Welcome to the Sketchbook Confessional for June and for the first half of July!
It’s the future and we live in the time of COVID-19, let’s live heroically, let’s live in style. #jewell2020
The sketchbook confessional is a ritualistic art process blog where I go into ALL of what I am making, thinking about, reading, and doing fitness-wise during a specific month - only, this month I didn’t get June finished, so I am blogging about June and half of July!
Making art:
Geddy the Poodle Gif!
I’ve been working on learning how to make animated gifs and have uploaded a few to Giphy! Thinking and creating in terms of animation has helped me create better artwork over all. It’s been fun to think about how things ‘move’ and how weight and direction affects art.
I’d recommend trying animation in Clip Studio Paint or creating layer-based animated gifs in Procreate if you never have - I learned a lot from this and have found that gifs are a great way to bring life to my static drawings and designs.
The GIF I am proudest of is the one at the top of this blog, I made about 6 or 7 four-frame gifs before drawing and animating an entire scene. Here is my process for the island gif
Drawn in Clip Studio Paint
Exported as a layered PSD File
Imported into Procreate
I watched a ton of great youtubes on how to animate via layers in Procreate. Someday I’ll make one too when I get a bit more time!
In addition to GIFs, I made some Colorado-based art in the form of a Topo Map of Leadville, Colorado. I also drew a patch of Columbine and added rainbow gradients in honor of both Colorado and Pride Month.
Both pieces are available as prints and more on my shop on Society6! Check them out here:
https://society6.com/beckyjewell
I worked a bit on Tilted Sun in June and am planning on finishing the first 100+ pages and releasing a print version. Keep an eye out for a future Kickstarter and an opportunity to support the print version of Tilted Sun!
For now, read the whole comic online at:
Start at Page 1 here:
https://www.tiltedsun.com/comic-1/2018/5/5/page-1
Reading:
I got a new Kindle Paperwhite and am cruising through books almost as fast as I used to when I rode the D.C. Metro each day. Here is what I am reading:
Call Sign Chaos - General Jim Mattis
This is a great read about leadership in general, and the leadership that goes into being a Marine and a Marine leader.
My favorite part in the book is a moment where Mattis goes into the importance and value of reading, where he states that if you don’t read hundreds of books, you’re probably going to fail. Well … he sort of puts it like if you don’t read or try to read and expand yourself, you’re kind of a moron. It’s nice to hear this from a Marine, and even nicer to hear it from one of the most loved and respected generals of all time.
Too Much and Never Enough - Mary Trump
This book is an empathetic look into the family that created Donald Trump. I think a lot of bravery went into this book. I’d had the book purchased for a week before it was released - it was recommended in my Kindle library after I read Call Sign Chaos by General Mattis.
This book is a tough read and I have to intersperse it with happier books to get through it.
Autism in Heels - Jennifer Cook
This book is a GREAT read for anyone who has an autistic family member, friend, coworker, or is autistic themselves. It is also a GOOD read for anyone. Even if you feel you have never met a person who is on the spectrum, you probably have, if you’re over 12 years old.
A ton of stereotypes get blown away by this author’s kind and funny narrative style, especially because she goes into such depth on the experience of being an autistic girl and woman.
The depth is important because most diagnoses and understandings of autism are built around how autistic boys and men navigate the world, where the diagnostic range needs to catch up with how autism is experienced by girls and women.
“Autism in Heels” is a perfect title to describe some of the hiding, mirroring, and acting that autistic women do in order to fit in - something that happens all too commonly since autistic women tend to fly under the radar, even to themselves. The author wasn’t diagnosed until she was in her 30s.
Please read this book.
Memoirs and Misinformation - Jim Carrey and Dana Vaschon
I love Jim Carrey and have been watching him in 2020 even more fervently than I watched Ace Ventura ever since he started painting and drawing. I also follow him closely on Twitter. I was excited to see this book being released and picked it up on the first couple days it was out.
This book is like Jim Carrey himself - it’s funny, wildly expressive, borderline absurd. I like the book a lot because it knows it is borderline absurd and, like Hollywood itself, sometimes it doesn’t try too hard to make things seem real. There’s a part where Jim Carrey and Charlie Kaufman and Anthony Hopkins get into a fight while eating Chinese food and, long story short, this anecdote almost killed me, it was so funny.
I think you might need to have a supermassive sense of humor for this book - otherwise it might seem too sad, but that’s also kind of what I think about life itself.
Cradle: Foundation - Volume 1 - Will Wright
I started reading the Cradle series in March and picked them up again in June after falling off my book game for a couple months during COVID.
I LOVE these books, they are so fun. There are spirits, warring families, mystical paths of study and skill, monsters, wealthy rulers, impossible goddesses, dragonbone cities… I’m all about it. The narration and plot reads a bit like a video game - the fantasy world has a very clear hierarchy of superpowers, and items and actions that help characters achieve those powers. The main character’s inventiveness is almost as charming as the second main character’s skill and power, and there’s a lot of deeper moments about invention vs. power, or the unstoppable teaming of invention + power.
Playing:
I’ve picked up a D&D campaign on Discord/zoom with some friends from Twitter and new friends. It’s been so fun to play D&D and have a couple hours each week where I don’t think about work, art commissions, or exercise. In a way it’s my main social time aside from zoom happy hours at my company and zoom family calls.
On one of those family calls, I explained a bit of D&D to my mom, who remembered kids in the 80s playing it when she taught high school English. It’s interesting, but not surprising, how storytelling and team efforts are attractive game concepts.
While explaining D&D to my mom, I realized that D&D, to me, is ultimately a bit more positive than Magic the Gathering - I used to feel bad about whipping people at Magic, and would also feel bad about getting whipped.
There are clear winners and losers in Magic, and Magic is a bit more about antagonizing others. On the other side of the fantasy game spectrum, D&D is about group survival - rather than beating your friends, you’re working together with them. The DM is not an antagonist (usually) either. Ultimately, I can see why D&D has had a resurgence and why it is sticking around. It’s a game about team/group success rather than competition.
Fitness:
Art and fitness for me are interlinked, both inform and balance each other. If I am stuck on an art idea or overly stressed, I just go for a run for a while and usually have my art issue worked out, and my stress melts away.
The myths that artists are physically weak, or that you can’t be both a jock and an artist, are myths that just sort of need to go away.
I think we are stuck with the myth of artist-as-unwell because artists would actually talk about their ailments, as opposed to being silent. So we have rich information about when van Gogh was in an asylum, but we forgot about the letter where he writes his brother about how his doctor mistook him for an iron worker. Same thing for artists like Frida Kahlo - artists themselves aren’t more sickly, they are sick at the same rate of everyone else, and they just make a painting about it.
Sometimes, the more stress I have, the more I run - because running helps me stay away from the computer and away from getting TOO invested in my phone, it helps me mentally reset.
June and July so far have been big months for me for running and biking. I have completed two ‘big’ runs at 10 miles and 10.5 miles in the past couple weeks - these runs are big for me right now, in the future they may be more standard. A year from now I might be reading this blog and fitting in 20 mile training runs on a Saturday. We will see!
I am training for marathons, and eventually, I want to do 50 mile ultra race. Who knows what racing will really look like in the future? I might just do a marathon and capture it on Training Peaks/Strava, and that will be good enough.
In other fitness news, I stopped drinking alcohol around the end of May, so I am calling my Soberversary June 1st. I feel… a lot better without alcohol. It was a good time for me to quit, because with stay-at-home orders, drinking just didn’t seem like something that needed to happen.
Now that hanging out doesn’t really happen, and therefore social anxiety doesn’t happen, I quit drinking and I feel like I am just thriving, soaring mentally and physically beyond my own wildest dreams.
Where I used to write a couple sentences, I now write a couple paragraphs. I identify problems sooner and come up with solutions faster.
I was thinking earlier this month that the last time I felt this sharp, this intelligent, was in high school when I was working with calculus and studying particle physics. I also wrote long science fiction fantasy books when I was in high school - sounds insane, but I remember looking at the word count in Microsoft Word and there’d be something like 180,000 words there.
So, I am off my own personal chain now, it seems. The dollars I save from not buying beer are one thing, but the time I save from not drinking is invaluable. I can’t put a dollar amount on that.
Ra, more art! xoxo catch you next time!
Related Blogs:
The importance of Personal Work
Sketchbook Confessional May 2020
Who wrote this:
