Sketchbook Confessional August 2023

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 -

Sketchbook Confessional May 2023

Welcome to May 2023’s Sketchbook Confessional! The Sketchbook Confessional is a blog where I review all of the art that I made in a month. Rather than a ‘to-do’ list, the Sketchbook Confessional is a ‘done’ list, where I can objectively see what I made in any given month without forgetting and without inflating my artistic output.

By making Sketchbook Confessionals into a habit, I am able to better understand my own patterns, including things that work and things that don’t.

One of my favorite paintings I made in May was this one of my baby.

I did gouache on canvas to make this portrait of my little redhead and his smile. Only his side teeth on his top gums have come in, so he has a very fangy vampire look right now which I wanted to capture forever before his big front teeth come in.

To make this painting and others, in May I picked up a new Himi gouache set of 18 colors. I really like this size. There are a couple smaller sizes and several expanded sets, yet this one I think has a good amount of colors and is an inexpensive price.

Goauche is a good medium for me right now since it’s easy to set up and clean.

Very exciting news that changed my May is that I learned in mid-april that I was accepted into Fan Expo Denver! I started making work for Fan Expo Denver in April and I cranked it up in May. If you want to go to Fan Expo Denver and haven’t booked tickets yet, get tickets here.

Partly thinking about Colorado and my art style, I made this digital piece in May. It rained a lot in Boulder so I found myself staying inside a bit. This was a good chance to work digitally again on my tablet.

I had fun making this. The source for the rocks is from a photo of one of my runs where I was on the back side of the Boulder Flatirons on the Mesa Trail. I love painting this area because of all the layers of the landscape. There’s so many interesting hills that roll into each other and overlap in a fascinating way. I will have prints of this piece very soon.

Back in the non-digital art realm, I did a couple sketches this month at coffee shops of photos I'd taken around Boulder, like the one above. To make these I worked with a single color of Sharpie pen in my Traveler’s Notebook. It was fun to work with limits for these. I’ll be sure to do more.

At the end of May I had an old plexiglass palette of oil paint that had tried. I didn’t want to throw it away, so I painted the back of it to make the shape of a woman.

This was a fun way to use an art supply and turn it into it’s own piece. I shouldn’t have let the oil paint dry, but I ran out of time to use it. It’s funny how even with oil paint, this happens for me. I don’t really forget that I have a palette ready to go, I simply have a lot of other things to do at times.

Reading/Watching/Playing:

I read ten books in May. Many of the books I read are now kindle suggestions, books I find in Little Free Libraries, or Gene Wolfe books.

Put your A$$ where your Heart Wants to Be - Steven Pressfield

I loved what is probably considered the classic Steven Pressfield book “The War of Art” and my kindle showed me “Put your A$$…” on my suggested list so I shrugged and hit “buy now”. I didn’t check to see when it was written before reading it, and I could tell right away that this is a good update to The War of Art, or an addendum that makes sense in 2023. He refers to more recent anecdotes and apps like Instagram and Zoom, so this feels fresh. Though I appreciate remote work and have been a remote working, I also appreciate the message of this book, which is “You have to go there.” The action for us to take from this book could be anything from sitting in our studio to moving to wherever the art we love is happening. Being someone who has moved around quite a bit for various reasons, some of them being love or passions and others being more practical, this made a lot of sense to me.

The book description says it is a ‘tough love’ book but I didn’t feel like it was that way. Maybe to use a few words I just used above, it’s a practical kind of love, but still feels full of the thrill of pursuing the arts.

My Body - Emily Ratajkowski

I’d been wanting to read this book for a while, and since I was looking for the Ben Riggs book below, and was searching for books with R authors, and saw this one. I loved this book and there were a lot of relatable moments in this book for me. I felt less alone in some things after reading this book.

Slaying the Dragon - Ben Riggs

This was a fun book about Dungeons and Dragons and TSR before Wizards of the Coast acquired the company. Which I must have known at some point but also must have forgotten. I believe the author is wildly fair to each person depicted in the book. Nobody is an outrageous villain, and if someone is a perfect angel who does no wrong, it’s a bit of a joke. He has a lot of moments where he covers the company’s varied mistakes, and reels in judgement by constantly checking any 20/20 hindsight bias at the door. This was quite refreshing, otherwise it would seem like an overly reverential book or a mean-spirited one. It took me a few chapters to get used to the writing in this book, but once I did, I loved it. It’s a fun narrative nonfiction style.

The Power of One More and #Maxout - Ed Mylett

Ed Mylett came up on my youtube playlist one day and I really enjoyed what he has to say. The premise of The Power of One More is simple enough, to summarize, if we could all make one more phone call, one more meeting, one more rep, and how that improves life. I responded to this idea fairly well. After reading the Power of One More, I also read #Maxout and thought it had many solid principles. Oftentimes I will read shorter, nonfiction books like The Power of One More and Put your Ass Where your Heart Wants to Be while I’m reading books that seem tough to scale, like most of the Gene Wolfe books. I will read two or three books at a time and finish shorter books before I finish longer books. I seem to both enjoy this and need the variety. The shorter books make me feel less like I’m slogging through one giant thing. It’s fun to have memories about books this way too, sometimes my brain finds ways to relate each book to other books, or I will see similar themes in books, and I really enjoy this.

Multipliers - Elizabeth Wiseman

I found this book in a Little Free Library and had heard the concept of Multipliers through the Ed Mylett book above, and possibly a few other places. It’s a good concept. Like Radical Candor, it’s a book where the title term alone makes enough sense, and the book contains all the nuance, antitheses, and details about the title term. To summarize, the whole point of the book is to try to be a Multiplier, or someone who enhanaces the skills and lives of others, as opposed to being a Diminisher, a person who reduces others. If you can’t be a Multiplier, the best hope is to get near one or work with one. Ultimately, if we’ve ever worked with a person who makes us a better person, that’s a Multiplier. I also liked that the book says that some people are Multipliers and Diminishers throughout their lives and in different environments, so neither condition is permanent.

Along the River that Flows Uphill - Richard Starks and Miriam Murcutt

I found this book in a little free library in Boulder and thought it looked interesting so I gave it a read. The way I figure, I will probably never be able to venture to the place featured in this book, so it would be a fun travel read.

The book is about two travelers who travel up the Orinoco river. There are meetings with natives, giant fish catches, wildlife sightings, and riverboat trips. It all has a bit of danger associated with it, or maybe more than that. Plus this book was more philosophical than I thought it would be, which to me was a nice surprise.

Visual Thinking - Temple Grandin

I regret to say I haven’t read any other Temple Grandin books and this is my first one, but I think it was possibly her most pertinent book for me and many people who suppose they are visual thinkers.

This book surprised me a bit and took me a few moments to adjust to, because one of the main problems in the book for Grandin is algebra. The challenge of algebra, according to Grandin and a slew of research, holds too many brilliant thinkers back in school, and that while we shouldn’t do away with math, we should rethink the cultural valuing of algebra. The main difference between most visual thinkers that are described in this book is I was good at algebra and calculus in school. I didn’t really want to do it, but I was at least okay at it most of the time. I was salutatorian of my class in high school so I must have done okay in it, even if I remember it being a bit painful. One of my memories from calculus was during the last week of my last year of high school, calculus became creative, or I finally saw how one could write their own formulas and figure stuff out.

What’s good is Grandin doesn’t polarize in this book, for Grandin there’s a spectrum of visual thinkers rather than any statements like “you’re either right or left brained” which is realistic to me.

The Fifth Head of Cerberus - Gene Wolfe

I just can’t get enough of Gene Wolfe I guess. I really like the Fifth Head of Cerberus, the second section (Sandwalker, ect) was a lot for me to get through but I raced through the first section. What I love most about Gene Wolfe is how he very slowly reveals details of his worlds to his readers, it isn’t easy to place what time, what planet, or even what kind of people are in his books. It makes second readthroughs better. It feels like knowing a secret. I like shows like Westworld and books like the Fifth Season for similar reasons though each isn’t the same dynamic as Gene Wolfe books, there are similar “ohh” moments.

Nightside the Long Sun - Gene Wolfe

I have a volume of The Litany of the Long Sun and couldn’t put it down at the end of May. This book has everything and is way friendlier than Book of the New Sun to me. I am glad I read Book of the New Sun first, this book is like dessert afterwards even though it’s also very long. The first book of Litany is Nightside the Long Sun and I was able to finish it. I won’t spoil too much of this other than to say it reminds me of Cowboy Bebop, but Spike is a priest-type character. There are robots, heists, enlightenments, gods, drugs, brothels, talking animals, possessions, exorcisms, tavern contacts. I love this book. I’m already on to the next book in Litany and am enjoying it quite a bit.

Now Playing: Tears of the Kingdom

I was excited to play the new Zelda game, even though living in Colorado is a lot like living in Skyrim or a Zelda game. I almost never buy games opening week unless it’s a Pokemon game, mostly because I either miss opening week or am thinking about other stuff, but I bought the game when it came out and I enjoyed playing it. I think the details of the natural world in the game are charming and maybe even more developed than in BOTW.

I haven’t had a lot of time to play this game but I’ve liked what I’ve played so far. What I do with videogames is I play them if I’ve done everything else I’ve wanted to do on a day. If I’ve hit my running goals and reading/art tasks, plus of course all my default mom duties, I will play TOTK for 20 minutes or so. The other game I really like on switch is Octopath Traveler, the first one, and maybe someday I will get the second one.

Running:

In May I was able to do a few big run expeditions. I was able to get some decent elevation-gain heavy runs in and distance as well. In the middle of May some smoke and haze rolled in from Canadian fires, and I got some sort of non-flu, non-covid cold, so I stopped running for about ten days. I cranked my indoor air filter to the max and stayed inside. Luckily by the end of May, I was back at it.

All in all a solid May, catch you next time!