Sketchbook Confessional July 2023

It’s July 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 July I worked on quite a bit of paper art, including making handmade paper for backgrounds for pieces.

I enjoyed making these hummingbird pieces and am happy to say they are all shipped out of my home, either to collectors or to Harperrose in Leadville. I’ll be sure to make more soon.

In July I made a few ink drawings in my Traveler’s Notebook of scenes around Boulder, which have been very nice to look at this summer, with more flowers and taller grass than I have ever seen before.

To make these, I’m still using the Watercolor paper for the Traveler’s Notebook, and a double-sided Kuretake pen. It’s really the only pen I need lately. Usually I don’t get too excited about supplies or gear but this is a pen I will be buying again and again for the future. I think they’re about $5 each if you buy a pack of three of them online.

To make some of the smokier elements in these drawings, I am using Chromatek water brush pens to draw out the ink of the Kuretake ink pen and make grays. I had some watercolors ready to go for these, but I decided I liked them best in black and white.

I haven’t gotten out for any plein air painting lately as it’s been a bit too hot. I can only slap on so much sunscreen before I feel like the extra-close Colorado sun melts it off and I’m getting too toasted. My goal for August will certainly be to find more shaded places to paint.

Playing:

In July I played quite a bit of Octopath Traveler 2, I enjoy the set design of this game quite a bit, and I get attached to the stories as well. They’re a fun way for me to spend time when I am taking it easy from art, running, or baby care. Here are some of my favorite moments, there aren’t too many spoilers in these other than what the scenes look like.

I’ll get excited about the little houses and things like that in this game. I think the details are very easy to appreciate. Even the wallpaper in the shot above is a nice moment.

Running:

I’ve been taking it easier on running ever since finishing the Leadville Heavy Half in June. This has been great timing because it’s been a bit too hot to run most days. Now I’m usually just hiking or taking Baby Jewell out to playgrounds to play. Also, Baby Jewell is now 1 year old! He’s 25 pounds so he definitely keeps me strong as I lift him dozens of times a day and carry him around town for all of our errands. I can safely say being a mom hasn’t slowed me down at all, in fact it’s probably made me fitter than I was before, even in 2021 when I was doing things like half-marathon distances every weekend.

Since I’m taking a break from running and plein air, my process for July was very much about going on hikes and getting photos to draw later. It’s been a fun way to work, which I hope to continue.

That’s what I got for July 2023! Catch you next time!

Sketchbook Confessional June 2023

Welcome to June 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.

June was a month where I did utilize my sketchbook a bit more than not. I’ve been very into the Traveler’s Notebook, which is a leatherbound journal that has refillable pages to be filled out.

With my baby, it’s a little hard for me to travel, because I don’t want to put myself, my baby, and other people through air travel involving lots of crying. I had ear infections when I was a kid and I still remember the pressurization in my ears when I flew as a young girl, and that being painful. But at least I could pop my ears, I guess babies can’t exactly do that. Anyways! I’m living my ideas of travel through my Traveler’s Notebook, and I put together some scraps from my 2019 Tokyo trip (below). It’s been a fun way to look back on the trip, though I hope to have more trips to look forward to in the future.

Since June was an event-heavy month and very planning heavy, I wrote shorter blogs in June covering all of my creative things I was up to.

Making a Prompt Jar for Creativity

Tokyo 2019 ink drawings

Leadville Harperrose Studios Expansion!

Art life and Mom Life

Painting on Tile in oil and gouache

Traveler’s Notebook Pages from my 2019 Japan Trip

Kuretake Double Sided Brush Pen No. 55

Chromatek Water Brush Pens

Denver Fan Expo

Denver Fan Expo was June 30th-July 2, and it was awesome for the first two days, as of this blog’s writing there is still one more day to go! It was fun to get everything together for this expo. Most of June was all about ordering display items, prints, and stocking up on things for the con.

I had been to Denver Fan Expo as a fan before but not as an artist. It was wonderful to meet everyone who stopped by!

Now reading:

Lake of the Long Sun - Gene Wolfe

This is my favorite Gene Wolfe book yet. The second book in the long sun tetrology, there are secrets and memories of other Gene Wolfe books that appear in this one that make it quite rewarding. It’s also quite an adventure. There are many sci fi concepts and characters to enjoy and the writing is, as always, unparalleled. I finished Lake of the Long Sun in June and started the next book in this series.

Deep Work - Cal Newport

I’d read the similarly titled David Lynch book and thought I would give this one a try. The book opens with anecdotes about how writers and thinkers like Carl Jung accomplished their best work in isolated states. The book tackles the trap of visible busyness, and also internet-centrism. Since it was written in 2016, there’s no way it could have predicted 2020’s pandemic crisis and the mental health and connectivity issues that persisted throughout. Physical isolation became more of a norm for more of us than anyone could have expected, and I think what we found out in 2020 is that not everyone is meant to be isolated. Maybe creatives like me can’t wait for a few hours alone, but many, many people, including me, aren’t built for weeks and months of being alone in a tower like Jung was.

At one point the author does admit that people in roles involving people, like sales, probably perform much better when hyperconnected. The initial idea of ‘Deep Work’ might be limited to people who run databases, do computer programming, or write academic articles or fiction books, but I think it can be extended to practices that concern me, like art.

Building a Second Brain - Tiago Forte

Deep Work seems to suggest that electronics are the gateway drug to multitasking, the opposite of Deep Work. Building a Second Brain is more encouraging towards utilizing a computer to take notes.

I like both. I keep hobonichi techo day planners and also a Traveler’s Notebook for drawings. I think this blog is my Second Brain type organization system.

The thoughts in these books are important to me as I navigate life as an artist and a mom. The way I take time is totally different now that I have a baby and I am making every effort to stay on top of things.

Running:

I finished The Heavy Half in Leadville with a time of 4:44. It was a fantastically fun and exciting race, with snow happening for most of the race up high. At some points, it was like running uphill through a creek, as water was coming down the trail in large volumes. We’ve had such a rainy spring and summer all over Colorado. It’s strange to see so much water in places that would normally be dry, but that’s what is happening. Rain, on top of snowmelt, has made the season this way.

That was my big exciting June! Catch you next time!

The Leadville Heavy Half

The Leadville Heavy Half is 15.7 miles up to Mosquito Pass above Leadville. The start of the race goes straight up 6th street from Harrison Avenue, and winds through some of the historically scenic parts of the old mining parts of town.

In 2023, The Leadville Heavy Half had the special challenge of being snowy. On June 17th.

This was a race where preparedness was a decent component of the race, because at high altitude, there was still snow on top of the large rocks. Near the top of the race, which was adjusted for 2023, we were all running uphill in what seemed like a mud river, with rocks that would easily loosen and turn over underfoot.

Things I brought:

1. Osprey water pack

   Filled a bit less than halfway with Scratch Labs powder. There were aid stations so no need to take a huge amount of water for the Half.

2. Frogg Toggs Rainjacket

   This is a lightweight rainjacket. It’s inexpensive and doesn’t breathe very well, but this is what I wanted for this race. If I needed it to breathe a bit I could open the front. The important thing is that it kept rain and snow off of me.

3. Melanzana sweater dress

   I like this dress because it has a hood. My mom got me this blue sweater dress years ago and it’s my favorite.

4. T shirt

   A basic t shirt that I often wear. It has a lotus on it. I think I bought it at the Galleria when I lived in Houston.

5. Sportsbra

   Underneath it all, Victoria’s Secret, more like Victory Secret.

6. Shorts

   I had these in my bag and I never needed them. I wore leggings the whole run.

7. Leggings

   Athleta leggings, they were warm and didn’t soak up too much of the snow.

8. Ice spikes

   Like chains but for your feet. I didn’t end up using these, but it wouldn’t have been a bad idea if I had not had my Brooks Shoes below.

9. Brooks shoes - Pure Grit 6

   I got these at the thrift store in Leadville, they don’t seem very special other than that they have nice gripping elements on the bottom. I chose the grippiest shoes I had for this race, and it was a good choice. At several points in the race, it was like running uphill through a river. There were many loose rocks and several inches of flowing water for many many yards near the top of the race.

10. Sunglasses + Hat

    Funnily enough I have done a race where I forgot my hat. I couldn’t find it on race morning and I sweated off all my sunscreen so you can guess how that ended up! Luckily this time I had a pretty well-built list and I didn’t get too scattered before the race, so I remembered. The sunglasses I have are the first goodr lenses I ever bought, also at a Leadville race event in 2019. They have a bit of paint on them but I like them better that way.

11. Honey Stingers + Gummy Bears + Gu

    I only recently discovered Honey Stingers and really liked them. My other MO for fueling on long runs is gummy bears. For 13 mile or half-size runs in the past, I usually eat an entire medium-sized bag of gummy bears, or 600 calories worth. This isn’t really enough though, so I took the Honey Stingers too, which to me are like giant-size gummy bears. The race was sponsored by GU so I enjoyed eating exactly one of those during the race. It’s a little unusual but I ate some Honey Stingers the night before to load up on carbs. I didn’t eat any during the race since I ate gummy bears instead.

Some of my fueling choices

So that’s all my gear I had!

As far as night-before fueling, while driving up to Leadville from Boulder, I drank as much water as possible where the water had some Scratch Labs in it. This may have been one of the more important steps for me of the race. Carbo-loading and fueling is something that I see other runners talk and write about often. For Leadville, I recommend… hydro-loading? It’s a bit more than simply ‘staying hydrated’ it’s purposely drinking almost more water than is comfortable on the way to high altitude. This helps me personally avoid headaches from dehydration. It may not be as important to do this for people living in Leadville and racing, since I lived in Leadville for about 18 years before going to college, and I don’t remember thinking as much about water back then.

I ate some oatmeal and quesadillas for dinner because that is the most carbo-rich thing I could think of. I ate oatmeal again for breakfast the next day. My opportunity to fuel is the day before, because I struggle to get energy during races. I theorize that my body works so hard at running, that it stops digesting or doesn’t actually digest. Almost everything i eat during a race, I end up throwing up later after the race. I always feel better afterwards, I wish I could keep food down, though. This is no dis on any of the foods I eat. It’s a total me-thing, not because the gummy bears are bad or whatever.

As far as the running I did to prepare, I pushed my baby in a stroller for many of my training runs, to the point where when I didn’t have the stroller, it was like running after pushing a sled. I sort of fell forward. The most I can put my baby through for a stroller run is about 5 miles, after that, I think it’s a bit too long for him to be in the stroller and I get him home so he can crawl around. My other runs on Strava were 10 or 13 mile elevation-gain heavy runs. I knew I wasn’t going to win or place high in the Heavy Half, my goal was to finish.

For a few days I thought The Heavy Half was the easiest race in the Leadville Race Series, it turns out with the Leadville 10k included in the series, the Heavy Half is probably the second easiest race. It’s hard to explain Leadville to those who aren’t familiar with it. I guess, one way to think of it is that everything in Leadville is hard - even driving there can be hard if you don’t hydrate right. The Heavy Half isn’t the hardest race you can do, but it’s still pretty silly. Running up a mountain from Harrison Avenue? 7 miles straight uphill, the last miles of which are covered in snow?

The Heavy Half doesn’t qualify as a half marathon because it’s too long. It might have been the hardest half marathon in the United States, but it can’t be, technically, because it’s 15 miles instead of 13.1. It’s aptly named, in this case. The Heavy Half is the heaping serving of a half marathon, it’s the cup that overfloweth, a weird outlier race that happens concurrently with a distinguished marathon. That said, there’s very little that is ‘half’ about it - I would say it’s entirely heavy.

As for what’s along those almost-16 miles, most people probably aren’t thinking about the closeup scenery of the mining relics, however the close scenery was all we had in 2023’s race, which was wrapped in sheets of falling snow.

I frankly loved this. Being a person who has painted a mining structure from part of the race, I couldn’t get enough of the old mining shanties and buildings along this race.

Even outside of the Heavy Half, whenever I see these structures, I think to myself “What on earth were people doing here?” and I start to get an understanding of the determination and obsession that was mining. I imagine scores of miners traveling up to 12000 feet almost daily to search through the earth for ores, run machines made of wood and rope, and pump water along refining sluices. All of us in the future are enjoying life with metals that were probably still in the ground 200 years ago. I’m writing this blog to you via my computer, basically electrified rocks, and I drove to this race in a car that almost certainly made use of molybdenum, the key mineral at Climax mine in Leadville.

As for how I felt during the race, I felt good most the time, and I was in good spirits. It was certainly hard, but I knew I could finish it.

I ended up getting 556th out of about 770 people. The above is my strava map, but I must have derfed something up about it, because my official finishing time was 4:44 and the mileage should have only been 15.7. Maybe I went out of service briefly and that was it. Who knows though, maybe a short walk back and forth around an aid station, or stopping to take photos of mining relics added some extra mileage, and maybe I accidentally paused Strava somehow, or it lost signal and the other 30 minutes of my race. Either way I am happy with my 4:44 time, it’s so easy to remember!

In a word, that was huh-huh-huh-HEAVY

Kuretake Ink Pen - Double-sided Brush Pen No.55

When I visited Tokyo I happened across a pen I really liked, and luckily it has many variations. The pen was a Kuretake brush pen, though it took me a little while to figure out what it was, as almost nothing on the pen was written with roman letters or English.

The Kuretake No.55 is an excellent double-sided brush pen. I like how it was a bit smoky, it was a lot like drawing with water on a Buddha Board. Here is a detail photo of a warmup drawing I did, where you can see the smokiness of the ink pretty well:

I went on to make this drawing of lupine with the pen:

What I really like about this pen is that the two nib sizes are about all one really needs to make a good drawing. The ultra thin brush is nice to do detail work, and the larger brush on the other end is good for shading or blacking out large areas, and larger linework. And it’s just one pen, so it makes working much quicker.

The ink does take a bit of time to dry so it’s a good idea to work from left to right in a drawing (if you’re righthanded like me, if you’re lefthanded, the opposite of what I just said), or to not draw on the right and then switch to the left quickly, because the ink got on my hand pretty easily. But I actually like that it dries slowly. I think it’s what gives the ink it’s smoky, pretty look.

Here’s the other Kuretake pen I’ve used that I really liked - it was an impulse buy when I was in Tokyo. I didn’t know or understand anything about the pen, something about it just felt right and it looked cool, and it wasn’t so expensive that I felt it was out of reach, so I picked it up:

This is the other kuretake pen I’ve tried, a. much thicker, darker pen with very black ink. A very nice pen to use for drawing. Making finer lines with this pen requires a very gentle, delicate touch

Kuretake offers many other pens, and they also make eyeliner pens and other cosmetics? (Seems like a fair enough product diversity offering). The pen I got in Japan was a single-sided deep black pen, but I liked this double sided pen quite a bit more. It felt more versatile and is smaller, so easier to use.

Traveler's Notebook Scrap Pages

I finally got around to putting some of the scraps I saved from my 2019 Tokyo trip into my Traveler’s Notebook. I loosely pasted these into watercolor refill pages using gel medium.

The tickets are one thing I am very glad I saved, because I went to so many museums, and in many cases, the tickets for each museum or art show were like little art pieces in themselves.

The ticket above that says “Independent” on it was one of the cooler shows I saw, it was featuring work by new and living artists and some art students. A few photos of the show are on my instagram. It was such a big floorspace that I wandered through it for an hour or two.

The rainbow ticket above is one of my favorites. They seemed to have gone all-out for that ticket. I have the larger brochure saved for it too.

I ordered a few prints of my photos from Inkifi and pasted them into each page.

The Traveler’s Notebook is a fun way to scrapbook like this. Eventually I may add writing to the tickets too, to explain what they are inside the book. Pasting the tickets into the book is a fun way to remember the entire trip. I think I will do this on future trips as well. It’s hard not to when the little scraps of paper that I seem to get are so artful.

Chromatek Water Brush Pens

These water brush pens are a fun and easy way to create watercolors from pigment or from watercolor pencil linework.

The pens unscrew the opposite way that machines and screws usually twist on and twist off, they’re lefty-tighty righty-loosy, if that makes any sense. I’m not sure why they are this way but it’s pretty funny.

The brushes work pretty easily:

1. Unscrew the water container end (lefty-tighty righty-loosy)

2. Fill with water

3. Screw the water container back onto the pen

4. Squeeze the sizes to get the water into the pen reservoir

5. Draw with water!

For this drawing, I made an ink drawing using a Kuretake pen, the double-sided no.55 Kuretake. I gently ran one of the water brushes on the edges of the drawn lines, which were already dry for about an hour, to create the effect around the flowers,

For this drawing, I made a drawing with watercolor pencil, and then ran the water pens over the pencil. This is on Traveler’s Notebook Watercolor paper.

Another way to use these is to put them in pigment and then draw with them until the pigment is cleared from the brush. I thought this was the best way to get large areas of color. The broader brushes seem to be made for this especially, because finer lines can be made with watercolor pencils, but I like the finer brushes in pigment for this too. In this case, the pigment I used was Himi Gouache. Gouache could be put on a brush and applied on it’s own without water, but I often leverage the watercolor-like aspects of gouache, so I gave it a try with these brush pens.

Lastly, I found these were pretty easy to clean, or they were self-cleaning. Unless there’s very aggressive pigment loading, pigment doesn’t get into the reservoir of these pens, so the water cleans out any pigment on it’s own. Instead of dipping a brush in water to clean it, if I needed a new pigment on a similar brush, i could either just dab the brush on a paper towel for a bit, or let the color run out on it’s own. I squeezed the pens to remove more of any color that was still on the brush. Despite what I thought was pretty hard squeezing, the water didn’t run out in the pens very fast.

I think these pens would be great for plein air painting, or maybe it could be called a combination of painting and drawing. They’re lightweight, they don’t run out of water easily, and they are fun and easy to use on paper with pencils or paint. I haven’t tried it, but they’d probably also be very fun with acrylic ink or india ink.

To summarize

• Chromatek Water Brush Pens are a fun and easy tool for creating watercolors from pigments or watercolor pencil linework. They can be used with gouache and ink too.

• The pens have a unique unscrewing mechanism, once you get the hang of it, it is straightforward, but the first time opening them can be a bit tricky. (righty-loosy)

• The pens are easy to pack and clean. The water doesn’t run out quickly.
  
  

Medium Moment: Painting on Tile

I’ve enjoyed painting on tile lately, and I’ve made probably about 20 tile paintings so far. Here is what I have learned about making paintings on tile.

A tile might be thought of as a nontraditional surface, yet it works so very well! It helps me to remember that a canvas is simply the best surface that people in the past could come up with at the particular time. Thousands of years of artists painting on rock, wood, canvas, and paper coalesces in canvases being what we largely think of as the best or most common art surface to paint on.

It turns out that painting in oil on tile is easy! I personally didn’t have to prime the surface at all for the kind of painting I do, which is usually impasto-style painting of laying down a thick layer of a neutral color like white or offwhite, and then painting into that layer with deeper color.

Since oil paint is very much made to stick, it doesn’t peel or chip off the tile. If you’ve ever painted on glass, it’s a lot like painting on glass. The paint doesn’t really fall or sink into any canvas, it sits on top of the glass surface and is easy to move around. This is why I think it’s great for impasto painting. It’s sculptural at some levels but still very much about painting and color.

Here are two lupine paintings I made with oil paint:

Oil on tile is awesome.

To paint in gouache on tile, I primed the tile with a thin coat of clear gesso. I am sure white gesso would also work well, I only happened to have clear gesso on hand so that is what I used.

I decided to do priming for gouache painting after attempting to paint without any priming, and this was immediately not a good idea. Maybe if the tile were less smooth or if it were more porous, one wouldn’t have to prime the tile, but I definitely had to prime every single type of tile I’ve had for gouache painting, and I’ve probably used about 4 different types.

These are oil paintings on tile samples

In the spring I had an idea to make paintings of desert night scenes with fantastic galaxies and nebulas, and having a tiny cowboy in the painting somewhere. I call this series the Space Cowboy series, overtly about the ending tag of each Cowboy Bebop episode.

I really enjoyed making these oil paintings on tile. The space cowboy paintings didn’t utilize too much impasto even, I think most of the paintings were pure oil with maybe a bit of liquin mixed in.

The paintings above are oil on tile, the paintings below are gouache on tile.

I eventually sealed the gouache with a thin layer of acrylic gel medium, to give the paintings the shine and apparent body of my oil paintings. I don’t think it’s hard to tell between the gouache and oil paintings, but if I weren’t so versed, it might be a bit hard to tell, because the finish is so similar.

If I layered the gouache too thickly, it would sometimes crack. I assume this is because the gouache can’t really sink into anything, so it forms a layer and loses structure, where gouache is designed to sink into paper and not be thickly layered. Given the cracks, I wasn’t sure how to fix this. I would try to thin out the cracked layer with water application or with another thin layer of paint (probably a bad idea) but it was hard to get those cracks out. Maybe even some particular colors of the gouache I was using cracked more than others. I’m not sure. After seeing the cracking, this is why I figured it would be a good idea to seal the gouache tile paintings in gel medium, which as far as I have seen is pretty much immune to all kinds of cracking and damage.

Another reason that I think we love painting on canvas is that a finished canvas is relatively easy to display. Nobody really frames a tile - tiles are meant to be stepped on, or meant to be put on a wall in large groups.

I found that shadow boxes worked really well to frame and display paintings on tile. I adhere the painting with a removable-but-strong tape strip to the shadow box backing, and let it sit in the box. I really like how this turned out. The glass protects the painting surface from dust and showcases the tile in an elegant way.

To sum up:

• Painting in oil on tile is straightforward and doesn't require priming. The paint sticks well to the tile surface, allowing for impasto-style painting.

• Gouache painting on tile requires priming with clear gesso to improve adhesion. Different types of tiles may need priming as well.

• Shadow boxes are my recommendation for displaying painted tiles, providing protection and an elegant presentation.

Art life and Mom life

My baby is teething. As I write this, last night I put my baby to sleep at 8:30. I glued paper cats together for about 30 minutes. He woke up at 9. I fed him and rocked him a bit. I glued more bookmarks and primed a canvas. He woke up at 10. I rocked him. This time I crawled into bed, hoping for the best. He woke up at 11 and 12. He slept until 2 after that and until 4. I know that a 2 hour block is happening if I have a dream.

Time as a parent for me is certainly different than time as a non parent. To make the art I want to make and to work on the projects that matter to me, time is now like a high-intensity workout. It’s not like a 10 mile run at any speed, stopping to snap photos of flowers and trees - it’s a 10 mile tempo run that MUST be finished in a certain time.

I have a very loose schedule with my baby. I don’t envy people who have each hour of their day planned out on a calendar, and I’ve never been this way with any part of my life. I find that for me, just because I have timeblocks labeled, does not mean that I control my time, or that I use my time in the best way. In fact, the less labeling, the less expectation, the better I seem to do. When I’ve traveled, I have no itineraries other than getting to the airport at the right time. Given this, if I had a schedule like “My baby eats at 9:30, 12:30, and 5:30” I think I would go insane or feel disappointed, because the schedule would be broken every single day. The one thing I keep to is bedtime for him each day at about 8 pm.

I also don’t have any hard rule like “I must work on my art 1 hour a day.” I don’t track this at all, but possibly this is because I’ve already put in so much time for art that I’m in a maintaining mode at this point. If I was trying to learn or do something totally new, I would try for 1 hour a day.

I took the Clifton Strengths assessment a few years ago and scored into the Maximizer trait. I never felt like a test classified me so well, even when I found out I was a Libra Rising ;). Being a Maxmizer means making the most of any situation, bringing the best out of other people, and creating value from almost nothing. Maybe a lot of people from small towns end up with this kind of trait, because it takes creativity and utility to survive a place where there’s not many people. Something I thought was relevant was I had Connectedness as my top Clifton trait, so, no matter what I do, I make the most of it, and in everything, there’s a purpose for me. Everything and everyone matters to me deeply, it might be a bit weird to others though because I simply don’t need it to be in a schedule.

Overall I think that motherhood has been wildly good for my art and my particular situation. The little time I do have is more high-impact. I seem to get more done in shorter amounts of time, because short amounts of time are all that I have.

Both right now and before motherhood, I tend to work in 1-2 week sprint-like efforts, a behavior which is fairly easy to witness on my Instagram. I’ll work on a series or style, crank out several paintings or drawings, and then change to a new series relatively quickly. It’s a fun way to keep things new with my art practice. Last month I made 12 mine paintings on glass. The week before the mines, I worked on four oil paintings of nudes. The two weeks before that, I almost didn’t remember what I was doing, but now I remember it was abstract mountain paintings on plexiglass.

I didn’t know about this sprinting pattern at all before observing myself more closely. Now that I’ve observed it, I don’t plan on either fighting it or leaning into it, I’ll just sort of let it be. I will continue to be in the moment of art.

I made the art below while being a mom of a not-yet-1 year old

These are just a few pieces, I made so many more that I have trouble counting and I keep track of everything I do in my monthly Sketchbook Confessional blogs.

What I’m most excited about is I haven’t really flagged on skill. I had a weird couple moments while pregnant where I thought I would lose some of my drawing ability if I didn’t use it. It turns out everything is ok. I think I haven’t lost any skills because I have a drive to retain them.

Something I’ve enjoyed doing with my baby now that he can sit up is I take him to restaurants where I make a drawing of a photo I took in my Traveler’s Notebook.

He really enjoys looking at all the different people at each restuarant or coffeeshop. When I thought about this, I realized I never was around so many people growing up in Leadville in the 90s. It was simply a smaller place, so if we ever went out to eat as a family, the most packed anywhere would be was with five other families. So, I think it’s good for my baby to get used to seeing lots of people, and people of different ages and cultures.

For these drawings I use a Sharpie of only one color for each piece. It’s fun to work with limits like this. Not only is the color limited, but the size of the pen is limited too, so this keeps my traditional art skills, (I must avoid saying sharp), well-tuned.

Interspersed with my time spent on art itself are art-related support tasks like writing on this website, cleaning and organizing my studio, checking out local art shows or galleries, running, talking to other artists, and shopping for new art supplies. 

About a year ago I had the luck of reading the book “The Obstacle is the Way” by Ryan Holliday. I tend to like all of his books that I read, I have read I think about five of them but nowhere near all of his books. I even read Trust Me I’m Lying a long time ago. I think that, in the purest form of the phrase, The Obstacle is the Way with my baby, except I wouldn’t go so far as to opaquely call him an obstacle, he’s certainly a challenging kind of entity. I run with him in the stroller instead of running alone. Pushing 25 pounds plus whatever the stroller weighs up a hill is no easy task. After doing this, I am so strong its a little dumb, it’s a little surprising.

Endurance is a good word for parenting, isn’t it? I am able to endure so much sleep deprivation and lifting of my baby that it’s a bit suprising. Maybe it surprises a lot of parents.

The rocking of my baby that I described in the first paragraph of this blog has completely stopped, he’s fully sleep-trained now and he falls asleep on his own within a few minutes. It took me several weeks to make entries into this blog, sentence by sentence, moment by free moment, where I wasn’t committed to doing other stuff like painting, baby care, running, slacking, tweeting, whatever blue-sky posting is. I feel like I do dishes and laundry 4000 times a day. In the scraps in between, I get art and writing done. With my sleep-trained baby, I do miss the rocking a bit, but not the sleep deprivation. As much as my baby needs me, he now needs me a bit less. It’s a funny feeling. Whenever someone steps in and watches after him for a few hours, I almost don’t know what to do with myself. I guess that I, too, am now trained in a way.

As some might know who are reading this blog, I’ve kept a Hobonichi Techo planner for about 4 years. On June 10th in the 2023 planner, this quote by Shigesato Itoi appears:

It’s hard for me to really say how much I needed this quote as a new mom. As a painter, I deeply realize there are few things in life that have rewarded me more completely than deep uninterrupted work. My mind privileges deeper work as better, but I find what I am doing now is just as good as hours of non-interruption. Maybe it’s even better. Perhaps what is most true is that the deep work of my past is still there, and this is what allows me to complete paintings in short bursts of free time. I’m operating on a foundation that won’t move or change, no matter how much the future changes. Now I am off to do some dishes.

Ink drawings from Tokyo 2019

I was cleaning my studio lately and found the sketchbook with these drawings from my 2019 Tokyo trip. It seems I was going to publish a post about these, but when I checked, the post was in ‘draft’ phase so it looks like I must have not done so after all.

When I was on my way out of Tokyo I had a few hours to spend before my plane took off. Before going to the airport, I settled in at a cafe and started drawing some of my photos from the trip with an ink pen.

The drawing above was from some gates I saw near Akihabara. I am not sure exactly where this was.

The drawing below is from Nezu Gardens, which I thought was very pretty and in a wonderful neighborhood. It was a bit of a challenge to do this in only blank ink, while the different greens of the area were so exciting.

This last drawing was from a waterway in Shin Koenji, where I stayed during my trip. I was lucky to be in Tokyo during cherry blossom season - I’d never been to Tokyo before so everything was new, it was even more new and special with the blossoms everywhere. This photo was from my last day in Tokyo, where I had almost ran out of museums to go to. I hung out near a playground where this photo was taken, and then I got on the metro to go to the airport and back to the US.

Making A Prompt Jar for Creativity

It’s not always easy to think of ideas to draw. I get many ideas when I’m bored or nothing else is happening, like when I am driving a straight stretch of road in my car. But sometimes I don’t have boring stretches of life anymore - I keep pretty busy with my art practice and my baby. Sometimes I am so out of ideas that I do yet another self portrait. I promise I’m not self-obsessed, there’s just no one else around, and I’ve ushered all the magazines with models in them out of my place in an effort to Kon Mari what is within my power, while an asteroid belt of Fisher Price toys encircles my studio area.

This is why I personally need a low-stakes prompt factory. One of my favorite things about hanging out with little kids is they have unbridled prompting, they ask me “Draw a ninja bee! Draw a unicorn surfing!” and it’s so much fun because I don’t remember what it’s like to come up with random ideas like that in .5 seconds. I like to think of myself as someone who is overflowing with ideas, but it isn’t always true.

To make prompting more random and easy, I created a prompt jar lately. Here is how I did it. I made two sheets of red words representing objects and places, and one sheet of style or themes in green words.

From there, I cut out all the words and put the word strips in a jar. The goal is to draw at least two red strips and one green one, and illustrate that. The first prompt I drew from the jar was: Door, Supernova, 1990s music video.

I was really happy with this prompt! Going forward, prompt-jarring won’t be a bad way to do warmups unless I have something specific to warm up on. I’ll post drawings I make from the jar as I get more prompts created.

Harperrose Studios Expansion!

I was happy to travel to Leadville lately to see the newly-expanded Harperrose Studios! Harperrose now has more than twice as much space as before to showcase local Leadville and Colorado artists!

It’s wild for me to remember that Harperrose’s building space used to be the old video rental place in town. The transformation of this little corner of Leadville has completely floored me. This space is such a good thing for Leadville, and such a wonderful way to honor artists.

Mineshaft postcards are pictured above, featuring six of my mineshaft oil paintings. The mineshaft in the paintings can be seen from the Mineral Belt Trail in Leadville.

Below is a large oil painting of mine of Mt. Elbert.

The painting above is of a fairy-slipper orchid, a rare flower that can be found near Leadville in rare instances. One hint I will say is that I have seen them near Turquoise Lake. From what I’ve seen, they grow in shady areas with mixed amounts of moisture and dryness.

Several of my original paintings are at Harperrose studios, as well as prints, mini-prints, paper art, and bookmarks!

All in all, the grand-reopening was a wonderful event and a fantastic way to celebrate the expansion! Congrats Harperrose!

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.