and I loved every moment.

Press Reset - Jason Schreier

This is one of those books where I hesitated in buying it because, being a fairly connected person who stays up to date with the games industry, I already know that the industry is dramatic.

I bought the book and started reading it with one question in mind:

Would this book be a Jude-the-Obscure kind of drama, where people get fired left and right and lose their legacies in a heartbeat, and it’s all very grisly?

Or, would this book be more staid in it’s approach? Would it have actual solutions to the massive problems in the game industry?

Turns out, I was in luck, and the latter question turns out to be the question where the answer is ‘yes’.

The subtitle of the book “Ruin and Recovery In the Video Game Industry” turns out to be very accurate. Yes, there is discussion of the Ruin, yet there is also discussion of the Recovery side of things. I found this to be very hopeful.

I enjoyed this book very much as it was not as negative as I thought it would be, and the anecdotes were very focused on strategy. From the very first chapter, the book talks about real situations happening in real boardrooms. The interview style and writing doesn’t feel like gossip, it feels more like watching an interview documentary.

Selfishly, it was nice to read about many of the conflicts in this book. Anyone who has gone into the office and yelled about the color of a button or felt like throwing something after a creative argument with a product manager/designer/executive or if you’ve BEEN that designer getting something winged at you, this book will probably be highly relatable to you. Most of all, what is strangely comforting is that, in some of the situations in the book, even in the best possible outcomes, people can still get laid off. We could be the most perfect designer on the planet, our product could sell millions of copies and be beloved by years, and at the end of the day, there’s still a possibility of losing one’s role at companies like this.

Schreier does address the burnout that can emerge from this kind of life on the edge. It’s hard to read a few hundred pages about people who move their families, buy new houses, and lose their roles within a year, yet the silver lining for Schreier arrives in the form of an unlikely savior: The popularity of remote work after the coronavirus crisis. That, and the formation of smaller studios working on contract basis, and the risks of going into games are reduced quite a bit.

While I’m not a person who works in the game industry, I saw many parallels in this book with the game industry and where I have spent my career: the tech and software sector. I think this book would be useful to read for others like me - if you’ve been in tech and ever seen the wild ups and downs that come with the territory, this book will give you a sense of camaraderie.

Another kind of reader that I think would appreciate this book is someone who is thinking about getting into games as a career. There are countless anecdotes that are good to keep in mind, both in terms of situations to avoid, and also solutions to difficult problems that have been inherent in the industry for a while.

Ultimately I say this book is a ‘yes’ - if you’re interested, get it for sure!

Disrupting the Game: From the Bronx to the Top of Nintendo - Reggie Fils-Aimé

As of this blog’s publish date, this book is very new! It was released on May 3 of 2022 - I didn’t know this when I bought it, I simply thought it looked like a cool book and I knew of Fils-Aimé’s work from watching Nintendo keynotes and release videos. It’s worth picking up if you haven’t already.

What makes this book different from other business books or business biographies is that Fils-Aimé describes specific situations in meetings, mentorship exchanges, and countless moments where he makes decisions. The reasoning behind the decisions are laid out, too.

I find this refreshing! In so many other nonfiction books of the business genre, the author’s steps to success seem shrouded by platitudes or combed-over moments. Fils-Aimé discusses how he applied for college, how he gets his first job, and how he works in his various roles. He describes problems that he comes across, both on the product level and in situations involving personnel, and how he approaches and solves those problems. I see that Fils-Aimé has an incredible ability to recall big moments, and also to recall small details. He remembers how to structure a memo at his first job, for god’s sakes - this would be like me remembering how I formatted and submitted an Asana ticket in 2010 (no, I don’t remember that very well).

This has to be a chief hallmark of a powerful leader - they can see the details, and they can also see from the mountaintop.

Aside from the boardroom dialogues and college app/interview tactics, the other highly familiarizing aspect of this book that I enjoyed is that I remember being around many of the brands that Fils-Aimé worked on in the 90s. He worked on campaigns for Crisco shortening. I don’t know about you, but we definitely had Crisco in our kitchen cabinet when I was growing up. Pizza Hut’s Personal Pan Pizza? Reggie worked on that, too! Chances are good that if you grew up in America in the 80s, 90s, and early aughts, you bought a product that Fils-Aimé and his teams marketed. Or, you at least saw one of his campaigns.

What I loved learning about most in this book is that Fils-Aimé was an early customer of Nintendo before he was ever a chief executive there. He describes in detail how he played games on the SNES, and also how he was quite a power-user. He owned more than 100 games, way over the average amount of games that households owned at the time.

I first became aware of Reggie Fils-Aimé’s career at Nintendo in the same way that I think many people did - it was the viral video where he gets into playing the Wii and says “My body is ready!” to describe getting ready for the active experience of waving the Wii controllers. This was one of those moments on the internet that was iterated on ad-infinitum, and it wasn’t wholly to make fun of Reggie, it was more because, I think, people loved him, they loved this moment. What’s not to love about this big guy getting into a game and saying something kind of nerdy and kind of adorable? The line “My body is ready!” was quoted in a Pokemon game - from this, fans know that through Reggie Fils-Aimé, Nintendo had gained an ability to laugh at itself in a good-natured way.

I think that it’s Fils-Aimé’s good nature that is the strongest part of his ability as an executive. There’s so much negativity and sarcasm in marketing and corporate spaces these days, to the extent that Ryan Holliday wrote “Trust Me I’m Lying” about being a manipulative story-twisting marketer, and has since moved on to focus on discussing stoic lifestyles. Years spent as conniving, manipulative Mad Men ideally end with retirement as a buy-nothing page admin who posts a lot about resilience and meditation. Marketing ecosystems for some brands tilt towards being so sassy and irreverent that it’s something to escape, not any place to build a legacy. Nobody wants to be there forever, unless they have to be - hence the allure of short-term thinking.

Fils-Aimé is a good role model in this vein. He thinks long-term. He doesn’t have a snobbish or sassy bone in his body. There’s nothing deceptive or money-grubbing about what he does to market brands, rather there’s a love of the fineness of the products and respect for the customer and collaborator alike. In a strange way, it’s as if Fils-Aimé disrupts the game by being the surprising thing of all in an age of irreverence: he’s traditional, respectful, and hard-working.

This book was useful to me as a business professional - I think it would be enjoyed by anyone who is a student or a seasoned executive.

Wacom Cintiq Pro 24 Review

TL:DR: If you’re an artist, get a Cintiq today! What are you waiting for?

My style and history as an artist:

I’ve been an artist my whole life and I started making digital work in MacPaint as a kid in the 90s. I make traditional drawings and paintings in addition to working digitally. I have been using an iPad Pro since 2016 to make digital drawings, everything from figure drawings, to a comic that I publish online called Tilted Sun. I’ve loved using Procreate and also Clip Studio Paint on the iPad Pro for the past six years. Ever since I got my first iPad Pro in 2016, I’ve been making more and more digital work.

^ A page from my comic, Tilted Sun, and a drawing of a figure model. Both digital art pieces were drawn on an iPad Pro - the comic in Clip Studio Paint, and the model is drawn in Procreate.

Long story short, this review is written from the point of view of a person who has been primarily using an iPad for making digital drawings.

This is my first Cintiq but not my first Wacom product. I’ve utilized the Intuos 4 and other tablets in the past with, personally, no success.

The Cintiq 24 is different, for me, than the non-screen Wacom products I’ve tried. The Cintiq is an experience of pure joy.

Size:

The Cintiq 24 is the right size for me. I would say it’s very large.

I was considering the Cintiq 32. In recent years I’ve adopted a ‘Go big or go home” mentality because it usually works out for me. In this case, I am very, very glad I got the Cintiq 24 instead of anything larger, because that would have been too large for me.

I’m 5’11 and I’ve been lucky to have very long arms and legs. As soon as I turned 13 years old, I became a bit of a treelike person, very tall and slender. Back when I bought more clothes before Coronavirus, I usually tried to get clothes with extra-long sleeves and extra-long legs. This is important when it comes to the Cintiq because it is easy for me to reach across most of the Cintiq 24, however, I noticed in some reviews that some artists struggled with reach for both the 24 and the 32. So, if you’re a big and tall person, you might have better comfort with reach with this particular device than someone who is say, 5’2. That said, if you’re 5’2 and you are fine with things like painting murals, using your whole arm, etc, I can’t see this as being much of a concern.

Here is a photo of the Cintiq 24 with my sunglasses on it for reference.

If you’re still on the fence and size is a primary concern, what could be done is measuring out a piece of cardboard or a canvas that is about the same size as the 24, and seeing if you generally feel comfortable reaching across it while sitting down. I’d say one of those extra-large drawing pads would be good for this, too.

Also, what can help is getting a stand or a mount for the Cintiq. I personally like it without any stand, but I can see how a lot of other creators would have a better time with a stand or a different angle for the machine.

File Management:

The nicest thing about the Cintiq 24 so far compared to using my iPad Pro is that I don’t have to worry about extra considerations around managing large files.

The iPad is a great machine and well made, but, right now, in 2022, it is not what I consider to be a Real Computer when it comes to file management. (I say this in hushed tones so my iPad does not overhear.)

I fully realized just how bad file management is on the iPad when I went to retrieve some files for a project. The files were a few months old. I was able to locate the files just fine, but after that, all I tried to do was export the files from Clip Studio Paint into Dropbox, and the iPad did little more than become very hot in my hands, and fail to upload the files. It took me a decent 30 minutes of fussing, watching loading bars, getting bored and reading Twitter, watching the loading bar, to figure out how to get a 40 MB file off of the iPad and into Dropbox, airdropped, anything at all.

I have tried what I would say is … a lot … of data storage and file management solutions with the iPad. I’ve got the $2.99 monthly extra iCloud storage, I’ve got the $9.99 monthly Dropbox. I gave it, as far as I can see, a solid effort. When it comes to file management and exporting to Dropbox or saving files, I had to do exactly 0 effort with my Cintiq, as it is effectively a display hitched into my computer. No watching loading bars, no heating, no getting bored and checking Twitter. Just files where I want them, right away.

The file management on the iPad was so annoying for me that it reminded me of having very stylish, good looking shoes, yet the shoes are incredibly uncomfortable, unwalkable. It’s fun to look good in fantastic shoes, and you can wear them for 2 hours a day or so, but it’s not so fun to go down the stairs in them or run up the mountainside with them.

I’m sure that in a few years, this comparison review between the iPad Pro and Cintiq 24 will be a bit more irrelevant, and the iPad will be a Real Computer (sorry iPad!). The iPad will overflow with space instead of feeling like a thumbdrive. In a few years.

Display itself:

A 'little thing' I like about the tablet is the art stays on, like I will get up from my desk to stretch or grab some water, and I come back and the art is still on the tablet and it hasn't gone to sleep. Very tiny thing but something I like a lot.

Speed and Feel:

The Cintiq 24 feels more like drawing on paper than the iPad Pro, which feels like drawing on glass. I really like the soft matte feel of it and the feel of the pen. I haven’t switched out the pen nibs very much, but I can see that as I get more comfortable with the machine, I might feel a bit more experimental and expand my nib use over time.

Conclusion:

Getting the Cintiq 24 was my effort at giving my art skills the most honor that I possibly could. I am lucky that it turned out wildly positive for me. It didn’t feel like driving a sportscar after driving a junker for several years - I never had hardware issues with the iPad. Yet, the Cintiq truly felt like a new, big, simple car after driving a bit of a cramped machine for several years. Much in the way that the iPad “Just works”, the Cintiq “Just works,” too, and it’s a lot bigger, more comfortable, and it’s easier to manage those files.

I watched a few Youtube review videos before deciding on the Cintiq, and if I had any advice to a friend who is also watching Youtube reviews on this specific product, I would say to listen to haters and critics with a big grain of salt. Something that someone else hates and gripes about the Cintiq might be something that you love. Also, I think that some artist reviewers can lean towards being a bit too negative or flaw-focused. Negative reviews can often rise to the top of our consciousness and they are often too-heavily-considered by algorithms. However, take what I say with a grain of salt too, because I trend towards being a very positive person who is willing to power through various issues in order to reach goals.

When I think of the positives that the Wacom Cintiq Pro 24 has brought to my life, my cup overfloweth. I can’t think of a single negative about it. It takes up my whole desk, and I like it that way. The way I see it, the thing I love most in life, art, should take up the most real estate, both metaphorically and physically.

So I would say that if you’ve been thinking about a Cintiq, go for it. I say that with all the warmth and encouragement in my heart.

Clay Sea Slugs - Oven Bake Clay

In art and life, I think there is a lot of value in trying new things, even things that are pretty random.

I like to experience new mediums by taking some time and walking around art stores - local Boulder stores like Guiry’s and Two Hands Paperie are fun places to shop. Sometimes I try out new crafts with supplies found at Michaels too, like this oven-bake clay, Craftsmart.

I played with Sculpey clay a lot as a kid. I loved how, with Sculpey, I could make figurines of characters that I could never find at the store. I made these Jinjos out of Sculpey when I was about 12 or 13, because I loved Jinjos in the game Banjo Kazooie, and I never saw anything like a Jinjo figurine available in 1998, or even right now!

The Jinjos’ ears (antaennae?) are broken, they may have been too delicate to last from 1998 to 2022!

Playing with clay more recently, I also made this little Junimo from the game Stardew Valley:

I had a ton of fun doing this! Being a person who usually draws and paints, working with clay to make a 3D object was a good challenge for me. I struggled a bit to get the Junimo’s delicate antennae built, and the tiny stringlike arms and legs sized well.

The sea slug and the Junimo turned out to be great topics because they took a decent amount of noticing and attention to get on point. Animals or creatures that are common can also be hard to sculpt, like I think a dog or a horse would be really difficult to do! But I wanted to make something very random and very strange to get my brain going in new ways.

I still have a few more bricks of oven-bake clay in the studio. I’m not sure what I’ll make next, but if I am too into the computer or vastly abstract concepts, it helps me to have some clay to work with my hands again.

Holbein Iridori Gouache Set - Spring Edition

The Iridori gouache sets from Holbein are a good deal, they have different themes and different colors. I like this spring-themed one because it has brighter colors than most!

Something I’ve never liked about certain paint sets is how primary the colors can be. There’s nothing wrong with primary colors, they’re our fundamentals, yet every artist deserves a couple wildcard colors. The greens and blues in this set impressed me in that regard - they’re just a bit more sophisticated than typical thalo-type greens that show up in sets. Plus, getting a peach/pink color is a nice bonus, and the metallic gray is just fun! Metallics are especially fun to play with if you’ve never tried one before.

There are other Holbein Iridori gouache sets you can get, all corresponding with seasons - Winter, Fall, and Summer. Spring is my personal favorite and it matches the season so well. I’d say Winter is my least favorite group of colors, but there’s nothing wrong with darker colors in gouache. The Summer Iridori set is likely the closest to most traditional primary-color sets. The yellows and reds are all pretty standard, but there are a couple blues and greens to choose from, which give the Summer set some diversity.

Overall I recommend this brand of gouache and this set - it’s a nice amount of colors and a nice range of colors too.

What’s great about gouache overall is that you can rewet it and rework it once it is dry, making it a good medium for plein air or painting outdoors and on the fly.

^ here I am painting with the Iridori Spring edition near Wonderland Lake in Boulder. I ran out of space in my easel so I used the lid of the box as a bit of a palette! Worked well!

Most of all I love the bright green color in this set, which is called Byakuroku or Pale Patina. I may have seen this color before at Guiry’s but I haven’t thought to pick it up. This color is the color of the deer on the left in the painting above.

All in all this is a fun set! If you’re looking for gouache colors that have a theme and a fun variation, the Iridori sets are a good mix and a good amount of paints.

Sketchbook Confessional November 2021

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

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

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

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

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

Tilted Sun:

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

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

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

NFTs:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading, Watching, Playing:

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

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

I love Stardew Valley

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

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

Exercise and Running life:

November fitlady photo :)

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

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

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

Hiking with an easel!

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

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

Catch you next time, see you Space Cowboy -

Becky

NFTs available on OpenSea

I’m happy to announce new NFTs that are available on my account on Opensea! Check them out!

Sketchbook Confessional June 2021

June is my birth month and June of 2021 has been good to me. It was a blitz month for painting, a blitz being the opposite of a slump, where there is so much happening that I can barely keep track of my own activity.

I was walking up to Wonderland Lake to paint and I met another painter on the road. We talked for a bit about watercolors and gouache, and I mentioned how much I love June because of how much light is outside. It is so nice to have the sun set at times like 8:20 PM, as opposed to winter when the sun sets more like 5:30 pm. It feels like each day is just packed to the brim, like time has expanded and I can go outside and paint for three more hours than I usually would be able to.

El Dorado Canyon is a great place to paint, hike, climb, or take photos. Every direction you turn is another amazing thing to see or do. At this point in time, I’d recommend going during the week - the photo above was taken on a weekday trip. Trying to go on the weekend means an early day to get parking, one would have to arrive long before 8 or 9 am, given how many people I saw there during the first week of June!

For most of June I was able to get out at least 3 of 7 days each week and paint plein air around Boulder. The plein air paintings aren’t always the best paintings I do, what is most important is that I get out there and make them. If anything, hiking around with a 13 pound easel gets me some good exercise, and there are parts of Colorado that can always be counted on to be transcendentally beautiful.

On June 13th I took my easel up Chautauqua Park trails in Boulder and was able to hit the sunset at just the right time. I could not believe my incredible luck with getting this vista.

I had been wandering around Chautauqua for about an hour before finally getting to this spot. This particular spot isn’t too hard to get to from the trailhead, only, I seemed to have taken the long way and approached it from the other side, not the trailhead side.

I lucked out and saw the most incredible sunset I’d seen for all of 2021.

I move pretty slowly with the easel. It’s just a few ounces shy of a lucky 13 pounds, and it’s big, so I plod. Occasionally I will have a nimble display where I cross a river with it or navigate up or down some rocks with it, otherwise I plod. Sometimes I have multiple water bottles in my backpack, which adds a few more pounds to my traveling weight total, and then I start moving even more slowly. This is totally fine, because the slower I move, the more I notice. The more I can look around the terrain and find a good painting spot.

Sometimes I will go running and scout out places to paint. The only problem with this is that I forget how long it takes to get to a painting spot, like this waterfall in Gregory Canyon. The first day I located the waterfall, I ran to it to scope it out. When I came back with my easel and backpack, I’d forgotten how far in it was, and found myself plodding up a bunch of rocks that I’d previously leaped up.

Another great location to hike or paint or both is Red Rocks Trail in Boulder, not to be mistaken for the Red Rocks Ampitheatre area, one of the trailheads for this area the Sunshine Canyon trailhead, right off of Mapleton avenue in Boulder.

Painting rock formations involved a lot of drawing for me, a lot of tracing a thin brush along the canvas to get the edges of the rocks pinned down in a way that I wanted. I love painting like this. Some painters try to avoid lines or the act of drawing, which is great. For me, I try to draw when I paint, as much as possible.

Before making this painting, I’ve never painted ‘below’ a subject either, where I was looking up at it. I’ve painted and drawn models on slightly elevated pedestals, yet I’ve never craned my head up at something that towered over me to try and paint. This was interesting to do, and worthwhile.

After hiking up on Mount Sanitas on June 25th, I saw these red rocks from a distance while on the Mount Sanitas trail, and decided that I wanted to figure out how to get to these rocks and paint them. I was able to make it to the rocks on June 27th and on June 28th.

The Red Rocks of the Red Rocks Trail are at the top left of this photo, as viewed from the Mount Sanitas trail.

This is how art ends up, often. Taking action and going out to paint will result in one painting, and usually, it will result in another idea. At it’s best, art gathers momentum like a snowball, like gravity - one idea leads to another idea, one expedition leads to another expedition, and on and on. 

That’s not to say I haven’t run into art slumps before. If making art at its best is a snowball, an art slump is like a snowfield with no slope to it, just falling snow and no shape. It’s hard to see progress in a white field. It’s hard to go anywhere and know what to do.

In Colorado you almost can’t go wrong, just pick a road and go, and you’ll run into something gorgeous. I grew up here and went to school in Boulder, yet it took some traveling around the States, living in different cities, and traveling around the entire world for me to realize just how beautiful and special this place is. 

The best part about being an artist is being able to see the deep preciousness of life, no matter where you are. Yet, wow, Colorado makes it all so easy.

I did get some digital art in as well in June, but not a ton. Whenever it was nice outside, it was just too tempting to go outside and hike. I couldn’t stay indoors or do iPad work when it was so nice out.

Reading/Watching/Playing

Reading:

In June I finished Ursula K. Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness after finding a copy in a Little Free Library. This book was very good and well written. I thought the strangest part about it was that it is about a guy who lives thousands of years in the future, who studies an alien planet, yet he still does not understand women very well. I think this has to be the point of the book.

What’s also odd about this book is that it must have been outrageously progressive at the time, yet it has several regressive moments in terms of women’s equality. Maybe I am being too harsh. More than anything, this book proved to me that whatever seems outrageously progressive as far as women’s rights and gender equality in our present moment will be old hat in the future. On a long enough timescale, everything revolutionary becomes routine. This is a comforting thought because it tells me ultimately to not stress out, and I can stick to my beliefs in women as equals without feeling like a total loner. I have to remember that this book was written when women couldn’t buy furniture without a husband’s account information. When I think of this, the book is a lot shinier in my imagination.

There are so many moments in sci-fi fiction of the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s where it is patently clear that women aren’t viewed as people. It makes loving scifi a bit harder, and is also compoundingly depressing because in visions of a dynamic future, women are still kind of less-than. It would be like reading a book about space aliens in the year 3335 and people are still racist about something that happened in the 1980s. Fortunately we’ve already surpassed some of that in 2021, not all of it, but some.

In June I also read some books about Bitcoin, it was interesting to learn about this.

Watching:

On June 26th (my birthday!) I was lucky to see Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, offered as a screening at the Boulder International Film Festival. It’s an ironic coincidence that the titles of these blogs are Sketchbook Confessionals, and in many ways Kitchen Confidential was confessional writing as well. What I liked about the movie was that it reminded everyone that Anthony Bourdain was first and foremost a writer, in addition to being a chef, and it was his writing that was so compelling to everyone around him. I’d recommend seeing this film if you get a chance on the festival circuit or any way possible if you’ve liked or seen anything of Anthony Bourdain’s work.

Playing:

I recently got back into Magic the Gathering after getting the Quantum Quandrix Commander Deck on a lark. After adding in a couple upgraded cards, I think I stumbled upon an infinite combo with Doubling Season, Adrix and Nev, and Helm of the Host. I started to do the math on this and realized it gets exponential pretty quickly. I also have to appreciate the art in the Quantum Quandrix deck, the fractal-based cards and ideas are just so very pretty.

I’m still playing Dungeons and Dragons with some lovely people online. Arlina has reached level 5, we’ve finished a second campaign arc, and we’ve almost been playing for about a year now over zoom and hangouts calls. It’s been a fun thing to play, especially since it’s a full homebrew campaign.

When I’m tired from hiking or running and there’s no Magic or DnD to be done, I’ll still fire up a round of Elder Scrolls Online. Averle is now about level 620.

Fitness:

Since June 1 is my no-alcohol anniversary date, I wrote a blog about my thoughts on the past year and how I quit, what I was thinking about, and how it affected me in terms of health.

Overall things are going great with not drinking, I hardly think about it at all. I keep busy with running and art and playing games if I have spare time.

In June I reeled back some of my running and was able to find a place to run indoors on a treadmill, which helps with some of the dry heat of the summer. I didn’t have a lot of exciting, big running feats, though I did build a ton of strength by carrying the easel uphill and across fields around Boulder.

The hardest trail to carry the easel on was the Mt. Sanitas trail, it had a huge uphill and I had to focus on not slipping on the rocks. I moved so slowly during this hike that a butterfly ended up landing on me.

It’s fun to do these hikes because I combine two of my favorite things: exercise and art. It’s not as easy as it seems to look. When I review my own photos, the hikes look so carefree, yet there isn’t an easy way to express all the plodding and grunting it takes to get to some of these locations.

Until next time! Thanks for reading my blog!

Plein Air at Chautauqua Park in Boulder

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

1 year, No Alcohol! Thoughts on Quitting Alcohol

After a year of no alcohol, I have put together my thoughts on how I became sober, what it was like to quit, what I did to stop, as well as what I see in the future for anyone who wants to stop.

My At-Risk Social Groups

It was no mystery to me that I am in two groups where drinking is deeply integrated into life: the tech world, and the art world. 

Every artist and art enthusiast loves going to art openings and drinking wine. Artists are also often seen as, well, a bit colorful, and with that comes the stereotype that we all love drugs and alcohol. There are only 1 million depictions in movies, books, and magazines of artists being drunks, smoking, or artists using drugs somehow. Drugs and alcohol are posited as a way that we artists get our ideas, or as an escape hatch from the trauma of our exciting lives (haha). I used to love drinking with my friends in school, Drink and Draw was sort of our thing.

Add to this the other biggest facet of my working life, the tech world, where drinking is so normalized that most software companies pretty much have beer on tap. I’m not so special that I avoided all this, in fact I indulged in this for years. On several work trips, I would drink every single night with my coworkers. Monday, Tuesday, every single night - and it wasn’t because there was a holiday or anything to celebrate, it was just how life was lived. After a full day of working through intense story problems and software issues that would make any grown man cry, nothing sounded better to me than crashing through some margaritas. I crashed through a lot of margaritas in my time in software.

In addition to the art world (wine and cheese) and the tech world (beer at the office), I’m a part of a third group that is extremely at risk for abuse due to alcohol: women. My take is that women are marketed alcohol left and right. There’s also overlap with women in art and women in the business world - Too many go-getter women-power self improvement business books geared towards women talk about wine culture and enduring negative experiences by getting drunk. If I open a book that is supposed to be empowering to women and it starts talking about wine, I usually stop reading it immediately. I know this sounds harsh, but I’m just not that into it. 

Around when I was 19, one of the most liberating moments of realizing adulthood was that I didn’t HAVE to finish reading some books. Unlike in school, in life, if you’re reading for fun, you don’t have to finish anything for the assignment or book report. You don’t have to do what everyone else is doing. If you don’t like it, nobody will be mad at you for turning it down.

That said, I didn’t learn how to turn things down with alcohol until much later.

I Break Down My Own Argument: Why Would My Social Groups Even Matter?

Am I thinking too hard?

Sure, students, passionate artists, and high-octane, high-stakes techlife people are going to be vulnerable to drinking, but, in parallel to all of this, I can’t help but think that alcohol has simply done a very good job of infusing itself into many different kinds of social groups. I could have probably written all of the above if I were a member of a bowling group, or if I were a pro basketball player, a cook, a racecar driver, or bridge enthusiast.

No matter what I chose as a profession or identity or social group, chances were good all along that alcohol was going to be somewhere near it. It’s simply everywhere.

Professional Noticer

In my professional life I am a pattern-weaver and noticer. It is my job. I am rewarded over and over again for identifying and improving patterns and behaviors, and also noticing problems, making small adjustments for user experiences. One second saved by one user is days and weeks of time saved for hundreds of thousands of users. One process tweaked for a team means the whole team is improved. One experience made happier for one user is thousands of satisfying, happy experiences for thousands of users. What is simple? What makes people happy? What is least risky? What makes life easy? To lean on a well-used analogy, I’m often in the weeds on issues with technology, but I’m also at 30,000 feet, looking at the geography of the weeds. 

The same is true in painting. You’re working with detail, and with scale. The smallest detail matters, and so does the whole thing. The details are the whole thing.

Same thing with comics - each panel matters, and so does the whole book. Being a software executive who paints and makes comics doesn’t make a lot of sense at first, then it makes more sense than anything at all. Once you run into one of us, you’ll start to see more of us at various companies.

To me, taking a sky-bound professional noticer view of alcohol, what it looks like is dozens of well-loved people of any gender, in any walk of life, rich or poor, racecar driver or painter, getting taken out left and right by accidents or problems directly caused by alcohol. 

In the weeds, it doesn’t look so bad. It looks quite nice, actually. One beer isn’t a big deal, neither are a couple margaritas. 

Living in The Weeds

I think this is part of why quitting is so hard. At first, when I quit, I started to see the weeds around me in perfect detail. It’s terrible, I’d rather have them be fuzzy, but that’s the problem… whether I drank or not, I’d still be in the weeds. 

Even when I was drinking, I would tend to surprise my friends by how much I can remember events, people, or things. Having a fearsomely accurate memory might be one reason why drinking was so attractive to me. Who the heck wants to remember all of life’s most terrible moments, all of our personal failures, rejections, and losses, when all one has to do is drink a couple beers or some wine?  

The good thing about an accurate memory is it can be used to summon up positive memories as well as bad memories. If the brain is so powerful that it can bring up trauma or remind us of how terrible some parts of life are, it can be powerful enough to bring up whatever redeeming moments are out there. 

Sometimes, there may need to be a jumpstart in this process, like therapy or medication or rehab, if anyone is caught in bad thought cycle or depression. We all get stuck. It happens.

For me, the jumpstarter was exercise and running.

What I Did To Stop

As far as what I actually did to quit, I did very little on the psychological side, I mostly got into exercise in a big way, and this distracted me from drinking. I didn’t think very hard. I took a lot of action.

My official quit date is June 1 of 2020. Here are the events leading up to that date.

In January of 2020 I was getting into running again after taking a multi-year hiatus. I would knock out 8 mile runs after work from time to time. I hit a goal of running 6 miles in 60 mins near the end of January 2020, and was super happy about it. I hadn’t run very seriously since high school, and I am in my mid thirties, so the idea that I could have some kind of speed was very exciting! At this point in time, however, I still was drinking from time to time. 

Like for so many, it was March of 2020 and Coronavirus that simply cut me off from my social groups. No more fancy openings, no more meetups, no more after-work brews. March pushed me further into running, life at home, and life away from social events. Yet, for a couple months, I still drank. I would mow my lawn and then have a beer or two while reading books. It was a fraught time, a time to read the news and try to ignore it. It seemed like every hour in April, ambulance sirens would be wailing down the street outside my house. There was always something. I started to feel like I lived in a cursed disaster place, like Gotham or Thebes. Then I realized this was probably pretty selfish - this virus was a disaster everywhere. We were all in one big disaster boat together.

Near the middle of May 2020, I’d had enough, I just didn’t buy liquor or beer anymore. Drinking in my yard wasn’t fun, there was nobody around, and it seemed like everyone was getting sick. I just stopped, I didn’t even think about it. I wish I could say there was some sort of striking, dramatic event that happened, an event which finally pushed me over the edge and made me quit. That would be logical, right? 

Running big miles in the DMV

But no, nothing about when I quit was very dramatic on the personal level. I think, in retrospect, it was the world that caused me to stop. I’d finally been so overwhelmed by the news that I realized no amount of drinking would fix anything, it wouldn’t fix me, it wouldn’t fix the pandemic, it wouldn’t soften the blows of division being struck everywhere. If I was going to get wiped out by a virus, I wanted every second before that to count, even if it hurt.

My running took off in the summer of 2020, where I would do 10 and 13 mile runs across Washington DC and Maryland. Wearing an Osprey water backpack, even in the soggy heat of a DC summer, I could just run forever. I’d never run this far in my life. Even in high school and running cross country, a training run would be, at max, seven miles. Deciding to come crawling back to running was pretty funny to me. And also, it made a lot of sense. I had to deal with my problems somehow, why not figure it all out on a run?  

My History as an Athlete

I always saw myself as an average runner. I would usually finish third in my group in school. I liked running because I never felt too nervous about it, I never thought I would be the best at it or that I had to beat anyone else at it. It was entirely something that I could do against myself - if I could beat a goal or a time I had set for myself, I was very happy.

I am an average runner but I am even worse at team sports. I have absolutely no aggression or a will to win against others in team sports. In school, I could get behind kicking a ball, but not stealing it from someone else. I could block an inbound volleyball but if I spiked it on someone, I would feel guilty somehow.

Running was perfect for me, because that’s all it is. I can make little games in my head while doing a race and see how many people I pass, but that’s about it. If I don’t pass them, I don’t pass them. I’m still doing something that is fully for me. Have you ever been in a win-win situation?

Running Doesn’t Fix Everything, Either

My burgeoning running obsession didn’t take me completely out of harm’s way - on one of my runs in June, a man ran after me up a hill and touched me near my hip. I was pretty surprised and stopped.

I am not sure, but I think he may have been on drugs. I ended up calmly talking to him and he went off in some other direction. Since he’d chased me within the first half mile of my run, I ended up finishing seven more miles after this, which sounds absolutely bizarre to me now.

Even though this event was traumatic, I didn’t think about drinking then or diving into alcohol to get the trauma out. I doubled-down on exercise. I would run very repetitive loops in areas that I knew were safe. I would check the public sex offender list and avoid areas dense with offenders. I had a couple canisters of pepper spray.

Seeing the weeds in perfect detail is so hard, but it’s also liberating because they’re easier to understand. My negative experiences with street harassment and street assault kind of pile up in my head as a sober person, but as a drunk person, it was all a trainwreck. Each moment is at risk of bleeding into another one, as if my brain files all of the events into the same cabinet. As a person who is sober, I can compartmentalize and figure out issues faster with less bullshit cutting in. Namely, with street harassment, that none of it is my fault at all, and I’m going to keep running no matter what.

How I Feel About Social Life Right Now

I have no issue and harbor no ill-will towards my friends and connections who still drink. I also have 0 regrets about all the time I spent at clubs or bars with friends or people I dated, or drinking in the art major. It was great to drink sake in Tokyo, wine in Paris, and whatever that crazy thing was that we all drank in the Bahamas. Ultimately I love my friends and all of my romantic partners very, very much, and any time I get to spend with them is treasured by me to no end. Possibly the funniest thing about being dead sober is that my art is exactly the same if not better, and the person I am is exactly the same person.

If someone wants to open some brews on a zoom call, I have no negative thoughts about it. In fact, I have almost no thoughts about it at all. Since life is, er, coming back to life, and we’re all going out again, if someone offers me a drink or a drink menu I politely decline and pass. It does take energy to decline, but that’s okay. I’m sure a lot of people might be tired of me repeating my sobriety milestones online, yet they are very important to me, because the more people who know that it’s a part of my life, the more I am living authentically. 

I sort of have to make a big deal of this for myself, first of all, because during 2020 there just weren’t too many people around. I can’t even remember what I did for my own birthday in June of 2020. I think I must have gone on a run.

What’s in the Future?

More sobriety for me in the future!

For all of us, who knows? I hope if you read this entire blog it was meaningful to you in some way. I don’t like to give a lot of advice out or tell people what they should do, first of all because I am not a doctor, and also because everyone is always at a difference place in life. The person reading this in Kansas is going to be different than the person reading it in California. Instead of issuing judgement or advice to people I’ve never even met, I find it much better to discuss experiences and events as they come, and go from there. If you do ever want to talk about sobriety, or, you know, art stuff, haha, you know where to find me. xo 😴

Sketchbook Confessional May 2021

In May 2021 I had an active month of art and everything else. I got my iPad out and made a couple illustrations over the weekend after my second COVID shot.

I made a couple alternate versions of this too which you can scroll through below:

Drawing on the iPad has been fun. I never know where a lot of my ideas come from for digital art, yet I do like to iterate on them and get them out.

I was thinking about how when our eyes are closed, we can still see quite a bit.

It was also fun to paint indoors on a couple instagram lives. I painted this cat and also the flatirons in Boulder below on stream.

A cat I painted on an instagram livestream

The beginning of May 2021 will probably be the last month for a while where I am cooped up and only interacting with friends and fans over the internet and Instagram lives. In 2019, right before coronavirus struck, I was able to get out to comicons more and see people, and was also making paintings in public.

I painted this vision of Boulder’s flatirons from Chautaqua park using a photo I had taken a few weeks prior.

In May I painted outdoors in remote locations so much that it’s almost too much to write about what happened every day. I just love May and June, and all of summer really - there is so much light outside, tons of time to paint. During the last week of May, I went outside and painted 5 out of 7 days. In the spirit of the Calvin and Hobbes book: “The days are just packed.” The main reason why I can get out so much is all I really need is an hour to go paint. I can drive my car for five minutes and be somewhere spectacular near Boulder. Since I’m using gouache paint now instead of oil, I can paint quickly and the paint will dry quickly. It can still be very hard to carry the easel but I can usually get it to remote places pretty easily.

The best place to keep up with my plein air work is Instagram.

The paintings I came out of from plein air are what they are, what’s most important is that I get out and do them. Even if the painting on a certain day isn’t the best painting I’ve ever made, that’s okay, not every run I go on is the best run I ever have done.

My favorite painting from my recent outdoor paintings is this one I made of the Northfacing view from Artist’s Point on Flagstaff Mountain. Though the colors of the hills in the distance changed as I painted and led to some confusion for me, haha, I thought I got the curves of the mountains nailed down pretty well:

Plein air continues to be a process of chaos management. The colors of the mountains change as clouds go by, revisions have to happen, bugs often attack me or land on the painting (looks like a flower), it rains, I get poison ivy sometimes, I forget colors in my studio and have to remake them out in the world, or I ruin brushes if I run out of water to wash them. I’ve made enough mistakes to be overprepared most of the time, but there is always something to improve. Plein air painting is one of those endeavors that looks fluffy and quaint on the outside, and is in reality quite a tough experience. It reminds me of ice skating or ballet. The key I think is to just let the chaos happen and paint no matter what. At the end of the day, it’s all completely and totally worth it.

Reading Watching Playing:

After getting my second Pfizer shot, I felt a bit fragile. I took up playing Octopath Traveler again for a few days. I still can’t finish it, I get stuck on the bosses and grinding. I still play Dnd each week on zoom with some really lovely people.

I found Super Mario All Stars at Game Force in Boulder and started playing Mario 64 again. I bought the entire game to just play Mario 64. I remember playing Mario 64 on demo at Wal Mart in Frisco, CO, which was the closest Wal Mart we had. I eventually owned the game for 64 in the 90s and played the heck out of it. It’s very fun to play again on Switch, brought back a ton of memories.

The other 64 game I am playing again is Banjo Kazooie. Tons of fun, another late 90s 64 game, which, like Mario 64, also involves giant paintings of worlds in a big navigating dungeon.

I can’t really even put to words how fun it is to play Banjo Kazooie again.

To put myself to sleep at night, sometimes I will play Banjo Kazooie levels in my head. I did this even a year ago before re-owning the game. In my head, I will make an effort to imagine the map of the game. I will go through every puzzle of the first level, and also Treasure Trove Cove, and get every puzzle piece, note, Jinjo, and honeycomb piece. I’m not sure why I started doing this, but I think the maps of Banjo Kazooie are just big enough that you can imagine every piece of them pretty well without getting stuck. If I tried to imagine a map of something like Elder Scrolls I would just get lost. Overall it’s a good way to fall asleep. It gives my brain something to do that isn’t too overwhelming and isn’t too easy.

Fitness:

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

In fitness news, on May 1 I was able to finish the 25 mile Collegiate Peaks Trail Run. Wow, this was quite the race. I finished in just under 8 hours. This sounds like a wildly long time for a marathon-length race. What accounts for the time was the fact that the race has over 3000 feet of elevation gain and gets up past 9000 feet.

I could tell when the elevation of the race was kicking up a notch even without looking at my phone, because whenever the elevation increased to a certain point, I would start throwing up water. At first I threw up three times, then I lost count of how many times I threw up during the entire race.

The first hill in the race, I could laugh at a bit. You can see it rising like a friendly challenger from far away, and I sort of thought to myself “Haha, what masochist designed this course? LOL.”

Sure enough, at the top of that hill I was throwing up water at the aid station in front of a half-dozen volunteers. If a volunteer was there to witness it, I would start throwing up, like wave-particle duality. I wouldn’t throw up if a volunteer was not present. If a volunteer was there, I would throw up.

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

There was a nice downhill after that, until there was another hill that seemed to Go. On. Forever. And you run up the hill in sand. This is the “Full-On Wake-Up Hill” in the map. That is not the name I had for it in my head while I was running the race. Calling it a ‘hill’ might also be too quaint, it makes it sound like an anthill, where it’s really more like running up a mountainside.

After the second mountainside/hill, the whole race is mostly downhill from there, which sounds nice, except my quads and hips were screaming. I didn’t merely walk a lot of the race. In addition to walking, at several points I cried, other times I sat down under a tree and tried to sip down some water. I crossed a river and a bunch of thorns tore up my leggings. I ended up getting a sunburn that didn’t melt off until a week later.

Possibly more traumatic, more exhilarating than anything, I did dances in my head during this race. I thought about a lot of things in life, and then there were moments where I didn’t have what anyone would call ‘thoughts.’

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

I was running alone in a high mountain desert for almost 8 hours. I was fully struck, fully exposed to how bad 2020 was.

I’d lost a few family members, young and old. In addition to family members, almost every week in April, I could think of several friends of friends who had passed away. Loose ties, people I’d met or known about maybe just for a couple minutes, gone. Every single week was like this, every week another person or friend of a friend had passed.

In our routine lives, while we are checking emails, looking at data, driving to the store, it is very easy to forget trauma. When you’re alone in a desert, you don’t forget a single thing. Through the pain of running this race, I finally allowed some of the pain of loss to fully be felt, felt it deeply and in a very real way as my body carried me down the mountain.

On top of grieving people I’d lost, I started to get overwhelmed with feelings of love for my friends and people I missed. Have you ever had a dream and it seems like every good person you’ve ever met is in the dream? It was like some kind of Grand Friend Parade was playing in my head. “Remember all these people you love! Aren’t they great?” was what it seemed my mind was trying to say. If we’ve had a warm interaction in the past couple years, online or off, I probably thought about you during this race. Maybe what it was, was my mind summoning up as many reasons to keep going as it could find.

I finished 91st in the 25 mile overall, which I am happy about. This was very close to last. Just finishing was an accomplishment for me as I felt that several times during the race, a volunteer was going to have to ATV my butt down to Buena Vista and I would have to be rehydrated in a hospital after throwing up too much water.

The strangest part of the race happened the next day. I felt totally fine, as normal as I ever felt. I woke up in my Boulder apartment at 6 am and made coffee. Like I could run six miles no problem. This experience has led me to believe that many physical accomplishments truly are very mental, and to reiterate what one of our Leadville local legends says: we can do much more than we think we can.

Other exciting news: I took first in my group for Maxim Covergirl, and finished at 5th in Quarter Finals on May 27th! Thank you so, so very much for supporting my efforts in this. My page was able to raise over $2000 for Wounded Warriors, which is super exciting. With or without being in a contest, I’m still doing lots of bikini photos when I can. The swimwear photos are a form of proofing to myself that I can clean up okay, even if most of the time I am cranking away at computer stuff or covered in dirt and sweat while out on a run. Since I’ve had my second vaccination, I’m happy to say I might be taking swimwear photos at a real beach soon instead of just at my house.

Ra! More art!

Sketchbook Confessional April 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lessons I learn from plein air painting:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



Reading Watching Playing:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fitness:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks again for stopping by! Ra, more art!

Who wrote this

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

- Becky Jewell

Sketchbook Confessional February 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading Watching Playing:

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

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

Severian and the Star Men

Severian and the Avern

Severian and Dorcas in The Green Room

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

Fitness

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

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

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

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

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

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


Thanks for reading!! xoxo


Who wrote this:

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

- Becky Jewell

Sketchbook Confessional January 2021

I started writing these blogs, Sketchbook Confessionals, in the fall of 2019, as a way to take inventory of all the art that I made, books I read, and fitness things that I did in the past month. Writing these blogs has helped me remember what I do each month, a kind of ‘done’ list rather than a ‘to do’ list.

I made several paintings of Mt. Elbert near Leadville in January 2021:

While painting Mt. Elbert and lupine flowers, I made a couple sheer abstract paintings using the paint left over. It is very fun to just cut loose and let the paint flow freely on these kinds of pieces. I call these Leftover Paintings, and I’ve been making them off and on since 2015:

Sometimes, in my opinion, the leftovers are even better than the mountain paintings.

In January I made a ton of Rainbow Cats too. I’d estimate I made about 95 of them.

The Rainbow Cats are fun for me to make because they are all different, all handmade, yet they are simple enough to get repetitive, zen, and very satisfying. A Rainbow Cat is kind of a relaxing art that I make. I draw the stripes for the Rainbow Cats while watching Twitch in the background. I can’t do this with oil painting - if I try to paint and have something on like a video, it doesn’t work very well.

Another art form that I worked on in January was video art, as I got my art projector to work again. I am not sure what I will do with it yet, but I made a couple videos for Instagram where I projected an animated gouache painting onto myself. The process for these is:

1. Make abstract painting using gouache

2. Animate the painting in an app like Pixaloop, using simplistic paths

3. Save the file, load it into the projector, project the animation onto a wall

4. Stand against the wall

There has to be more I can do with this but I am not sure what, or how to make it into more meaningful art.

Reading/Watching/Playing:

A sword, drawn by our party DM, the “Sword of Songs” utilized by Arlina, the Changeling Bard

The funnest thing I am playing continues to be a D&D game I am playing with several other artists and designers, where I play a Changeling Bard named Arlina. I think we are up to almost 20 sessions now, all happening over zoom/videocall. Playing D&D is something I look forward to, specifically because of its improvisational nature. It turns out that I really like the feeling of being on my toes, unexpected monsters, funny changeling hijinks, and our DM is doing a great job.

I realized how important D&D was to me when I went too hard on a big 10 mile run in the summer in DC, got dehydrated and too sick, and couldn’t make a session that night because I was struggling to keep down water and ibuprofen. I was so sad I couldn’t make the session, which I had been looking forward to all week, and pretty much had to say “please go on without me comrades.” At that moment I realized, wow, I really, really like D&D a lot. Now I plan my runs more carefully, haha!

My drawing of Arlina, the Changeling Bard

It’s fun to play Arlina, she has become like Averle, my character in Elder Scrolls Online - an extension of myself who has stayed with me for some time. Changeling hijinks, like changing into an Orc but not knowing Orcish, changing into an antagonist yet not knowing exactly how he would act, and changing into an NPC who had passed away - all of these are moments that were interesting to play as a Changeling.

Even though Arlina is like me, in her base form, it is fun to be her because she can kind of be anything. Since she is a Changeling, similar to Mystique in the X Men, she can be a big dumb orc if she wants, or a shadowy thief.

It’s wild to remember that our D&D experience is different for each person in the party. Whatever we are all imagining in our heads is completely different from the next person. If we happen across an ice cave, the ice cave is totally different for me versus the person in the zoom window next to me, and the person next to them. In this way, D&D is a lot more like five people reading a book, than five people watching a movie or playing a video game. This is why it is so special, I think.

This month, I also started playing Octopath Traveler again. This might be one of those games that I just keep playing throughout life. Witcher 3, Final Fantasy games, Ocarina of Time, all of those are like that for me.

When I think about how I first started playing Witcher 3 in my Austin apartment, and later moved to Houston, Maryland, DC, and back to Colorado, I remember what a longevic, eternal game it is. I remember Witcher 3 specifically because I got CARDED to purchase it at Target in 2015, which was quite flattering and also very funny and entertaining to me. Some games just hold up forever. Octopath and Witcher 3 are like that for me.

I wish I had read more books in January, however, I was very tuned into the news. I don’t think there is anything wrong with this, there were a lot of important moments in January for the United States.

Fitness:

This January, I hit a couple big runs, including an 8 mile run at the very end of January on the 30th. When I am feeling my best and running well, the miles pass very quickly, as they did on this particular 8 mile run.

I’m getting better overall fitness too. Aside from not drinking alochol, I don’t watch my diet too closely, though I do try to eat well enough overall. I will eat lots of bagels, lots of mexican food and thai food.

More oblique ab definition in January! Not sure why, must be all the running + strength + dancing?

For some reason, this month, I started getting more definition in my oblique abdominal area. I don’t think I deserved this at all, because I haven’t been doing planks like I used to. I think it all must be coming from running big miles, and the strength routine I am doing as part of my training. Sometimes I also dance in my studio since I miss doing Zumba.

Completing long runs on the weekend to the order of 6-8 miles reminds me of when I was in Tokyo, and I would walk 5-10 miles each day to see all the art that I could. I was so tired each day and so hungry from all the walking, I would struggle to find enough food to stay energized. Since portion sizes in Japan were so small, I would order things like three croissants from Starbucks and buy several sodas from vending machines. Walking and running really do take a lot of energy from me, and, I suspect, from most people. Whenever anyone asks me for fitness advice, I will always say ‘run'! and if you can’t run, walk! And once you feel pretty good about that, do some planks. My advice will always be pretty simple like this.

Jan 1 marked 7 months of no-alcohol for me as well. It may sound strange but I don’t even think about alcohol at all, I don’t seem to have cravings. It might be that my exercise routines have replaced alcohol completely, and that staying at home for COVID, ie, not going out to bars, ect, has made it even easier to forget about alcohol.

To sum up: In January 2021, I did a ton of work in painting and video art. I completed a total of 10 paintings. I played a lot of D&D and ran something like 75 miles total with a couple large runs mixed in. I hope to continue this trend in February.

Who wrote this:

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

- Becky Jewell