Welcome to the Sketchbook Confessional for May 2020!
It’s the future and we live in the time of COVID-19, let’s live heroically, let’s live in style. #jewell2020
May is a special month for me since May 1, 2018 was the launch date of my comic, Tilted Sun! It’s been interesting to look back on this comic and also look forward, but most of all, it’s been important to stay present with it too.
I think if I get too excited about what I have already done, or too nervous about what is to come, creatively and personally, I get trapped in my own kind of helix in my head.
For this reason, small projects and lots of exercise have seemed to help me get through stay-at-home life. I miss my friends and just generally talking to people because everything that everyone has to say (about both art and life) is always so surprising.
I miss telling my friends a joke and having them laugh, or staying out at the bars in DC until 1 AM talking about politics and ideas. I guess what I kind of found out during this whole coronavirus event is that I am actually kind of extroverted - my peers take me out of the helix in my head - and this is invaluable to me.
During COVID-19 and Maryland’s stay at home measures, I’ve been journaling and writing as much as possible to keep track of how I feel, even if it is a couple shorthand notes in my Hobonichi Techo journal, or a scribble on a document in Clip Studio Paint, I’m doing my best to keep on top of my mental states.
Around 2016 I was so sad at the polarization and meanness that I started seeing online, and I began making art that was explicitly about love and romance. I wanted to depict relationships and people that looked happy and safe, because that was the opposite of what I saw online. My studio in Austin, TX in 2016:
If you’re an artist working with themes like this, you’re immediately at huge risk of criticism that tacks it all ‘onto you’ like, “If you’re painting people who are making out, that must mean you either like making out a lot or you’re lacking it.”
I think times of social injustice need an overflow of art about love, trust, and safety, because it is what we are all lacking. Thinking back to the sex-positive 70s, it makes sense that social and racial revolutions went hand in hand with … sex, and being freely-loving.
I think the freely-loving kind of mentality is still a shock to people in 2020. I think the most shocking, punkass thing you can do is love someone, love yourself, love people, or love something relentlessly, ESPECIALLY if the world tells you NOT to. This does scare me a bit, that love is punk. But that’s all that I can think of as true.
More life:
During May 2020, I’ve also enjoyed connecting with my friends and wider audience over Instagram livestreams! The livestreams aren’t always perfect - sometimes the quality is bad, or some random trolls show up, or the signal drops. Yet, they are a fun way for me to get out of my head and into art, and back into chatting with people who I love deeply. Here are some works I did on 1 hour livestreams on Instagram in May:
I also did a couple livestreams featuring gouache on yupo paper, both translucent yupo and opaque yupo.
I made some flower art of flowers that I found around my neighborhood and used them for quasi-motivational poster like posts.
Some of the aesthetic of the “Way too Fucking Much” art that I made came from looking at Dasharz0ne posts, which are pretty funny satires of toughguy-biker aesthetic posts that circulate the internet.
I think if you share motivational messages, that is great, but it is true that some motivationally-aimed messages intrinsically tap into and exploit weakness in people. They can be very ‘this or that’ polarizing, and sometimes a bit judgmental, and sometimes they go after a straw man.
Take motivational messages that say “I am enough” for example. What? Who the fuck told you that you weren’t enough? Fuck that person. Even if that voice is you, and it’s ‘you’ saying that you are not enough, and this is the thing that the motivational message needs to fight … that inner voice needs to go. It’s not going to be fixed by a chipper post on Instagram.
So, the piece above came from thinking that asked: “What if, instead of stating that I am merely enough, I acknowledge I am already overflowing?”
I think this is true of most people, not just over-the-top artists. Our cup runneth over already.
In May, I was able to finish some Toonme work and a couple other fun commissions too.
Reading/Watching/Playing:
I read the second volume of ElfQuest and am in the middle of the third volume. I really like this series. It absolutely turns most comics on their heads, in that sometimes there is violence but that’s not the focus of the series. Overall it’s a series beyond it’s time. I don’t think I’ve seen a more sex-positive comic, or a comic that treats PTSD so well. At least of it’s time. Either way, it’s refreshing to read.
I have only been playing one video game in May: Breath of the Wild. I am not sure if I will finish it or not. In this game I spend a lot of time wandering around looking at butterflies and trees, and cooking food. I keep climbing towers instead of doing shrines, and usually with shrines if I can’t solve the puzzle in a few minutes, I leave and try again later.
Fitness:
My fitness routines lately are pretty lassaiz-faire as far as how ‘hard’ I go, I’m only able to measure time, or, the duration of my jogs in my neighborhood in Maryland-shy-of-DC. I run anywhere from 30-60 minutes, about four times a week. If I find myself helixing, I will run every day and force myself to take an ‘off’ day.
I’m also super into planks, and every day I step away from my computer or ipad and do at least one 30 second plank per day, usually in sets of three each day. I can now do about 40 seconds three times a day and will feel the impact of a 60 second plank for a full day.
I’m glad Geddy photobombed these shots of me doing a full-arm side plank - by the end of the plank you could see a lot of strain in my face!
Thanks for reading and catch you all soon!!
Related blogs:
The importance of Personal Work
More 2016 photos from my studio in Austin, TX
Who wrote this:
