Sketchbook Confessional May 2023

Welcome to May 2023’s Sketchbook Confessional! The Sketchbook Confessional is a blog where I review all of the art that I made in a month. Rather than a ‘to-do’ list, the Sketchbook Confessional is a ‘done’ list, where I can objectively see what I made in any given month without forgetting and without inflating my artistic output.

By making Sketchbook Confessionals into a habit, I am able to better understand my own patterns, including things that work and things that don’t.

One of my favorite paintings I made in May was this one of my baby.

I did gouache on canvas to make this portrait of my little redhead and his smile. Only his side teeth on his top gums have come in, so he has a very fangy vampire look right now which I wanted to capture forever before his big front teeth come in.

To make this painting and others, in May I picked up a new Himi gouache set of 18 colors. I really like this size. There are a couple smaller sizes and several expanded sets, yet this one I think has a good amount of colors and is an inexpensive price.

Goauche is a good medium for me right now since it’s easy to set up and clean.

Very exciting news that changed my May is that I learned in mid-april that I was accepted into Fan Expo Denver! I started making work for Fan Expo Denver in April and I cranked it up in May. If you want to go to Fan Expo Denver and haven’t booked tickets yet, get tickets here.

Partly thinking about Colorado and my art style, I made this digital piece in May. It rained a lot in Boulder so I found myself staying inside a bit. This was a good chance to work digitally again on my tablet.

I had fun making this. The source for the rocks is from a photo of one of my runs where I was on the back side of the Boulder Flatirons on the Mesa Trail. I love painting this area because of all the layers of the landscape. There’s so many interesting hills that roll into each other and overlap in a fascinating way. I will have prints of this piece very soon.

Back in the non-digital art realm, I did a couple sketches this month at coffee shops of photos I'd taken around Boulder, like the one above. To make these I worked with a single color of Sharpie pen in my Traveler’s Notebook. It was fun to work with limits for these. I’ll be sure to do more.

At the end of May I had an old plexiglass palette of oil paint that had tried. I didn’t want to throw it away, so I painted the back of it to make the shape of a woman.

This was a fun way to use an art supply and turn it into it’s own piece. I shouldn’t have let the oil paint dry, but I ran out of time to use it. It’s funny how even with oil paint, this happens for me. I don’t really forget that I have a palette ready to go, I simply have a lot of other things to do at times.

Reading/Watching/Playing:

I read ten books in May. Many of the books I read are now kindle suggestions, books I find in Little Free Libraries, or Gene Wolfe books.

Put your A$$ where your Heart Wants to Be - Steven Pressfield

I loved what is probably considered the classic Steven Pressfield book “The War of Art” and my kindle showed me “Put your A$$…” on my suggested list so I shrugged and hit “buy now”. I didn’t check to see when it was written before reading it, and I could tell right away that this is a good update to The War of Art, or an addendum that makes sense in 2023. He refers to more recent anecdotes and apps like Instagram and Zoom, so this feels fresh. Though I appreciate remote work and have been a remote working, I also appreciate the message of this book, which is “You have to go there.” The action for us to take from this book could be anything from sitting in our studio to moving to wherever the art we love is happening. Being someone who has moved around quite a bit for various reasons, some of them being love or passions and others being more practical, this made a lot of sense to me.

The book description says it is a ‘tough love’ book but I didn’t feel like it was that way. Maybe to use a few words I just used above, it’s a practical kind of love, but still feels full of the thrill of pursuing the arts.

My Body - Emily Ratajkowski

I’d been wanting to read this book for a while, and since I was looking for the Ben Riggs book below, and was searching for books with R authors, and saw this one. I loved this book and there were a lot of relatable moments in this book for me. I felt less alone in some things after reading this book.

Slaying the Dragon - Ben Riggs

This was a fun book about Dungeons and Dragons and TSR before Wizards of the Coast acquired the company. Which I must have known at some point but also must have forgotten. I believe the author is wildly fair to each person depicted in the book. Nobody is an outrageous villain, and if someone is a perfect angel who does no wrong, it’s a bit of a joke. He has a lot of moments where he covers the company’s varied mistakes, and reels in judgement by constantly checking any 20/20 hindsight bias at the door. This was quite refreshing, otherwise it would seem like an overly reverential book or a mean-spirited one. It took me a few chapters to get used to the writing in this book, but once I did, I loved it. It’s a fun narrative nonfiction style.

The Power of One More and #Maxout - Ed Mylett

Ed Mylett came up on my youtube playlist one day and I really enjoyed what he has to say. The premise of The Power of One More is simple enough, to summarize, if we could all make one more phone call, one more meeting, one more rep, and how that improves life. I responded to this idea fairly well. After reading the Power of One More, I also read #Maxout and thought it had many solid principles. Oftentimes I will read shorter, nonfiction books like The Power of One More and Put your Ass Where your Heart Wants to Be while I’m reading books that seem tough to scale, like most of the Gene Wolfe books. I will read two or three books at a time and finish shorter books before I finish longer books. I seem to both enjoy this and need the variety. The shorter books make me feel less like I’m slogging through one giant thing. It’s fun to have memories about books this way too, sometimes my brain finds ways to relate each book to other books, or I will see similar themes in books, and I really enjoy this.

Multipliers - Elizabeth Wiseman

I found this book in a Little Free Library and had heard the concept of Multipliers through the Ed Mylett book above, and possibly a few other places. It’s a good concept. Like Radical Candor, it’s a book where the title term alone makes enough sense, and the book contains all the nuance, antitheses, and details about the title term. To summarize, the whole point of the book is to try to be a Multiplier, or someone who enhanaces the skills and lives of others, as opposed to being a Diminisher, a person who reduces others. If you can’t be a Multiplier, the best hope is to get near one or work with one. Ultimately, if we’ve ever worked with a person who makes us a better person, that’s a Multiplier. I also liked that the book says that some people are Multipliers and Diminishers throughout their lives and in different environments, so neither condition is permanent.

Along the River that Flows Uphill - Richard Starks and Miriam Murcutt

I found this book in a little free library in Boulder and thought it looked interesting so I gave it a read. The way I figure, I will probably never be able to venture to the place featured in this book, so it would be a fun travel read.

The book is about two travelers who travel up the Orinoco river. There are meetings with natives, giant fish catches, wildlife sightings, and riverboat trips. It all has a bit of danger associated with it, or maybe more than that. Plus this book was more philosophical than I thought it would be, which to me was a nice surprise.

Visual Thinking - Temple Grandin

I regret to say I haven’t read any other Temple Grandin books and this is my first one, but I think it was possibly her most pertinent book for me and many people who suppose they are visual thinkers.

This book surprised me a bit and took me a few moments to adjust to, because one of the main problems in the book for Grandin is algebra. The challenge of algebra, according to Grandin and a slew of research, holds too many brilliant thinkers back in school, and that while we shouldn’t do away with math, we should rethink the cultural valuing of algebra. The main difference between most visual thinkers that are described in this book is I was good at algebra and calculus in school. I didn’t really want to do it, but I was at least okay at it most of the time. I was salutatorian of my class in high school so I must have done okay in it, even if I remember it being a bit painful. One of my memories from calculus was during the last week of my last year of high school, calculus became creative, or I finally saw how one could write their own formulas and figure stuff out.

What’s good is Grandin doesn’t polarize in this book, for Grandin there’s a spectrum of visual thinkers rather than any statements like “you’re either right or left brained” which is realistic to me.

The Fifth Head of Cerberus - Gene Wolfe

I just can’t get enough of Gene Wolfe I guess. I really like the Fifth Head of Cerberus, the second section (Sandwalker, ect) was a lot for me to get through but I raced through the first section. What I love most about Gene Wolfe is how he very slowly reveals details of his worlds to his readers, it isn’t easy to place what time, what planet, or even what kind of people are in his books. It makes second readthroughs better. It feels like knowing a secret. I like shows like Westworld and books like the Fifth Season for similar reasons though each isn’t the same dynamic as Gene Wolfe books, there are similar “ohh” moments.

Nightside the Long Sun - Gene Wolfe

I have a volume of The Litany of the Long Sun and couldn’t put it down at the end of May. This book has everything and is way friendlier than Book of the New Sun to me. I am glad I read Book of the New Sun first, this book is like dessert afterwards even though it’s also very long. The first book of Litany is Nightside the Long Sun and I was able to finish it. I won’t spoil too much of this other than to say it reminds me of Cowboy Bebop, but Spike is a priest-type character. There are robots, heists, enlightenments, gods, drugs, brothels, talking animals, possessions, exorcisms, tavern contacts. I love this book. I’m already on to the next book in Litany and am enjoying it quite a bit.

Now Playing: Tears of the Kingdom

I was excited to play the new Zelda game, even though living in Colorado is a lot like living in Skyrim or a Zelda game. I almost never buy games opening week unless it’s a Pokemon game, mostly because I either miss opening week or am thinking about other stuff, but I bought the game when it came out and I enjoyed playing it. I think the details of the natural world in the game are charming and maybe even more developed than in BOTW.

I haven’t had a lot of time to play this game but I’ve liked what I’ve played so far. What I do with videogames is I play them if I’ve done everything else I’ve wanted to do on a day. If I’ve hit my running goals and reading/art tasks, plus of course all my default mom duties, I will play TOTK for 20 minutes or so. The other game I really like on switch is Octopath Traveler, the first one, and maybe someday I will get the second one.

Running:

In May I was able to do a few big run expeditions. I was able to get some decent elevation-gain heavy runs in and distance as well. In the middle of May some smoke and haze rolled in from Canadian fires, and I got some sort of non-flu, non-covid cold, so I stopped running for about ten days. I cranked my indoor air filter to the max and stayed inside. Luckily by the end of May, I was back at it.

All in all a solid May, catch you next time!

Expanding Skills by Working With Limits

I’m a busy mom, and I have limited time each day to work on art. This is okay, and good even, because it means that the time I do spend has to have a high impact. Or at least, I want it to have a high impact, because I want to either maintain my art skills or get better.

When I was working up to the long distances that I run, I used to go for 5 or 7 mile meandering runs around my neighborhood in Maryland and DC. I didn’t have a time limit or goal, I just wanted to go for a run.

One day though, I decided I wanted to run 6 miles in 60 minutes. I did this on a treadmill at a gym. I didn’t even know I would be able to do it, but I did.

The impact this single goal had on me was higher than any of those other meandering “Oh I guess I’ll just go run” runs that I ever did.

With art it is the same. I began to have to ask myself the question, if I have only 1 hour a day or less, what do I do? How do I maintain the skills I’ve built for my whole life? How do I expand those skills?

For me, one high-impact way of retaining drawing skills is drawing a photo with Sharpie. Let’s go over what it means to draw in ink, and Sharpie specifically:

No takebacks, everything is permanent so everything matters

Are you an artist who draws on a tablet and on paper? Have you ever been drawing on paper and your brain tries to press CTRL-Z? Or maybe your brain tries to access the Procreate double-tap to undo a previous action? I ask because, I’ve done this what feels like thousands of times. What I try to do is draw on paper with Sharpie until my brain stops doing that.

Only one color. No real shading.

Thinking will happen in terms of shapes and line and negative space. There are only three main values to using a single Sharpie color: Paper, Sharpie, and Sharpie Pressed Hard.

Only one size of pen.

No outrageously broad strokes, no hair-thin lines without using the hand to either change the pen angle or pressure.

What’s the point of doing all this if I can get back on my computer in an hour and use my wacom tablet? The point is that ultimately when I do get back on the computer, I can use my time better because I am faster and more accurate at art.

I’ve been making art my whole life - I painted as a toddler and I finished an art major. I have my art for sale online and in galleries. Of all my experiences in art, what I find myself going back to when I draw like this is the negative space training I did in a high school art class. We learned from the book “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.” Where some left/right brain studies have been debunked, the principles of this book and it’s focus on negative space has served me well time and time again.

It might be that Sharpie drawing is incredibly frustrating at first, which is good, because every high-impact learning environment is going to be extremely frustrating. For me, it can often be a way of making a series of mistakes and rescuing the situation at the last minute.

When I look at all the mistakes I make in a drawing, I do think of the Bob Ross maxim of “Happy Little Accidents.” Maybe the biggest skill in art is patience and some dogged ability to keep working and have faith that everything will turn out okay in the end. Everything looks kind of bad or flubbed, until it suddenly looks good. Everything looks impossible until someone actually does it. The funny thing about limits is that they expand us, and eventually absolute limits get absolutely transcended.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until next time, thanks for reading!

I'll be at Denver Fan Expo 2023!

Exciting news, I’ll be at Denver Fan Expo 2023!

Fan Expo is from June 30th - July 2. I’ll be in Artist Valley near some other comics artists.

If you haven’t booked tickets yet, grab some tickets here

See you, Space Cowboy

Sketchbook Confessional April 2023

Welcome to April 2023’s Sketchbook Confessional - the Sketchbook Confessional is a blog where I review all of the art that I made in a month. Rather than a ‘to-do’ list, the Sketchbook Confessional is a ‘done’ list, where I can objectively see what I made without forgetting or getting too grandiose about it.

In April I started something a bit new - painting in oil on glass. I found some small palm-sized glass samples and thought they would be wonderful to paint on.

Luckily I was right. Funnily enough, some blogs on the internet would have one think that painting oil on glass is a doomed mistake. It worked just fine in my case with these glass samples. I decided with some of the glass samples to make paintings of old mining structures around Leadville.

It always awes me when I am running or skiing up high in Leadville and I happen across some kind of old mining relic. It reminds me how crazed yet methodical people were about mining the earth. First of all, they were at anywhere from 10,000 to 13,000 feet, in the 1800s, digging and exploding and sluicing the earth around. I imagine how hard it is to walk around at 12000 feet and then imagine swinging a sledgehammer or moving rocks around. It’s not exactly the mining scene in Zoolander that plays in my head but, almost? haha.

Anyways, I think all of the wonderful nature aspects of Leadville get a lot of credit and I’ve personally done a lot to credit those wonderful aspects with the mountains in my paintings. Mt. Elbert, waterfalls, animal life, and Leadville flowers are usually my subjects so I figured, why not talk about mining history in my art? It’s not as glamorous a subject and the pollution in Leadville is seen as one of the negative parts of it, but I think it’s better to talk about the whole picture than to pretend the mining aspects of the town and pollution do not exist. After all the entire town probably would not be there without mining - nobody opens an opera house at 10,000 feet for no reason for no customers.

I made around 12 mines total.

I made a few paintings in my Space Cowboy series. Eventually I want to do a bigger one, for now I made a small 4 x 4 inch painting and 3 x 5 inch painting.

I also made it out several times in April for plein air painting, as it’s finally getting a bit nicer out, and there’s this thing called #Pleinairpril that I was able to get excited about.

I’ve been trying out a new rig with a lighter easel and also using a cigar box as a palette. The cigar box works well because it contains the paint and it doesn’t slide around.

It was truly fun and challenging to get out a few times with my baby as well. Plein air with a baby, for me, involves double the planning and gear. It’s really fun and luckily we don’t have to walk too far to find something cool to paint in Boulder.

In April I also tried out using photos of myself as starters for the AI app Prequel. I saw Prequel in an ad and thought it looked interesting, so, I gave it a try.

I gave the ai a few photos of me and used what is called the “Watercolor” AI on the app. I thought this was fascinating as an exercise. I learned a lot about how this particular AI and AI style handles faces or what it thinks is pretty - it definitely grabs highlights on my face and makes them brighter, and makes my eyebrows thicker, darker, and more rounded. Which I don’t think is a bad look, only different. I think the AI’s faces can lean towards looking a bit uncanny or ‘overdone’ in some instances, but not all.

What these remind me of are covers of photoshop and illustrator magazines from about 2009 - present, many of them feature realistic face-bust portraits with, reductively, lines and flowers coming out of people’s heads. Which I don’t think is a bad look. I can’t help but think the AI has trained on covers or illustrations like this. I had a lot of fun with this and it’s something I can do while I’m rocking my baby and I have only one hand free or even 0 hands free at times. It’s more fun - way more fun - than scrolling news sites.

More on my foray into ai swimsuit photos here.

For fun, I made a book of the swimsuit photos and AI photos side by side.

At the end of April, I worked on a bit of paper art involving dragons! It’s been very fun to do this:

Playing:

I took a bit of a break from Gene Wolfe books this month and instead, in my late night hours after my baby goes to sleep, I play Octopath Traveler on Switch. Even before I saw that a sequel was coming out, I was playing it, and then I saw that the sequel was coming out and I figured I should finish and enjoy the first one if I ever got the second one. I also have that thing happening with Gene Wolfe that happened when I played Breath of the Wild - I don’t want it to end, so I stop powering through everything, afraid the thing I love will be over somehow. Of course this is silly and I could just re-read or replay, but that’s how I am, I guess. I leave things that I really love somewhat unfinished.

Octopath and Gene Wolfe are aligned for me because I started both in 2019, put them both down for a long time, then finally got going again. I guess it was hard for me to focus on things like this in 2020 and 2021.

As far as Octopath, I really love this game, it’s pretty to look at and the concept art is cool. I started playing it as Primrose, the dancer, and I empathize with this character quite a bit. I personally think the Allure ability is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen in a game, and it’s more than funny because the power of seduction is such a real one. Mostly what each character says after Primrose Allures them is the funny part to me.

I thought the final boss for Primrose was truly scary, along with the finals for H’aanit and Ophelia. I won’t spoil it even though the game is like four years old at this time, haha. I ended up playing most of the game with the four women characters as a party. I like them the most, though I also think the scholar character is really funny and pure.

I also love the merchant, Tressa. Everything she says brings me joy, especially when I charge her up to her ultimate and she says “Welcome Back” and when she finishes a battle “Time to close up shop!” idk why this is so funny and perfect to me but it is. I think Tressa’s story was the first one I finished in the game. The part with the travel journal was so pure to me. There’s a lot of purity in her storyline which is a bit hard to find in stories about money and trade.

My other, unposted silly photos of the game don’t do it much justice. Since I played the original Game Boy growing up and I still remember gray and yellow screens, everything on the Switch looks like some kind of holy relic to me, light and color pouring out of it. Every moment in Octopath is so pretty it’s hard for me to get over. I could really go on and on about this game. I finished the main story and hope to play the sequel soon.

Running:

In April I got a few big run expeditions in. The biggest run I got in was 9 miles, and I started stroller running quite a bit more too. It was exciting to do as we move towards summer. I’m still training for the Leadville Heavy Half but the runs are fun to go on regardless of any goal. It’s fun to see everything around Colorado greening up a bit for spring.

AI art might be faster, and

I think with AI art I can throw in the towel on some facts. An AI can paint something faster, a robot with little paintbrush arms could too. A horse and a car will always be faster than me. What I am saying is that I climbed this mountain and I made this painting.

The unspoken thing that I, nor any artist, wants to say is that maybe the AI can make not only a faster painting, but a better painting too. But that’s the best thing about art, that’s just like, an opinion, man.

Cooking Oil to clean Oil Paint Brushes

If you’re looking for an alternative to turpentine or expensive brush cleaner for cleaning brushes, I’ve had luck with cooking oil or canola oil for removing oil from brushes.

Also, after being cleaned with cooking oil, the bristles on my brushes are very smooth and soft. They’re not brittle or dry at all.

To clean brushes with cooking oil, here is what I do:

1. Pour 1/3 inch cooking oil into a re-usable container (a takeout container, a coffee can both work well)

2. Swish the brushes around in the oil (a coffee can works great for this if it is corrugated or if it has ripples, it has a washboard effect)

3. Empty the container of cooking oil into the trash

4. Wipe clean the excess remaining oil in the container with a paper towel.

I personally loved this when I discovered it because - no smell! And the oil is easy enough to get out of the container, so that the container can be used again.

This also works with olive oil, and though I haven’t tried it I bet it works with other oils used for cooking, like sesame oil.

Until next time -

I gave an AI app, Prequel, some of my photos and I really like what it came out with.

I saw Prequel in an ad and thought it looked cool, so I gave it a download and started playing with it. From the first photo I gave it, I thought the output was fabulous. I decided to subscribe to it, at least for a bit, and give it more photos of myself that I like - usually photos that I’ve been using for swimsuit contests or Instagram posts.

To “make” these, I used the AI Style called Watercolor in the Prequel app. Most of the images here are first-time outputs, so I didn’t re-run the AI over the photo - the first try, I thought, was cool enough.

The faces are a bit uncanny at times, but they do seem beautiful when all I gave it is a face.

What all of these remind me of are Photoshop or illustrator magazines, where the cover of each magazine features a beautiful woman and stylistic flourishes of color, linework, or paint splotches. Only the AI work is a bit less exact, there are moments where ears, noses, and facial edges aren’t that clear or defined.

I couldn’t find much about how the AI works or how it operates - if it’s highly trained on people’s existing artwork, or less so. I found a few apocryphal blurbs on Wikipedia and that’s about it. Unlike some AI art generators, it’s not based on prompts, only photos and AI filters.

What I notice it seems to do is make my eyes ever-so-slightly bigger, darkens my eyebrows, and it grabs highlights on my face and makes them even more highlighted. After looking at these I felt drawn to the idea of applying more moisturizer, or I felt the need to buy some highlighter, or something. I don’t dislike it, it’s only something I notice. I did like what it did with a photo of me with my hat on, it turned me into a kind of Indiana Jones type character.

After looking at this I sort of thought - I should get a hat like that, haha. I had the same thought when this one below popped out - the dress in it is pretty, though I don’t like the ragged edges at the end so much.

When I was in my art major and heck probably even right now, people would get a little depressed when they learned that many realistic artists use projectors to paint. I think I was a little dismayed too. Some of the magic or romance of art went away, but it’s also nice to know that some art is made with tracing tools, because unique deviation from reality and the human element is what makes good art so good. It’s still worth it to learn to paint and draw realistically. 

I’d say the same is true of AI, it’s still worthwhile to be an artist even if machines seem to be outpacing us. It’s a way, and there are many other ways, to make images.  

It would be a mistake to say that AI art is a phase or fad, that would be like saying gouache paint is a fad. It’s hot right now, and it might wane in popularity, but I don’t see it going away completely like pogs. I see it as a quick and easy tool that’s there, has near instant gratification, and people will continue to utilize. It has to be a lot like when the camera came out and painting suddenly seemed slow and a lot of work. It has to be like when phones got cameras and suddenly nobody had to go into a darkroom anymore, and everyone was and still is a photographer.

Is it hard to make these? I would say it can sometimes be hard to throw on a swimsuit and get a pose right. It’s not ‘easy’ to stay on the extremer side of fit. It is easy, though, to download an app and push a button and have a computer fairy put flourishes of paint around me, lengthen my already-long hair, and mist my face over with the sheerest digital makeup.

The other question that comes to mind with AI is: Is this taking someone’s job away? In my case, I think the answer is no. I don’t know if I would ask anyone to make a drawing of me like this. I can’t imagine myself sending someone a swimsuit photo and saying “Please make this into a drawing.” That’s not something I would do. But now that I’ve had an AI do it… the idea is in my head and maybe it would be cool? We also have to talk about the ease factor here. Pressing a button and paying 5 dollars is easier than mustering up a bunch of courage, vulnerability, and self-acceptance to ask a living, breathing artist to make a painting of us. Unless a person is a fount of confidence, there’s going to be some worry about how an artist will paint our necks, inner thighs, freckles. Like a duke getting a portrait commissioned in 1800, we’re going to assume the artist will smooth out our wrinkles but, what if they approach things so realistically that they don’t?

I think AI art - with all of its instant-ramen ready-now power - is giving us an opportunity to connect with those who create non-AI art. If we want something instant that gets us through the day, that is going to be forgotten in a week, we can ask the robots. If we want a deep, real connection, we will ask an artist.

Sketchbook Confessional: March 2023

The Sketchbook Confessional is a blog where I look at the past month and all the art and creative things I did in that month. Like a backwards to-do list, the Sketchbook Confessional is a ‘done’ list.


Painting:

In March I continued my Mountain Paintings series. I paint these on plexiglass that is either clear or already a color. It’s been fun to do and see what happens with the various color backgrounds.

I had a lot of fun making these.

I’ve started a new painting series that I call Space Cowboy, featuring cowboys and deserts, night skies with stars, galaxies, ect. I’ve really liked this idea and I’m going to expand on it. Below is a small 8 x 10 study of what I want the idea to look like on larger canvases or panels, which I think turned out well.

In March I also moved back into some realism or sketching in oil with turpenoid and have really enjoyed it.

Now that I am painting in oil after having my baby, I am moving back into realism. I will be focusing on figures and maybe, landscapes, in April. It’s been an exciting way to work again.

I’m not sure why but sometimes I forget how much I’ve trained in realism and also how happy it makes me to paint this way. Maybe writing this will help.

Lately I moved my studio to a new part of my place so it’s more light. It’s been really nice.

As far as things outside of the studio, I did get out to paint a bit en plein air at the end of March. It’s been a very snowy winter, and cold, so it was very cool to get out on a nice day. I painted in oil en plein air for, I think, the first time in a couple years, as most of the plein air paintings I made in 2021 were gouache.

On the digital drawing/design side of things in March, my friend’s cat, Bitty, is running for Pet Mayor of Louisville so I made some button designs for Bitty’s campaign. It was really fun to do this.

Travel:

In March I went to DC for a bit, I saw a friend’s art show, went to the National Gallery, and I caught a bit of blossoming season. I can’t believe my incredible luck with this. I don’t mind being one of those silly, over-the-top tourists who gets really close to the trees and takes dozens of photos. Some sights in life never get old to me, and those include tree blossoms, mountains, and water.

I also stopped by my hometown of Leadville to see a tiny bit of skijoring! It’s always fun to see this whenever I get a chance. Few things are more “Leadville”

Reading:

On the plane back from DC to Denver, I finished reading The Urth of the New Sun. This book brought Book of the New Sun home for me, as I’m sure it does for most people. I won’t say much more but I loved it. I bought The Fifth Head of Cerberus and The Litany of the Long Sun to read next.

Running:

I had some decent running in March! I’m still getting ready for the Leadville Heavy Half this summer. I knocked out an 11 mile run in Boulder that spanned from Wonderland Lake to Chautauqua and back again. I’ve always wanted to do this, and, it’s very possible. I’m not sure why it took me so long to finally do it, but there you go. Every time I run up Chautauqua there’s a lot of elevation gain to be had. It’s also pretty hard, I think at least, to run from Boulder Creek up to Chautauqua and then keep running around Chautauqua.

Sketchbook Confessional: February 2023

The Sketchbook Confessional is a blog where I look at the past month and all the art and creative things I did in that month. Like a backwards to-do list, the Sketchbook Confessional is a ‘done’ list.

In February I reworked some of the drawings I did in 2015, 2016, and 2018, I made them a bit looser and more colorful:

In my original drawings like this, the colors were only blues and whites. It’s been fun to revisit the drawings and redo them.

I added a new piece to this series too:

In February I started a new kind of painting - I am making imaginary landscapes with hikers or backpacker figures in each one. It’s been an adventure to do this. I really like what I am making, with these.

These are painted on clear plexiglass and also color plexiglass. It’s fun to have a color background to effectively work as a built-in underpaint color. Some of the plexiglass colors that I have are very bright or different colors than I would typically use as underpainting colors, so they are a good stretch of my routine.

In February I did a few paintings of Mt. Elbert that I don’t see as finished yet. I will add a couple more touches to these over time.

I added these to this blog to see how they change next month. All I have to say for these is they are super thick paintings and I love them. They will definitely take a bit of time to get done.
I made a few lupine oil paintings also.

The lupine paintings are a fun way for me to get into the swing of things with impasto.

In February I was able to get outside and do a few plein air pieces. I went to Boulder Falls the day before Valentine’s Day and did a few watercolors that I enjoyed making.

I think of romance a lot in February since it’s the month of Valentine’s day and it’s unavoidable, but I also think of February 14 as exactly half of February, most years. I also like that there are so many flowers in the supermarkets because they are green and there’s not much green around in Colorado in February. It’s such a short and cold month, not as dark or cold as January, but still cold. I do like running and skiing in the snow but I don’t mind the idea of beaches and sun.

Running:

I signed up for the Leadville Heavy Half marathon and knocked out a few runs in Leadville in February. I have a long way to go before June. As far as training, what I’m up to is going for hikes or runs whenever I can get childcare for Baby Jewell, or the occasional stroller run. I think the stroller running makes me stronger but who knows. I also don’t want to put Baby Jewell through running in some of the 0 degree weather we’ve had lately.

All in all I’m happy with my mile splits for any given terrain, this spring I will work on driving down the times for my splits at high altitude or over 10000 feet.

Overall I’m feeling 100% and have felt this way for about a month after getting Covid in November. It really did take about 8 weeks before I felt normal or back to where I was after I gave birth.

That’s what I got for February! Until next time, see you, Space Cowboy.

Independence Pass

Between Aspen and Leadville, Independence Pass is open in the summer. It can be a harrowing drive up from Aspen and a little easier, I think, up from Leadville. For these photos I drove up from the Leadville side in the summer and walked around a bit at the top of the pass.

I was able to see a group of female bighorn sheep with a few babies right off the road! It was fun to see them. I’ve seen male bighorns nearby as well though they are more solitary.

Sketchbook Confessional January 2023

The Sketchbook Confessional is a blog where I recap all of the art that I made in a month, as well as what I’m reading, watching, writing, and up to as far as exercise.

Art:

This month I waded back into oil painting with a few paintings of the Boulder Flatirons.

I had a lot of fun painting in my watercolor paper in my Traveler’s Notebook. I discovered the magic of taping off the edges of the paper and painting within a little square or rectangle. Oddly I have never tried this before and I really enjoyed it.

I painted a few fish in watercolor on paper that I’d purchased on my Paris trip in 2017. I’m glad I saved the paper for these rainbow trout, though next time I think I will use it sooner, haha.

Speaking of documentation, In January of 2023, I finished reading several books and also blogs covering my thoughts about the books, as well as art related blogs. I find that when I’m caring for my baby, I always have time to either jot down a few sentences on my phone or read my kindle. Here are all the blogs I finished this month:

My Magic Paper Menagerie

All Art is a Force of Optimism

Painting Fish

Boulder Falls

Brainard Lake and Long Lake

Leadville tiny waterfalls

Red Rocks Trail

Painting the Boulder Flatirons

New Mt. Elbert Painting

Quote blog: “All art is quite useless” - Oscar Wilde

Book blog: The War of Art - Steven Pressfield

Book blog: Never Finished - David Goggins

Book blog: The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

Boom Days Rocks

In January I created a couple new designs that I figured I would upload to Society6.

Overall I had a lot of fun making the above design using goauche, acrylic, and watercolor on duralar.

I made several oil paintings this month. I have had a lot of fun ‘drawing’ with oil paint, which I’ve done before - what I end up doing is laying down a thin layer of white or offwhite paint and then drawing into the paint with a dark color like teal. Impasto or thick painting is pretty unpredictable but drawing with it is at least a little controllable.

I stayed on two subjects this month, mountains and nudes, which I plan to continue throughout the year now that I feel better painting in oil again. I stopped for a while out of concerns for breastfeeding and while I was pregnant with my baby. If you’ve ever smelled oil paint you will probably understand this, haha. It’s nice to be back.

The painting of Mt. Elbert that I made at the end of December dried out this month though it did take a while.

What I’m reading:

I had what I think of as a huge literary accomplishment this month. I finished reading the first three books of Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. I started reading it in 2020 and put it down for a few years, and only recently in 2023 have I powered through the last 30% in about a week where it was too snowy to go outside and I was too overwhelmed by the idea of brushing the snow off my car and chipping at the ice on my windshield. I had also run out of books to read and it was my last book I could read for free before buying a new one. This is also how I ended up reading as much Proust as I did, if I am on an airplane for a long time or stuck indoors somewhere I do end up reading books that otherwise seem impossible to scale.

I decided to start drawing pages from Botns as warmups on my tablet.

I think Severian is an interesting character because he does so many unlikeable things yet he does his best in all the terrible situations he finds himself in. He’s way more likeable to me than the character in Dune. Anyways, I’ve drawn some Botns stuff before and I’m excited to do more of it.

I think Botns is hard to read because of the violence. Otherwise it’s worthwhile. If anyone were to read this blog and start reading Botns for the first time afterwards they’d probably be like “omg why does she like this book, this is horrendous.” All I can say is it gets better at the end or in the last half. The language or writing is good the whole time but I liked the last half of the plot a lot more than the first half. I’m now reading through book 4, which feels like an afterwards, yet is still a part of the series.

This month I also finished Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art and The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, along with the new David Goggins book.

Running

I did walk a bit in January and squeezed in a couple 1 mile runs around Chautauqua. On a couple days, I hiked with my baby and my easel and a diaper bag, for a total of 42 pounds of weight I was carrying around. I sort of couldn’t believe I was doing this, but I did gain about 40 pounds while pregnant so maybe it’s not so different from how I spent most of 2022.

I knocked out a 7 mile run at the end of January and was glad to feel like I’ve completely gotten Covid out of my system after a rough couple months of residual symptoms. The first 3 mile run that I did after having Covid felt horrendous, I felt like I’d never be the same. Luckily I got over it, somehow, and am running back at my 2021 levels. It took about 8 weeks to feel better. After having my baby I was able to knock out a 6 mile run pretty easily, so I think Covid was harder on me than having my baby, strangely enough. I hope I never get it again.

Until next time -

Red Rocks Trail - Summer and Winter

I’ve visited the Red Rocks Trail in Boulder often to either paint or just hang out. It’s a fun trail to get to, a little hard to find parking in the summer.

I liked taking photos on this overcast day, the colors of the rocks stand out when the sky is gray.

Every now and then I paint here, it’s very fun because the shapes of the rocks are so different. I’ve really liked every painting I’ve made at this trail or from sketches that I brought back to my studio.

I visited Red Rocks in the winter recently because I’d never been up there with the snow! It was totally deserted and very beautiful. For once, the trailhead parking lot was empty - probably because it was about 5 degrees out.

It was a little difficult to get up on the rocks, I wouldn’t recommend this hike in the winter without studded shoes. It was also easier to get up the rocks than go down - definitely a beautiful place to go and good to be careful.

Leadville Tiny Waterfalls

When the snow melts in the summer in Leadville there are many small waterfalls to be seen. They’re very beautiful. I have a few photos of these here.

What I love most about these waterfalls is how much they change the terrain they fall on - the high rockies are usually dry and brutal, but all kinds of life - flowers, mosses - can grow around these snowmelt falls.

It seems like another world. These waterfalls are probably at about 11,000 feet, maybe even 11, 500 or so.

Boom Days Rocks

In Leadville you can still see some rocks or large boulders that I painted in high school for the Boom Days Drilling competition. This one is my favorite, it was a bright sky blue and now is a powder blue.

Brainard Lake and Long Lake

In 2022 I was lucky to get up to Brainard Lake and go even a bit further to Long Lake. There were many wildflowers and waterfalls to be seen! I loved it up there and I didn’t realize it was about 10000 feet until afterwards. The terrain and flowers remind me quite a bit of the high country around Leadville for this reason.

Painting the Boulder Flatirons

I’ve had fun painting the Boulder flatirons from the large open area of Chautauqua park. In 2021 I painted a few flatiron paintings en plein air in gouache.

I’m using the paintings I made en plein air to create oil paintings in the studio of the flatirons. I also go up to the flatirons every now and then to catch the sunset. It’s the most colorful part of winter.

It’s been fun to do this as a way to get back in to oil. My usual mountain subject is Mt. Elbert over Leadville, and I’m enjoying figuring out the flatirons as painting subjects as well, they are very fun to figure out.

I’ve also painted higher up in Chautauqua park, it can be challenging to hike up with an easel, and it is fun to paint the sunset there, especially in June and July, when large rainclouds appear across the front range.

What is great about this area is that in the summer and the winter, there are many layers to paint. Even the area in front of the rock formations is interesting and full of waves and lines.

Here are a few of my photos of the flatirons in the summer also, it’s fun to see the poppies and various other flowers around Chautauqua.

What I personally like to do with the flatirons is paint them a bit plein air, then take the plein air paintings back to the studio to rework and add details. This way I get the energy of plein air and also the focus I need to really nail down the trees, grass, and edges of everything.

THE Philosophy of Andy Warhol

The book reads similarly to the Diaries of Andy Warhol, which I enjoyed quite a lot. The Diaries are a bit more my style because they’re massive and detailed and almost overwhelming, and what’s fun is you can look up any day, and find out what Andy Warhol was doing that day.

The Philosophy of Andy Warhol is a lot like a compressed episode of the Diaries, where Andy Warhol shops at Macy’s and talks to his friends on the phone for hours, but it is interspersed with overarching quotes or thoughts about life.

I like Andy Warhol a lot, and I think that the reason I like him because he is ready to admit things about life that other people don’t want to talk about, yet his art isn’t ugly or mean. I think that his admissions of beauty and unbeauty are novel or unusual right now in 2023, and may would have been abrupt in the 1960s. There’s something about Andy Warhol’s approach to life that feels refreshingly, maybe even shockingly straightforward. I wouldn’t use the words ‘honest’ or ‘blunt’ so much as ‘direct,’ and this directness doesn’t feel antagonistic or mean. It just ‘is’. Maybe this directness and fearlessness carried into his art, and it’s one reason why he was so successful. In addition to having scores of funny friends and understanding people very, very well, he worked, and eventually people worked with and for him.

What I think is the most true about Andy Warhol is that his ability to understand people led him to being able to predict the future. He seemed to know what people wanted, and because of this, he was able to know how the world worked and how it would work, which led him to his 15 minutes of fame quote. In this book, he also predicts futuristic moments like how much people will love holograms, and the idea of a metaverse or at least an online world or a community that isn’t in person. He does this without thinking of it in terms of computers, which I think is very novel. It feels like he predicted the high speed rail without first knowing about the steam engine.

There are a lot of worthwhile moments in this book, I loved it.

It is possible I already had some presentiment of my future

Book of the New Sun - Page 1

It is possible I already had some presentiment of my future

Mt. Elbert

My latest medium-sized Mt. Elbert painting is done! Here it is:

This was my first larger oil painting I’ve done in about 18 months, since I’ve been avoiding oil paint while pregnant and in my months of breastfeeding.