Welcome to November 2019’s Sketchbook Confessional, where I get all of the art out of my system.

The Sketchbook Confessional is a place where I post and describe all of the art that I did in one month’s time, an effort to reel in the chaos of art and objectively know what I did and did not do.

Art:

Tilted Sun: I cranked quite a bit on Tilted Sun, it’s almost moving as fast as I want it to. How the comic works at this point is that I have characters, places, ideas about technology and life, and Things to Say, and weaving them together is what takes most of the time. I’ll make basically a ‘key page’ and retroactively work back from the key page I am trying to get to. I’m doubling down on working on environments, since I am pretty weak at thinking about places, furniture, interiors from a visual development standpoint.

But there’s so much to be had in little details! Like if you truly care about a character you’ve made, surely they need a pouch to carry their items in, or they need a coat because it’s cold. Or they prefer sneakers because they run, as opposed to boots because they plod.

The energy that goes into thinking about outfit details or accessories or interior design doesn’t really come up if you’re not working on original characters, so that’s where a lot of the effort goes.

It sounds really relaxing to draw Batman right now because I know what Batman looks like and I know a bunch of his accessories - I don’t have to reinvent the wheel. This is why doing fan art as an artist or working with existing characters is such a mental break. Seriously drawing a hero after working on your own OC and original characters feels like prismacoloring a relaxing-AF coloring book about butterflies at this point. It’s like, hey man, you don’t have to re-envision Wolverine. You could, but you don’t have to.

I’ve found that using a lighter line weight helps me move more quickly as an artist. I was once pretty attached to these thick black lines, but the problem with those is that if you make the slightest squiggle, it looks pretty bad. A lighter weight or a thinner line is much better and helps me draw more quickly. I suppose it’s the difference between drawing like Moebius or drawing like Mike Allred - both amazing artists, one just has a thinner line and the other has a much thicker line.

There were some moments in making Tilted Sun where I captured the full process of each panel, like below. I really am attached to the initial pencils and the whole time while making these, I find myself working to bring life to the inks and colors in a way that honors the pencils. Maybe I should just do a whole book in pencil someday.

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Reading:

I read Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins and also Super Attractor by Gabrielle Bernstein, but I only made it through the first half of Super Attractor. So, wow! Yes, if you want to go on the self-help rollercoaster ride of your life, read these two books immediately back-to-back and call me.

I like the thoughts and efforts behind Super Attractor but as soon as the author started talking about summoning archangels to help you with your problems, I just couldn’t get there. I couldn’t get on the Archangel boat with Gabby. Maybe it works for some people, but I feel the David Goggins thing more closely, running hundreds of miles seems more accessible than archangels. This is the great thing about our world, you can kind of just choose what works best for you.

Can’t Hurt Me is a good read for any artist since Goggins is a person of extremity. I guess it’s so easy to give up on art, or to give up on anything - your business, yourself - when the circumstances are bad, or chances are slim. For Goggins, giving up is as hard as going further. I’m a fan of this book and following David Goggins on Instagram because he does the exact opposite of most coddling self-help books. Some of his posts say “Hey, sometimes you’re just not good enough.” Harsh but true, and, he’s not mean about it. For the entire book, he transforms by relentlessly confronting himself and he doesn’t bash other people. He stays in his lane of self-focus without being selfish or pompous. It’s liberating. I’m absolutely magnetized by it.

Playing:

I played almost no video games in November but I did get a bit more into DnD with a couple campaigns rolling right along. In one campaign, sadly my carefully-thought-out elf instantly died by getting one-shotted by some ochre jelly. I’m not good at surviving DnD but I get lost in the art and ideas in the books. Playing DnD when you are a fantasy artist is like going to see a band and the lead guitarist plays the exact same guitar that you do. I like the world-building aspect of DnD as well, where in Magic the Gathering the card art is phenomenal but you don’t get a sense of the environment or exactly ‘where’ all the combat is happening, on top of ‘why’. (Plains, swamp? For some reason?) Why are there 300 mushrooms taking on an enchantress deck? Anyhow the narrative aspects of DnD draw me in, plus, you’re not piling a beatdown on everyone, it’s more an operation of working together. It’s like improv, with elves.

Working Out:

I’m adding a new part to Sketchbook Confessionals: what I’m doing physically!

Art and exercise have always been integrated for me, and to write about art without writing about what I’m up to in the gym seems unfair somehow. Most artists I know are not just sitting at a desk all day - they’re out running, playing sports, or at dance class - and if they’re not, they sort of want to be.

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This month I joined up at my local gym and am doing Zumba and also Personal Training once per week. What captured me on both is that I found that after each workout, I’d be excited to go home and work on art, and I’d work for longer amounts of time instead of just falling asleep.

Usually I’m into running for miles on end into some kind of blue delerium, but I think the dance classes and strength training will add to the mix in a positive way.

I did do a 2009-to-2019 post too, here it is.

I was making massive art in 2009 and had relative success with paintings, success at that time meaning I sold a few paintings here and there for $300 - $1500. It sounds great but if you only sell three paintings per year, well … Also in 2009, I would overwhelm people with 30 ft paintings, which were impossible to get installed at local galleries until finally they found a spot at Norlin Library at CU Boulder.

Here I am in 2010 with one of the paintings I made in 2009 - Norlin Library at the University of Colorado, Boulder

Going big with art was great, I’d do it again in a heartbeat and am not sure why I stopped. It is a bit hard when the show is over and you have to roll up your painting and put it in a basement, but, the painting above got a good three years of time at Norlin Library and, I don’t know, probably tens of thousands of people saw it.

Crushing it on Big Art is kind of like the David Goggins thing where you think you’re doing as much as you can, but in reality you’re only doing 40% of what you are truly capable of.

Most of what I make these days is enclosed in an iPad, which does save time and space and produces previously unimaginable colors. Even if it all seems stuck in a computer, there’s always the internet. At least, no matter what happens with our world as far as tech, art is real.