In February I continued a series of oil paintings of Mt. Elbert near Leadville and also lupine flowers. I will keep painting these as time goes on.
I also tried something new this month and I wasn’t sure if it would work. In the first week of February, I painted a D&D mini of a dragon using the oil paints that I usually keep in my studio.
A couple of quick google searches revealed that yes, oil paint would be all right for these minis. Turns out oil paint is almost preferred, as long as it is thin.
Overall, painting the dragon mini was really fun and relaxing. It felt a lot like coloring in a coloring book. All of the hard parts of the artwork are already solved if you paint on a pre-built mini.
I couldn’t help but thinking that the dragon kind of looked like it was very happy and smiling, so I made a few instagram stories where the dragon was singing.
I ended up liking this so much that I bought another dragon to paint.
I sort of bought the dragon on a whim. I went into a game shop in Boulder and was so bummed about how empty everything seemed. The game shop, which would normally be full of people playing Magic and tabletop stuff was just empty and dark. I had to buy … something … so the dragon was what I picked out.
In other Dnd and ABBA related art realms, I drew a picture of myself, my Elder Scrolls Online character Averle, and my DnD character Arlina having gal time together with Geddy the Poodle.
I had an active and busy mid-February so it was fun to unwind with this silly just-for-fun drawing.
In a way, I do spend a lot of time with Averle and Arlina. I realize that this is sort of like looking at a grown adult who has imaginary friends, yet they are also extensions of myself. It’s fun to play Arlina because she can change into any kind of character, however, for my next Dnd character, I want to try to vastly branch out and play a character who is much different from me IRL, maybe an orc or tiefling one of the new 5e nonhuman characters.
Reading Watching Playing:
I’ve been very into Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. I started reading this book in April of 2020, and it gets more and more interesting with every page.
There are so many moments in this book that would be fun and challenging to draw. I’ve made a list of things I want to draw from the book
Severian and the Star Men
Severian and the Avern
Severian and Dorcas in The Green Room
I mapped out Severian and the Star Men below, haven’t gotten much further and I sort of want to model this one out or pose to get it right.
Fitness
In February I got some nice training in at Leadville, CO with trainer Alex Willis. I did a couple miles running around Harrison Avenue in Leadville, and a few miles of skiing at Mt. Massive Golf Course. Getting up to Leadville from Boulder always seems to take a lot of energy from me. Even though I was born in Leadville and grew up there, it is still difficult to go from 5000 feet to 10000 feet and exercise a lot. This might go to show you that elevation is an incredible challenge no matter who you are.
I was able to knock out a couple big runs in February, like a 9 mile and a 10 mile. I hit my best efforts on a 10 mile and 15k. The scariest thing about the 10 mile run is that it goes … relatively fast. Mentally, it doesn’t seem like a drag at all, I sort of go into a mental state where I am not experiencing any stress while running, I seem to be somewhere else. Here are some results from Strava:
I also became “The Legend of Wonderland Lake” on Strava, which sounds pretty badass, haha!
It’s nice to have all of these stats and times in Strava and to have had them for a while. I can look back at my times from running in DC/MD/VA and compare notes. In the DMV I was running 12-14 min miles almost every mile. In Colorado, it looks like I am a lot faster in Colorado, about two minutes per mile faster on average, with 11:30 min miles being around my average. Given that Boulder is a lot higher in elevation than DC, that’s pretty good.
I don’t see myself as very fast, but I am able to endure and persist through just about anything. At the end of 10 miles, I feel like I could go 10 more.
In other fitness news, things are going well with sobriety. It is a lot easier to hit my goals with running and fitness by having alcohol just be automatically out of the picture. I’m still very hooked on caffiene - this might be something I work on kicking next, but at this time I don’t see any health benefit to doing so on the same level as kicking alcohol, so I’ll probably be sipping coffee for a while.
Thanks for reading!! xoxo
Who wrote this:
I’m a painter, I make comics, and sometimes I do computer stuff!
- Becky Jewell