A lot of 2020 has reminded me of the searing feeling where you can’t tell if something is hot or cold.
I made the above piece in Clip Studio Paint to memorialize 2020 as a year where I spent most of it pretending I am on a beach somewhere. I think about my trip to the Bahamas earlier this year all the time, and how I can’t wait to go back there and to other islands soon.
Art:
For Christmas day I hiked up a hill near Wonderland Lake in Boulder and painted with gouache on Yupo en plein air. This was tougher than I thought it would be and the paper did fly away a few times before I taped it down. This was one of the few plein air sessions I’ve done where I had truly thought to bring everything I needed. I painted in gouache because I couldn’t find any turpentine to paint in oil, which was probably for the best.
I’ve worked on the next few pages of Tilted Sun and have decided I just need to get them done even if they are not perfect. It’s still very hard for me to work in sequence, I am much, much more adept at cover-like illustrations or singular ideas. Drawing Sam and the Gray Woman over and over are fine, it is just very hard for me. I have an even bigger swooning admiration now for artists like Bill Watterson who seemingly can just fire off consistent Calvins, panel after panel.
So I’ve been doing some low-stakes work on my iPad and even polishing off a couple pieces.
I love putting up photos on Instagram. It was exciting to do a shoot lately with artist Julie Tierney of JMFT Industries at Twin Lakes in Leadville:
Games:
I finally downloaded Hades on my Bill Gates machine and am loving it. There is so much to love, all the details are just brilliant. Character art, environments, voice acting, all of these are good.
At first I kicked myself for not getting Hades on the Nintendo Switch, yet, I love looking at this game on my PC. It is nice to have my eyes being just about 18 inches from a big ol’ screen with all of this glorious art on it. It is so, so sharp. I’m in love.
I also bought the Ace Attorney trilogy for Switch and am enjoying the theatre of gamified law. The sheer amount of crashing noises and random smacking sound effects in this game gives me life. I don’t know why it is so funny, it just is.
Other than those two games I am still loving a zoom D&D campaign I am playing with some fellow artist friends. I have to reiterate that D&D is like some kind of therapy for me. It isn’t like a video game where you can look up answers, it also isn’t like MtG where you are trying to crush everyone or be the best. It’s a perfect game for this particular time. Shoutout to our DM Michael for doing such a good job.
Reading:
I’ve loved the new book, Moment of Lift, by Melinda Gates. It’s out on Kindle right now and will be in paperback and hardback very soon.. A lot of anecdotes from this book can be found in other interviews with Melinda Gates, yet it is nice to see her thoughts in book form and at length. We have an enormously long road to travel with ending gender disparity and misogyny, this book is a step forward.
Whenever I see the world being tough on women, the long-term thought part of my brain has to ask “Why?” What societal benefit is there to selling child brides, telling women they don’t matter, or keeping women out of schools? Of course, the answer is ‘absolutely no benefit’.
It’s an important book to read now, too, as many women are at home with kids and are still working or looking for work in the United States. It’s very hard to concentrate on ideas or get intellectual work done when you are responsible for most chores, childrearing, and have other family members to take care of.
I posted some salient passages in a twitter thread here. https://twitter.com/beckyjewell/status/1343695125239590912
Ultimately, the best that most women in developed countries can hope for is a woke partner. The best that countries can hope for are women leaders in power.
Fitness:
I’ve been running about 12-20 miles a week and have been enjoying a training plan from trainer and triathlete Alex Willis. It’s nice to have a training plan from Alex each day in my email inbox, it takes questions and uncertainty out of my day, because I have a plan.
Strava has been nice and I have made a few new friends on the platform. I try to go for consistency. I do dream of taking some huge runs in the future in places far from Boulder, until then, I stick to running around in the foothills.
Running Chataqua Park this December has been fun. I wear a mask for the most part while running and have liked how it keeps my face warmer than it would be otherwise. It isn’t as heavy as a neck gator either. People are pretty nice here and aren’t creeps, which has been good. The most fearsome thing I see while running is an occasional coyote or people who aren’t wearing masks. The most distracting thing I see while running are Little Free Libraries in nice neighborhoods where the books are all high-level self development books like Strengthsfinder 2.0 or books about coding Python or vegan parenting.
As of Jan 1st 2021, I will be a lucky 7 months in to my no-alcohol life, which has been fantastic. The importance of sobriety for me personally is that I never needed alcohol to be a good artist, and it only ever held me back from being a better athlete. There’s also marketing in alcohol where, much like cigarettes, drinking is posited as an activity that makes you wild and free. This appeals to the values of many artists, but ultimately it’s just marketing. The wildest and most free I have ever been has been in the past 7 months.
Who wrote this:
