In August it was very toasty in Boulder, I ended up staying inside a bit more often than not and making iPad drawings.
For the drawing below I thought about how I’m often shopping with my baby, and it feels like sometimes I am buying a universe of things for him to eat, wear, and play with. In a way, the things will become his universe.
I also did a quick sketch portrait of my baby as well. He grows so much every day. I try to soak in every moment.
For this drawing, at first I was thinking about a head that was an island of some kind, then I turned it into a series of layers of fluid.
This digital piece ended up printing well too!
I thought a bit about illustrating moments from games that I hadn’t seen done before. This one where Celes goes fishing came out of that effort. I wanted to do a strange angle and also make the place look idyllic, even though it’s effectively the end of the world.
She’s a weird character, maybe every character in FF6 is weird. At the beginning of the story, she’s working for the other side. She joins up with the resistance force, then stars in an opera? I guess. Anyways I forgot how sad the fishing moment was, I forgot that after fishing for the old man, Celes gives up all hope. Only after that does she see the bandana, and has hope again. What I think is significant though is that Celes can still fish, while the old man cannot.
In August I had a few hours on a couple days to hike, run, or draw while some family looked after my baby. It was fun. I ended up making a few drawings of things I had seen around Boulder.
With these drawings, I have some extreme limits in play. I have limited time to work on them, and I only use ink mediums for them. This, I think, gives them a kind of energy that can be hard to replicate without the limiting factors at play. I think if I had 8 hours instead of 20 minutes to draw a rabbit, I probably couldn’t make a better one, or one that I was happier with. For these, it continues to be fun to draw with the Kuretake double-sided ink brush pen. The above drawing of a rabbit was made with a Faber-Castell pen though.
Another digital piece I worked on in August is what I am calling the floating village. It was drawn using Clip Studio Paint models.
I had a cold at the end of August, so, both me and Baby Jewell were inside quite a bit. I worked on this piece for something like 5 days. Since I worked on it for so long, I decided to animate it, taking 2 more days to complete about 6 frames of art for a full second of unlooped animation.
The animated island village took me most of a weekend between trips to the store and other errands. I had fun doing this and learned a lot about animation, namely, animating a wheel from a 45 degree angle, and finding other ways to make the animation interesting.
The animation had to be compressed a bit for it to be uploaded to this blog but here is the static image, much crisper.
Also here is a link to a higher-res animation. https://www.instagram.com/p/Cwf_KpdA73-/
To back up a bit, at the beginning of August I was a part of North Boulder’s First Friday, which was very fun. Thanks to everyone who stopped by!
Reading:
Steinbeck’s Letters
In August I dove into Steinbeck’s letters more than any other book. It’s interesting to read about the problems he has, that he expresses to his friends, publishers, lawyers, and his wives/girlfriends. In a way, they’re like Marcus Aurelius’ writings, not in such a philosophical note-to-self way, but in the way that Steinbeck could not have predicted at all that they would someday be printed as a collection, to be read by potentially millions of people. That said, he writes in a way that isn’t embarrassing to himself, he has a noble and direct demeanor privately and publicly. It doesn’t seem like the editors had any trouble finding wonderful letters by Steinbeck because there are hundreds of them, and hundreds of pages to read. By ‘wonderful’ I mean well-written, clear, and very descriptive about what he is up to. On the back of this book, there’s a quote that says this is arguably his best work. I’d have to agree, though I DNF’ed Grapes of Wrath, maybe it’s too sad, and really have only finished the delightful Travels With Charlie, because, poodle solidarity. I guess you could say that what I like most about Steinbeck is his nonfiction, even though so much of his fiction was based on his environments and realities that were very close to him. His life is very interesting to me, even though he wrote about the lives of others in his fiction, I think his life is the most interesting of what I’ve read of his.
The Book of Long Sun - Gene Wolfe
I love this book so much. It’s less brutal than New Sun, so there’s much more to love, in my opinion. There are parts of BOTNS that are quite hard to read, reading BOTNS, every time I thought I was over the worst of it, Severian sees or does something terrible again. But I did like Urth of The New Sun. Anyways the Long Sun series is like New Sun but much happier or lighter. I guess you could say my take is that BOTNS is like Game of Thrones and Long Sun is like Wheel of Time. Long Sun is just a smidge more comfortable, and still a fantastic fantasy … thriller? There’s still danger and adventure, but just a smidge less brutality.
The Aeneid - Virgil - Sarah Ruden Translation
The introduction I liked a lot, and it revealed a few things I never knew about The Aeneid, most of which is that it’s unfinished. Maybe everyone knew that, but I didn’t. The Aeneid now goes into my brain category of unfinished epics, a space also occupied by the Faerie Qveene.
The Aeneid feels like an interesting turn, it’s like a sequel abut the other side. Virgil knows this at several points, and through Aphrodite, he asks Aeneas to not hate the wars of the world, but to hate the gods who make the wars. Virgil and the gods alike know that ultimately the Trojan war leads to the founding of Rome, so none of it can be truly bad, but of course this is not how it looks to Aeneas, who loses most if not all of his friends to war.
When I think about Virgil I can’t help but think about how Virgil is Dante’s guide in the Inferno. It’s really funny in many ways. It would be a bit like me writing a book and saying I wanted Dante to be my guide, but that’s probably not old enough. Virgil lived about 1400 years before Dante, so maybe it would be like wanting King Arthur to be my hellguide. In a weird way the Inferno like any tv show or movie where someone meets their hero from the past, like Abraham Lincoln, or Shakespeare. This too is a bit like who Aeneas was to Virgil, a heroic person from long ago.
Gustav Klimt: The Complete Paintings - Tobias G. Natter
This book had a lot of wonderful writing and background on Klimt in addition to pictures of his paintings. I learned some interesting things about Klimt that I never knew, that he had a brother who was also an artist. He was also loved and sort of hated in his own time, as the writer says, Klimt belonged to modernity and tradition at the same time, and this gave critics enough to be ‘divided’ about. I bought this book for the images but ended up loving the writing. It does take some flipping back and forth to get the full effect or to see which paintings the author is referring to, but worth it.
Running:
In August I decided to take it easy a bit on running still, though I finished two runs on a trip to Leadville, which was no easy task.
Catch you next time -
