Welcome to April 2020’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.
I had a solid April creatively, and have been focusing on getting better at art all around. To do this, I started asking what I really liked about the art that I like, and piecing together tutorials and watching art documentaries and tutorials as well. I drew a lot of very random moments too.
Since I’m at home under COVID-19 measures, I figured I would just take what I could get creatively - not everything was going to be perfect in April, so I cut loose a bit and just started going after whatever themes struck me, or whatever themes I’d been wanting to tackle for a while.
I also had a ton of fun making these Six Fan Arts by request on a livestream. Drawing while live on camera on Instagram is definitely a challenge, and it’s helped me figure out a lot about creating off-the-cuff, and also public speaking.
Even though it is very hard for me to do, I will watch the full replay of my Instagram live videos to get better at how I speak about art and also watch how I create while I am not creating.
Watching my own Instagram live playbacks is kind of like watching a video of yourself throwing a football or swinging a golf club - outside of myself, I notice things that I can improve or change.
Also, I think people in general are a bit more video-genic than they are photogenic most of the time. Most people seem to look a lot better in videos - I hope I’m included in that category!
In April, I started caring less about cohesion or gridding on Instagram and everything being wrapped up in a bow, and I started posting just about anything and everything instead of sticking with one central idea.
I think this approach helped me get a lot of art done, even if it doesn’t really make a lot of sense or look like it was made by one artist.
Reading:
I’ve been reading Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun and while Kindle reports I am a paltry 16% of the way through, I don’t think I’ve ever read a book so rich with detail. I really don’t know what to make of this book. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever read.
A couple illustrations from this series. Below I illustrated a segment early in the book, where Severian is swimming and gets caught in the roots of blue water flowers.
I also wanted to take a stab at this incredibly strange episode in the book where two men fight with large flowers or flower leaves, and the flowers are also kind of sentient - I am struggling to describe this and thought it would be a fantastic art challenge.
Whenever I run into something like this in fiction, something totally weird and hard to imagine, I like to draw it. I accidentally hit a filter in Clip Studio Paint and ended up with this alternate version of the water-flowers piece.
Writing:
I did a bunch of writing in April as opposed to reading. Now that I don’t spend 80 minutes a day riding the DC Metro, I have converted all of that time into either drawing, livestreaming, or writing.
I wrote these blogs in April:
Art Philosophy and Life:
The importance of Personal Work
Art How Tos:
Color Palettes from Moebius Illustrations
Color Palettes from The Little Mermaid
Before and After: How My Art Changed in School
Even after writing all of these blogs I have a lot of ideas that I need to get on this website. I have phenomenal energy around posting on Instagram, and am starting to bring that same energy to this site.
Playing/Watching:
I’m playing Breath of the Wild, and I’m not sure if I will ever finish it, not because I think it is a bad game, but because I think it is a good game and I never want it to end. So, after I stop my work each day I will turn on Breath of the Wild and run around and cook dishes, and usually not get a lot done.
I watched this mini-documentary with Jean Girard Moebius and grabbed some takeaways about what people liked most about working with him and his art. Mostly, his co-producers liked how fast Moebius was. I was a little surprised nobody asked him about where he gets his ideas - I think his speed was just so impressive that everyone forgot about the other part - his ideas.
I’ve also been watching Portfolio reviews from this fellow on Youtube - it is nice to see his active opinions about art, and, selfishly, it is nice to see other people get critiqued aside from me. I think watching portfolio reviews like this is a good idea if you are someone like me who is working in relative isolation and you aren’t surrounded by other artists every day. (True for me as of COVID and before COVID).
Fitness:
In April, to stay fit, I mowed my lawn a bunch and I also got some planks worked in to my daily schedule, where I spend most of each day at at a computer. Wow, planks have really moved my fitness along - I think I could do 500 crunches and it wouldn’t have as much impact as one 30-second plank.
I’ve been working harder at fitness for about 6 months and it’s been paying off. I’ve always been thin and have been able to pass as fit even without working out too hard, but I haven’t consistently been ‘strong’, so, my past six months of strength development have been an effort to change that.
Something I realized while looking at my website analytics was that almost nobody reads these posts, though they might be the best pieces I write. The most-read posts on this website are my how-to tutorials and product or software reviews like this one.
This makes sense. Nobody is going onto Google and typing in “Deep thoughts about art” — they’re usually typing in “Apple Pencil and Clip Studio Paint Review”.
A lot of people are interested in the ‘How’ of art or the speed of art, but we get lost immediately at the ‘why’ and the thoughts behind it all, but, like with the Moebius documentary I mentioned above - I wish we wouldn’t.
I think the most boring question you could ask someone like Moebius is “What pen do you use?” Tools do matter, but man, I would have loved to know more about what artists were thinking throughout the ages. So, this is why I will keep writing these blogs, even though almost nobody reads them.
Until next time, Ra, more art!
Related blogs:
The importance of Personal Work
Who wrote this?
