Welcome to June 2024’s Sketchbook Confessional! The Sketchbook Confessional is a blog where I recount all the drawings, paintings, and other efforts I made in a month. It’s my “done” list rather than my “to-do” list. The Sketchbook Confessional is a way for me to objectively survey and assess my work in a limited period of time.
June was an exciting month for me because June 22 was LAUGH or the Lafayette Art Underground Hustle, an art fair series installment that took place in a neighborhood in Lafayette, CO. I had a lot of fun and saw some familiar faces, as well as met some new people at LAUGH.
June was a good month for me to make paper art. I made several miniature paper dragon pieces and put them into series or groups as framed pieces. It was fun to do these and several have already sold.
I tried out some new papers and motifs. Some of the paper I made myself, which was satisfying. It’s great to take things from a pulp phase to a completed piece phase.
In June I worked quite a bit with watercolor, making portraits of my toddler. Above is the largest piece of this series. I made probably 6 or 7 watercolor drawings and studies of this same pose where he was sleeping. It continues to be a good challenge to draw him. He truly changes so fast, every month. It reminds me that all of us change a little bit as time goes on, even if we don’t grow as fast as babies or toddlers, we change a bit on the inside.
To work on watercolors and give them my best shot, I added some Sakura Koi watercolor sets to my art backpack. These have been fun and easy to use with my Chromatek water brush pens. Watercolor is tough, certainly, but what I like about it, is that it feels like traveling light compared to oil paint. It’s much easier to carry around watercolor sets and paper than it is to carry around tubes of oil paint, an easel, and canvases.
My new creative medium in June was … journaling, or taking journaling a bit more seriously. I’ve had a Hobonichi Techo each year for about five years now. Sometimes I will keep up with these journals very well, and I will fill out each page about things I did that day, or places I went to. Sometimes I fall behind. What has helped me keep up recently is getting a thermal printer, which has allowed me to print out little photos of things that I did that day, and stick the photo to the appropriate page. It’s been a good way to work on my memory, which was in bad shape last year with all the sleep deprivation I went through being a new mom.
I’ve enjoyed getting into washi tape as well as a journaling medium. It’s a fun way to be expressive in a journal or scrapbook without necessarily drawing everything out. With a thermal printer and washi tape, I have a fast and easy way to express how I felt about any given day.
Reading:
This month I worked on reading a couple books. I’m a few hundred pages in to this Van Gogh biography by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith. It’s fascinating to me. I felt like I knew a lot about Van Gogh after reading his letters, but this biography has much more context and much more information. Since in the letters, Van Gogh writes only to Theo, there’s much more to say and know since there were 6 Van Gogh siblings, and aspects to his story that emerge from other relatives like his uncle, and his mom and dad.
I also read “A Magic Girl Retires” by Park Seolyeon. I enjoyed this book quite a bit.
I definitely needed a shorter, lighter read as opposed to the Van Gogh book so this book fit the bill for that particular task. I won’t spoil anything in “A Magical Girl Retires” but I will say there were awesome illustrations and it was a surprising, fun read. I’m very glad the cover drew me in.
Lastly, this month I started reading “Grit, Guts, and Determination” by Cole Chlouber, a book specifically about the founding of the Leadville Trail 100 race. I was born and raised in Leadville and volunteered at several LT100 races, but I certainly didn’t know the whole history of the race. It’s full of references that will be familiar to any Leadvillian and it will also be exciting to read for anyone who wants to get to know Leadville a bit more.
That’s what I got for this month! Catch you all next month.