After about an hour of hiking and taking the long way around Chautauqua, I was lucky to get to this sunset at a breaking point in the trees right above the park trailhead.
Sketchbook Confessional April 2021
In April, there was a mix of snowy days and warm days in Boulder, so I was lucky to get out and do some plein air painting around Colorado.
I was able to go to The Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs and paint some of the monumental rock formations there. Even though I grew up in Colorado, for some reason, this is one place I’ve never been. It was very accessible and easy to walk around. There are a few places slightly off the trail where I could set up the easel without straying too far or disturbing the local ecologies.
There are a ton of interesting moments to see and paint at Garden of the Gods. It is fun to puzzle over the many layered formations and also paint the terrain around the formations.
It was cool in the morning at the Garden of the Gods, yet the clouds burned off and the weather became quite toasty. I had water but should have packed even more.
In other paint efforts in April, I was able to get out and paint around Boulder too.
This view of Mount Sanitas is so pretty every time I see it. It’s not as iconic from this angle as the flatirons, yet you get to see so much of the valley from North Boulder if you look south. It is very fun to watch the sunset from here and paint the dramatic shadows on Mount Sanitas and the nearby rolling hills.
I also painted right in Chautauqua park! Occasionally I will complete training runs in Chautauqua Park and get benefits from the elevation and hills. I have never painted there before until this April.
I was able to knock out about 6 paintings of the flatirons on this day, some are definitely the kinds of paintings to take back to the studio and work on a bit more. Others were very good, in my opinion, for having been made on the spot. Not every plein air painting is perfect, yet it is always nice if a few of them are.
Lately I’ve been painting with gouache, which has been transformationally easier to do than painting outdoors with oil paint. Oil paint is tough to paint outdoors with because usually you have to have turpentine or makeup wipes to clean brushes. Turpentine is terrible, almost nothing will make turpentine better. That is why using the makeup wipes seems better to me for oil paint.
But that doesn’t matter in these photos since I’m using gouache! Gouache is so nice because it is such a bright paint, and, it dries fast! Painting with gouache is a lot like drawing. It’s also very easy to layer and add different colors on top of one another.
Lessons I learn from plein air painting:
1. Planning - Where does everything go? In what order should I paint which colors? Blue is a stronger color than yellow, so I should probably paint the sky first, and then the middle ground, and finally the foreground.
2. Chaos Management - The wind might come up and throw a bunch of dirt on the canvas. Bugs might get stuck in the paint. Bees are attracted to bright colors so painting can involve a lot of hornet and bee encounters.
3. Communication - What does the painting say? What does it fail to say?
In other art efforts, I sprinted to get some abstract patterns done and uploaded to Society6 and also the POD service running on this website. I laid down quite a few swatches of gouache on yupo paper and uploaded the designs to Society6. Here are some of the swatches:
I took a Saturday and sprinted to see how many designs I could upload in one day. This involved a lot of reformatting and ascertaining the quality of the file sizes. My record for daily design uploads is 12!
Uploading ~12 designs onto ~70 products turned into about 850 unique product listings generated by Society6. The designs can be had on clocks, towels, shower curtains.
It was fun to turn uploading art into a game like this. There is definitely some downtime involved in making a big upload, since I would wait for Clip Studio Paint to make the files ultra-large, a lot of watching-of-loading screens and shuffling files from Dropbox to my computer. It’s fun to listen to podcasts while I am doing the not-art part of art. I hope to make a similar effort in the future where I try to upload as many files as possible in one day.
The funnest part of uploading these abstracts onto products is that I usually have no idea how the product will turn out, and after a couple tunings, iterations, and reuploads, the products look… amazing, like look at these backpacks:
You can find all of these backpacks and other products on my Society6 store here: https://society6.com/beckyjewell/backpacks
My other products on Society6 are still ‘good’ but abstracts are going to be more accessible for everyone.
Reading Watching Playing:
I’m still playing Dungeons and Dragons with some friends online on Zoom. We’re up to something like session 35 after starting a game in July of last year! It’s been a ton of fun to play our campaign.
Arlina the Changeling Bard is my character in our Dnd game. She’s really fun to play and has had some good Vicious Mockery moments. Now that she and the party are level 4, she’s able to deal a bit more damage in battles, where previously she was kind of just a healer, she can now do more like 8-10 damage instead of paltry 3s and 2s.
During the last couple days of April, I was able to get some Warhammer miniatures and build them. Earlier this year in March, I painted a D&D dragon miniature and had a bunch of fun. I never really ‘got’ model painting until I painted that dragon. Painting models kind of looked like a strange hobby to me, it didn’t make any sense, until I actually tried it and loved it! It is quite a lot like coloring, in 3D, and just like a coloring book, you can kind of take it as far as you want it to go. You can go hyper-detailed, or you can diligently follow the suggestions on the box, or, you can kind of go wild, and paint the figurines whatever you want. Technically there is no rule against the Gryph-hounds having rainbow feathers. I think when Robin Williams played he had a bright pink character, which is endlessly sweet to me.
I find building and painting the models to be very relaxing because a lot of the other tasks I do all day are so incredibly heady - looking at big swaths of data, figuring out 40-part problems, bug triaging, ect. Painting feathers on some Gryph-hounds, by comparison, is very relaxing. Plein air painting is relaxing too, yet, there is more puzzling to be done because nothing is done when you look at a blank canvas. In painting a gryph-hound, the gryph-hound is already created for you.
As far as actually playing Warhammer I’m still a few weeks away at least because there are so many figurines to build. Who knows, I might just like to paint the figurines, and that will be the extent to which I take the hobby. We will see!
I’m reading What I Talk About When I Talk about Running by Haruki Murakami. It’s an interesting book, and very easy to read. The other two big running/go hard books I’ve read in the past couple years are Finding Ultra from Rich Roll and Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins. Where Rich Roll and David Goggins go into their upbringings, Murakami’s book is a bit less about his early life, it’s more about running in general. He’s a little grumpy about some topics, but he usually only gets grumpy at himself in terms of running. I’d say the highlight of the book is when he is running a 100k race and he has a couple interesting experiences. I won’t spoil it though.
There are also a couple other running books out there I want to read. I am not sure if many books like this are by women, but I’d like to get a running book by a woman in my reading schedule soon. Maybe that is a book I could write someday.
Fitness:
This month I completed a couple big training runs for my race on May 1!
I was very happy with my low 11s pace on this 18 mile run:
My high 10s pace on this 15 mile run was pretty exciting to me as well:
If you’d like to follow me on Strava, check out my link here: https://www.strava.com/athletes/60020136
In April I was also able to get my first shot of the Pfizer vaccine. This was exciting to me. 2020 was a wild year for me as I moved from Washington DC back to Boulder, Colorado. A lot of the positive changes in my life probably wouldn’t have happened if the pandemic hadn’t struck. I was taking running more seriously in January of 2020, but I probably would have kept drinking and plugging away if it hadn’t been for Coronavirus. With everything else going on in my fitness world, I almost forgot that May 1 is my 11 month no-alcohol sobriety milestone! I quit drinking sometime near the end of May in 2020, so I rounded up a bit and decided June 1 is my formal anniversary.
Even with cutting alcohol and celebrating the freedom and clarity that came with it, I had some major challenges this year and getting my first vaccine installment cleared up a lot of stress and worry for me. Immediately after getting the vaccine, I started to think about my comic, Tilted Sun, once again, as I was driving in my car home from the hospital.
There seems to be a limit to how many things I can mentally think about at one time. Tilted Sun is a big project, and it my guess is it was too complex to manage while trying to stay safe and get some of my basic needs met. As soon as one more worry was removed, I was able to consider a complex project again.
One of my fitness-category art efforts in April has been ‘running’ for Maxim Covergirl 2021. This is a very fun and exciting thing for me to do. I uploaded my favorite swimsuit photos of myself to my profile and am asking my networks to vote. What is super cool is that if a dollar is donated to vote, the dollar goes to Wounded Warriors, which is a super important cause to me.
It was exciting to make the top 15 of my group in the first cutoff on April 29th. As of writing, I am in second place in my group and hope to make the top 10 next.
If I win I am planning on giving the $25,000 prize away to art programs for kids and teens in Leadville. I did some thinking about what was the most important thing I learned in life as a young person in Leadville, and I realized that the most important thing was having environments that encouraged and supported my creativity. This is why I plan on giving the money away to art efforts for young people in my home town.
If you’re reading this blog, thanks for all the support on this project and my other efforts!
The “Sketchbook Confessional” Is a blog that I write each month where I write down all of my accomplishments in that month in terms of my chosen categories of Art, Reading/Watching/Playing, and Fitness. Like a retro meeting on a project, it’s a way for me to observe my accomplishments and progress, or a ‘done’ list rather than a ‘to do’ list. In some months, I meet my goals and succeed, in others, I fall short of what I hoped to do. These blogs help me identify places where I can improve or where I may be spending my time in ways that I can change.
Thanks again for stopping by! Ra, more art!
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