Welcome to December 2019’s Sketchbook Confessional!
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:
December is a bit of a glum time in DC/Maryland/Virginia so I ended up subliminally drawing a lot of artwork with eye-melting bright colors.
When making the piece above, I was thinking about Disney movies and how princesses always have this part where they sing and they are surrounded by friendly animals, like Ariel and Flounder in The Little Mermaid, or like Belle and her horse and other farm animals in Beauty and the Beast.
I began thinking wow, life sure is not like that at all, most animals are pretty rough - the animal kingdom is often as cruel as ours. Even birds can be absolutely terrifying. So, I envisioned a princess who makes friends with predators. Weasels, snakes, tigers, hyenas - all of these are the ‘evil’ or ‘bad’ animals of pop culture, but why? What if we could be friends with the ‘bad’ animals, and, what if they aren’t really that bad? It’s not their fault they’re eels.
The four-winged vulture was just one I threw in there because, you know.
This month I also did a bunch of art from Die Hard! There’s a full mini blog of these drawings here:
I was lucky to get a large iPad Pro for Christmas from Marc. He looked into Wacom and other tablets, and the ipad eventually won out . I have a smaller 2018 iPad Pro 2 that I won, miraculously, by playing blackjack, somehow?
While I love my mini iPad for riding on the metro, I’ve named my 12.9 inch Big Boi and it stays at home with me in the studio, planted on a stand. The real estate of the larger screen does matter - I already feel like a more powerful artist who can see quite a bit better. There’s no parallax and the drag is perfect. No need for a screen protector or drag-enhancer to make production art.
The first thing I made on my new ipad pro 2
Tilted Sun is finishing the year at 92 pages. It’s become a bit of a Russian Doll of stories, with characters experiencing the thoughts and memories of other characters as time goes by. The year’s final panel of Tilted Sun:
I feel very happy with how Tilted Sun is turning out. There’s always more to be said and done, and none of it is full circle yet, but I’m glad I just started and just kicked the tires on making comics instead of waiting for a publisher or a kickstarter or someone in the industry to say yes. I’d recommend this approach to anyone. If you want to make something, just do it.
Tilted Sun is my science fiction/fantasy comic of absolute creative freedom, where I can talk about anything, and it turned out to be a place where I talk about computers and technology. At this time in 2019-soon-to-be-2020, computers are something that are fully integrated into our lives. In Tilted Sun everything is just a bit further along, where computers are absolutely entangled with people and also the natural world. That’s about as much as I can say without spoiling it. :) You know I love surprises.
One of my friends said to me lately “Scott Adams did computer stuff and made Dilbert, and you made … this”. There are so many absurd, funny, heartbreaking moments in working with computers, but there is also so many fabulous, ‘I-can’t-believe-we-made-that-work'' moments. Maybe I haven’t had my heart broken enough yet, but I think I actually have, over and over again, and this is what I do anyways.
I think the best art comes when artists are fully in their own world and producing what they truly want to produce. Commissions are great, but the best thing you could ever do with an extremely talented artist is just hire them and say “Make whatever you want to make” and turn them loose on a project. The best people I’ve worked with have done this for me, and I’m grateful.
I’ve started putting up more posts about my comics-creation process on Instagram. Since I save everything I do, I figured Instagram would be a good platform to show some of the work that goes into the final product.
To fire off 1000-word microblogs on Instagram, I use an app called Later to type out posts on a computer with a full keyboard. Later has helped me save a bunch of time, because I can type faster than I can tap, and since posts are scheduled I can block out an hour and get posts done for an entire week, and not spend as much time fussing over Instagram. It also has a cool planner function so you can see how your spread of posts will look. This is important since I’m trying to be more consistent and make blocks of consistent content in sets of three - for example, three lifestyle posts, three drawings, and three paintings.
Why do all this planning around Instagram? I started working harder on Instagram because I realized my Instagram profile actually gets as many visits as this website. It’s a pretty fun place to engage and I do an occasional livestream there so ff to follow if you aren’t already: https://www.instagram.com/beckyjewell/
This website is a great place for high-level tutorials, 4000-word journals, longevity, and step-by-step writeups on art tools, but for everything else, for everything new, Instagram is great.
Playing:
I’m watching a bunch of Death Stranding and made some fanart of the part where Norman Reedus puts on the dreamcatcher necklace. A couple of my friends messaged me to say that Death Stranding reminded them a lot of Tilted Sun, just in a darker sense. I do see the similarities - the main character is named Sam, and there are all kinds of unexplained mysteries and concepts. I was so flattered by these messages because even if Death Stranding is a bit opaque to me, Hideo Kojima is an artist’s artist.
The game started creating a pretty eerie feeling in me since I live in Maryland-shy-of-DC and the scenes about presidentiality and goverment started to feel very close to home. I think this is just part of living somewhere iconic - movies like Independence Day and National Treasure have a new tint to them if DC is your home, it’s like romantic background noise that you’re trying to cut through as you’re stuck in DC traffic or on the metro.
I am not going to lie, I do NOT understand Death Stranding at all, but I am onboard to try to understand it. Maybe understanding isn’t the point, and though sci-fi audiences deeply want to ‘get’ and ‘know’ and be experts of scifi universes, there are some parts of both life and fiction that just won’t make any sense, or, some that will depend on you to piece things together.
I’m not sure when scifi got so explaination-heavy, or when it became an expectation that everything had to be logical or planned. It might even be remake-culture at work, where we are so used to certain universes that, the second that something new comes along in pop culture, we can barely handle it in a critical way.
It’s like when the most gleaming, dazzling minds of my life call artwork and stories ‘property’ or ‘content.’ The part of me that loves what is wild and free just reels. It just reels.
Fitness:
Well yes, December has been pretty glum, weatherwise, in the DMV, so I’ve been hitting the treadmill at the gym. I’m ramping up in confidence and am just running for about an hour in a sportsbra and leggings, pumping the jams on Spotify. What’s good about the gym and jams is it keeps me in a good mood even if the weather is miserable. Occasionally I will run hills in our neighborhood in Maryland just to get some out-of-the-gym chaotic experience.
I’m still working with a personal trainer once per week, which absolutely kicks my ass, but its moving me in a good direction artwise. When I work out midday, I find that I have more energy when I get home and I crank through more artwork than I would have otherwise. I’m not a get-up-early person anymore, so, midday workouts seem to be what I can do in my current life in a way that makes sense.
Until next time, Space Cowboys … let’s DO THIS 2020!! I love you all!!
Related blogs:
Sketchbook Confessional November 2019
Sketchbook Confessional October 2019
Sketchbook Confessional September 2019
Who wrote this?
