Staying Positive As a Creative Person During COVID-19

I have a hashtag that I love to use on Instagram, called #AlwaysBeCreating - or ABC.

#AlwaysBeCreating makes me happy whenever I use it, because it is a bit of a joke about “Always Be Closing”, possibly the best sales mantra of all time (and also the most cliche).

Sales and Creating Art aren’t always different, however the sales mentality and the art mentality are such an odd couple that .. Always Be Closing and Always Be Creating will always put me in a good mood.

I love the Always Be Closing moment of Glengarry Glen Ross so much, that I even make joke art about it from time to time, like in this mini painting of an office space that has a snack table with a bucket of art that says “Art Is For Closers.”

So, that’s how I got onboard with:

#AlwaysBeCreating!

Yet, there are definitely some days - especially during COVID-19 stuff - where I don’t feel like I am always creating. I start to get kind of stressed and worried “Am I doing enough?”

Taken too literally, “Always Be Creating” can’t be a healthy mentality, because it seems to pressurize. Artists are people too, right, what about eating and sleeping, and playing Zelda? What if by Always Creating, we get burnt out and exhausted?

So, I think Always Be Creating should be taken with the salt of more generous, kindhearted subtexts.

Generous, meaning:

• If you’re eating a bowl of soup and the soup makes you think about drawing a ramen shop scene - that’s creating.

• If you’re stuck in traffic and the traffic makes you think of an idea for a children’s book series - that’s creating.

• If you’re drawing on an ipad or on paper or on a napkin - that’s creating.

• If you schedule out your Instagram posts so that you can create later - that’s creating.

• If you’re chatting with friends in slack or on twitter about your ideas - that’s creating.

• If you’re organizing your home so that you can create more efficiently - that’s creating.

One of the best comics ideas I ever had came to me while I was driving cross-country from Texas to Maryland, and I was alone in a car bored out of my mind. Though I wasn’t in front of my art supplies, at my computer, or in the studio, I was still creating.

So, I think during COVID-19, it would benefit all of us artists to take the generous side of #AlwaysBeCreating even a bit further:

Even though we are all at home and staying away from people we might adore, even though cons are cancelled and zooms wax and wane between being cool and getting old, we’re still being as creative as we can. Nobody expects a global pandemic.

If you’re doing even the smallest thing for your health and well-being, that’s creating.

Always Be Creating! Until next time!!

Related Blogs:

The importance of Personal Work 

Art Therapy is Too Late 

In Praise of Low-Stakes Art  

Print Shop

Who wrote this:

I’m a painter, I make comics, and sometimes I do computer stuff!

- Becky Jewell

Sketchbook Confessional: April 2020

Welcome to April 2020’s Sketchbook Confessional, where I get all of the art out of my system.

The Sketchbook Confessional is a place where I post and describe all of the art that I did in one month’s time, an effort to reel in the chaos of art and objectively know what I did and did not do.

I had a solid April creatively, and have been focusing on getting better at art all around. To do this, I started asking what I really liked about the art that I like, and piecing together tutorials and watching art documentaries and tutorials as well. I drew a lot of very random moments too.

Since I’m at home under COVID-19 measures, I figured I would just take what I could get creatively - not everything was going to be perfect in April, so I cut loose a bit and just started going after whatever themes struck me, or whatever themes I’d been wanting to tackle for a while.

I also had a ton of fun making these Six Fan Arts by request on a livestream. Drawing while live on camera on Instagram is definitely a challenge, and it’s helped me figure out a lot about creating off-the-cuff, and also public speaking.

Even though it is very hard for me to do, I will watch the full replay of my Instagram live videos to get better at how I speak about art and also watch how I create while I am not creating.

Watching my own Instagram live playbacks is kind of like watching a video of yourself throwing a football or swinging a golf club - outside of myself, I notice things that I can improve or change.

Also, I think people in general are a bit more video-genic than they are photogenic most of the time. Most people seem to look a lot better in videos - I hope I’m included in that category!

In April, I started caring less about cohesion or gridding on Instagram and everything being wrapped up in a bow, and I started posting just about anything and everything instead of sticking with one central idea.

I think this approach helped me get a lot of art done, even if it doesn’t really make a lot of sense or look like it was made by one artist.

Reading:

I’ve been reading Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun and while Kindle reports I am a paltry 16% of the way through, I don’t think I’ve ever read a book so rich with detail. I really don’t know what to make of this book. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever read.

A couple illustrations from this series. Below I illustrated a segment early in the book, where Severian is swimming and gets caught in the roots of blue water flowers.

I also wanted to take a stab at this incredibly strange episode in the book where two men fight with large flowers or flower leaves, and the flowers are also kind of sentient - I am struggling to describe this and thought it would be a fantastic art challenge.

Whenever I run into something like this in fiction, something totally weird and hard to imagine, I like to draw it. I accidentally hit a filter in Clip Studio Paint and ended up with this alternate version of the water-flowers piece.

Writing:

I did a bunch of writing in April as opposed to reading. Now that I don’t spend 80 minutes a day riding the DC Metro, I have converted all of that time into either drawing, livestreaming, or writing.

I wrote these blogs in April:

Art Philosophy and Life: 

The importance of Personal Work 

Art Therapy is Too Late 

In Praise of Low-Stakes Art  

Getting over Judgement in Art  

When Art Isn’t Therapy

Art How Tos:

Color Palettes from Moebius Illustrations 

Color Palettes from The Little Mermaid

Fan Art Friday!  

Before and After: How My Art Changed in School 

Even after writing all of these blogs I have a lot of ideas that I need to get on this website. I have phenomenal energy around posting on Instagram, and am starting to bring that same energy to this site.

Playing/Watching:

I’m playing Breath of the Wild, and I’m not sure if I will ever finish it, not because I think it is a bad game, but because I think it is a good game and I never want it to end. So, after I stop my work each day I will turn on Breath of the Wild and run around and cook dishes, and usually not get a lot done.

I watched this mini-documentary with Jean Girard Moebius and grabbed some takeaways about what people liked most about working with him and his art. Mostly, his co-producers liked how fast Moebius was. I was a little surprised nobody asked him about where he gets his ideas - I think his speed was just so impressive that everyone forgot about the other part - his ideas.

I’ve also been watching Portfolio reviews from this fellow on Youtube - it is nice to see his active opinions about art, and, selfishly, it is nice to see other people get critiqued aside from me. I think watching portfolio reviews like this is a good idea if you are someone like me who is working in relative isolation and you aren’t surrounded by other artists every day. (True for me as of COVID and before COVID).

Fitness:

In April, to stay fit, I mowed my lawn a bunch and I also got some planks worked in to my daily schedule, where I spend most of each day at at a computer. Wow, planks have really moved my fitness along - I think I could do 500 crunches and it wouldn’t have as much impact as one 30-second plank.

I’ve been working harder at fitness for about 6 months and it’s been paying off. I’ve always been thin and have been able to pass as fit even without working out too hard, but I haven’t consistently been ‘strong’, so, my past six months of strength development have been an effort to change that.

Something I realized while looking at my website analytics was that almost nobody reads these posts, though they might be the best pieces I write. The most-read posts on this website are my how-to tutorials and product or software reviews like this one.

This makes sense. Nobody is going onto Google and typing in “Deep thoughts about art” — they’re usually typing in “Apple Pencil and Clip Studio Paint Review”.

A lot of people are interested in the ‘How’ of art or the speed of art, but we get lost immediately at the ‘why’ and the thoughts behind it all, but, like with the Moebius documentary I mentioned above - I wish we wouldn’t.

I think the most boring question you could ask someone like Moebius is “What pen do you use?” Tools do matter, but man, I would have loved to know more about what artists were thinking throughout the ages. So, this is why I will keep writing these blogs, even though almost nobody reads them.

Until next time, Ra, more art!

Related blogs:

The importance of Personal Work 

Art Therapy is Too Late 

In Praise of Low-Stakes Art  

Print Shop

Who wrote this?

I’m a painter, I make comics, and sometimes I do computer stuff!

- Becky Jewell

Daily Post: April 7 2020: In Praise of Low-Stakes Art and Crafts - Especially During COVID-19 measures

Sometimes, I make art about what I think are difficult and serious subjects, like love and relationships and the nature of reality.

Extremely weird, diffusive art that I’ve made

And sometimes, I make Perler bead art.

Most of the time, art involves our very best work and talents - critical thinking combined with communication and a sense of style. Art takes all of this and more.

Sometimes art doesn’t require any of this. That’s the cool thing about art.

Balancing between high-stakes, high-demand art and low-stakes art has become, well, a bit of an art for me in my creative life.

A narrative scifi epic of 100+ pages, Tilted Sun is the result of me writing, drawing, inking, lettering and planning a comic. It’s been a year-over-year project. Comics are usually made by 8 people for a reason!

When you take a step back, a lot went into Tilted Sun and still goes into it each day when I work on my art.

I’ve also done paintings like this one, a 30 foot tall acrylic which hung in Norlin Library at CU Boulder, seen by thousands of people per day.

The other thing about painting is … it’s hard. Even a tiny painting is hard to do sometimes.

To supplement my current work in comics (hardmode) and painting (death hard mode), My recent low-stakes side project is resin casting.

All that I have to do with resin is mix it up, find something to embed in it, and pour the resin and the thing into little trinket moulds.

Now, that said, resin casting isn’t always low stakes - if you want, it can be a huge undertaking. Entire tables can be coated in hundreds of dollars of resin. It’s also possible to encase musical instruments in resin - such as guitars - where if the pour is unideal, the stakes at hand are both the cost and time of the resin pour, and the cost of the instrument. … Yikes …

Anything, any kind of art can be extremely serious if you want it to be.

Yet for me, right now, resin is my little pet project where I make trinkets that nobody, not even me, is worried about.

No clients are wringing their hands over the quality or artistic merit of my extremely average resin casts. If the resin casts turn out wonky, I lose, at most, fifteen bucks and a couple minutes.

It’s great to go after big things in art - it is also incredibly scary and full of failure and twists and turns. So, sometimes, I need to make a smaller thing to have a sense of completion, however small, in the midst of a longer journey.

Low stakes art has been especially helpful for me during COVID-19 measures, where I am staying in or near my house 95% of the time. Small pieces of art help me feel like I am making - at least- something, even though I can’t go out and meet my friends or move my art forward in other ways.

Until next time!

Related blogs:

Why Art Seems to Predict the Future

Tilted Sun - Sci Fi Fantasy Comic

Sketchbook Confessional - March 2020

Who wrote this:

I’m a painter, I make comics, and sometimes I do computer stuff!

- Becky Jewell