Sketchbook Confessional June 2023

Welcome to June 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.

June was a month where I did utilize my sketchbook a bit more than not. I’ve been very into the Traveler’s Notebook, which is a leatherbound journal that has refillable pages to be filled out.

With my baby, it’s a little hard for me to travel, because I don’t want to put myself, my baby, and other people through air travel involving lots of crying. I had ear infections when I was a kid and I still remember the pressurization in my ears when I flew as a young girl, and that being painful. But at least I could pop my ears, I guess babies can’t exactly do that. Anyways! I’m living my ideas of travel through my Traveler’s Notebook, and I put together some scraps from my 2019 Tokyo trip (below). It’s been a fun way to look back on the trip, though I hope to have more trips to look forward to in the future.

Since June was an event-heavy month and very planning heavy, I wrote shorter blogs in June covering all of my creative things I was up to.

Making a Prompt Jar for Creativity

Tokyo 2019 ink drawings

Leadville Harperrose Studios Expansion!

Art life and Mom Life

Painting on Tile in oil and gouache

Traveler’s Notebook Pages from my 2019 Japan Trip

Kuretake Double Sided Brush Pen No. 55

Chromatek Water Brush Pens

Denver Fan Expo

Denver Fan Expo was June 30th-July 2, and it was awesome for the first two days, as of this blog’s writing there is still one more day to go! It was fun to get everything together for this expo. Most of June was all about ordering display items, prints, and stocking up on things for the con.

I had been to Denver Fan Expo as a fan before but not as an artist. It was wonderful to meet everyone who stopped by!

Now reading:

Lake of the Long Sun - Gene Wolfe

This is my favorite Gene Wolfe book yet. The second book in the long sun tetrology, there are secrets and memories of other Gene Wolfe books that appear in this one that make it quite rewarding. It’s also quite an adventure. There are many sci fi concepts and characters to enjoy and the writing is, as always, unparalleled. I finished Lake of the Long Sun in June and started the next book in this series.

Deep Work - Cal Newport

I’d read the similarly titled David Lynch book and thought I would give this one a try. The book opens with anecdotes about how writers and thinkers like Carl Jung accomplished their best work in isolated states. The book tackles the trap of visible busyness, and also internet-centrism. Since it was written in 2016, there’s no way it could have predicted 2020’s pandemic crisis and the mental health and connectivity issues that persisted throughout. Physical isolation became more of a norm for more of us than anyone could have expected, and I think what we found out in 2020 is that not everyone is meant to be isolated. Maybe creatives like me can’t wait for a few hours alone, but many, many people, including me, aren’t built for weeks and months of being alone in a tower like Jung was.

At one point the author does admit that people in roles involving people, like sales, probably perform much better when hyperconnected. The initial idea of ‘Deep Work’ might be limited to people who run databases, do computer programming, or write academic articles or fiction books, but I think it can be extended to practices that concern me, like art.

Building a Second Brain - Tiago Forte

Deep Work seems to suggest that electronics are the gateway drug to multitasking, the opposite of Deep Work. Building a Second Brain is more encouraging towards utilizing a computer to take notes.

I like both. I keep hobonichi techo day planners and also a Traveler’s Notebook for drawings. I think this blog is my Second Brain type organization system.

The thoughts in these books are important to me as I navigate life as an artist and a mom. The way I take time is totally different now that I have a baby and I am making every effort to stay on top of things.

Running:

I finished The Heavy Half in Leadville with a time of 4:44. It was a fantastically fun and exciting race, with snow happening for most of the race up high. At some points, it was like running uphill through a creek, as water was coming down the trail in large volumes. We’ve had such a rainy spring and summer all over Colorado. It’s strange to see so much water in places that would normally be dry, but that’s what is happening. Rain, on top of snowmelt, has made the season this way.

That was my big exciting June! Catch you next time!

The Leadville Heavy Half

The Leadville Heavy Half is 15.7 miles up to Mosquito Pass above Leadville. The start of the race goes straight up 6th street from Harrison Avenue, and winds through some of the historically scenic parts of the old mining parts of town.

In 2023, The Leadville Heavy Half had the special challenge of being snowy. On June 17th.

This was a race where preparedness was a decent component of the race, because at high altitude, there was still snow on top of the large rocks. Near the top of the race, which was adjusted for 2023, we were all running uphill in what seemed like a mud river, with rocks that would easily loosen and turn over underfoot.

Things I brought:

1. Osprey water pack

   Filled a bit less than halfway with Scratch Labs powder. There were aid stations so no need to take a huge amount of water for the Half.

2. Frogg Toggs Rainjacket

   This is a lightweight rainjacket. It’s inexpensive and doesn’t breathe very well, but this is what I wanted for this race. If I needed it to breathe a bit I could open the front. The important thing is that it kept rain and snow off of me.

3. Melanzana sweater dress

   I like this dress because it has a hood. My mom got me this blue sweater dress years ago and it’s my favorite.

4. T shirt

   A basic t shirt that I often wear. It has a lotus on it. I think I bought it at the Galleria when I lived in Houston.

5. Sportsbra

   Underneath it all, Victoria’s Secret, more like Victory Secret.

6. Shorts

   I had these in my bag and I never needed them. I wore leggings the whole run.

7. Leggings

   Athleta leggings, they were warm and didn’t soak up too much of the snow.

8. Ice spikes

   Like chains but for your feet. I didn’t end up using these, but it wouldn’t have been a bad idea if I had not had my Brooks Shoes below.

9. Brooks shoes - Pure Grit 6

   I got these at the thrift store in Leadville, they don’t seem very special other than that they have nice gripping elements on the bottom. I chose the grippiest shoes I had for this race, and it was a good choice. At several points in the race, it was like running uphill through a river. There were many loose rocks and several inches of flowing water for many many yards near the top of the race.

10. Sunglasses + Hat

    Funnily enough I have done a race where I forgot my hat. I couldn’t find it on race morning and I sweated off all my sunscreen so you can guess how that ended up! Luckily this time I had a pretty well-built list and I didn’t get too scattered before the race, so I remembered. The sunglasses I have are the first goodr lenses I ever bought, also at a Leadville race event in 2019. They have a bit of paint on them but I like them better that way.

11. Honey Stingers + Gummy Bears + Gu

    I only recently discovered Honey Stingers and really liked them. My other MO for fueling on long runs is gummy bears. For 13 mile or half-size runs in the past, I usually eat an entire medium-sized bag of gummy bears, or 600 calories worth. This isn’t really enough though, so I took the Honey Stingers too, which to me are like giant-size gummy bears. The race was sponsored by GU so I enjoyed eating exactly one of those during the race. It’s a little unusual but I ate some Honey Stingers the night before to load up on carbs. I didn’t eat any during the race since I ate gummy bears instead.

Some of my fueling choices

So that’s all my gear I had!

As far as night-before fueling, while driving up to Leadville from Boulder, I drank as much water as possible where the water had some Scratch Labs in it. This may have been one of the more important steps for me of the race. Carbo-loading and fueling is something that I see other runners talk and write about often. For Leadville, I recommend… hydro-loading? It’s a bit more than simply ‘staying hydrated’ it’s purposely drinking almost more water than is comfortable on the way to high altitude. This helps me personally avoid headaches from dehydration. It may not be as important to do this for people living in Leadville and racing, since I lived in Leadville for about 18 years before going to college, and I don’t remember thinking as much about water back then.

I ate some oatmeal and quesadillas for dinner because that is the most carbo-rich thing I could think of. I ate oatmeal again for breakfast the next day. My opportunity to fuel is the day before, because I struggle to get energy during races. I theorize that my body works so hard at running, that it stops digesting or doesn’t actually digest. Almost everything i eat during a race, I end up throwing up later after the race. I always feel better afterwards, I wish I could keep food down, though. This is no dis on any of the foods I eat. It’s a total me-thing, not because the gummy bears are bad or whatever.

As far as the running I did to prepare, I pushed my baby in a stroller for many of my training runs, to the point where when I didn’t have the stroller, it was like running after pushing a sled. I sort of fell forward. The most I can put my baby through for a stroller run is about 5 miles, after that, I think it’s a bit too long for him to be in the stroller and I get him home so he can crawl around. My other runs on Strava were 10 or 13 mile elevation-gain heavy runs. I knew I wasn’t going to win or place high in the Heavy Half, my goal was to finish.

For a few days I thought The Heavy Half was the easiest race in the Leadville Race Series, it turns out with the Leadville 10k included in the series, the Heavy Half is probably the second easiest race. It’s hard to explain Leadville to those who aren’t familiar with it. I guess, one way to think of it is that everything in Leadville is hard - even driving there can be hard if you don’t hydrate right. The Heavy Half isn’t the hardest race you can do, but it’s still pretty silly. Running up a mountain from Harrison Avenue? 7 miles straight uphill, the last miles of which are covered in snow?

The Heavy Half doesn’t qualify as a half marathon because it’s too long. It might have been the hardest half marathon in the United States, but it can’t be, technically, because it’s 15 miles instead of 13.1. It’s aptly named, in this case. The Heavy Half is the heaping serving of a half marathon, it’s the cup that overfloweth, a weird outlier race that happens concurrently with a distinguished marathon. That said, there’s very little that is ‘half’ about it - I would say it’s entirely heavy.

As for what’s along those almost-16 miles, most people probably aren’t thinking about the closeup scenery of the mining relics, however the close scenery was all we had in 2023’s race, which was wrapped in sheets of falling snow.

I frankly loved this. Being a person who has painted a mining structure from part of the race, I couldn’t get enough of the old mining shanties and buildings along this race.

Even outside of the Heavy Half, whenever I see these structures, I think to myself “What on earth were people doing here?” and I start to get an understanding of the determination and obsession that was mining. I imagine scores of miners traveling up to 12000 feet almost daily to search through the earth for ores, run machines made of wood and rope, and pump water along refining sluices. All of us in the future are enjoying life with metals that were probably still in the ground 200 years ago. I’m writing this blog to you via my computer, basically electrified rocks, and I drove to this race in a car that almost certainly made use of molybdenum, the key mineral at Climax mine in Leadville.

As for how I felt during the race, I felt good most the time, and I was in good spirits. It was certainly hard, but I knew I could finish it.

I ended up getting 556th out of about 770 people. The above is my strava map, but I must have derfed something up about it, because my official finishing time was 4:44 and the mileage should have only been 15.7. Maybe I went out of service briefly and that was it. Who knows though, maybe a short walk back and forth around an aid station, or stopping to take photos of mining relics added some extra mileage, and maybe I accidentally paused Strava somehow, or it lost signal and the other 30 minutes of my race. Either way I am happy with my 4:44 time, it’s so easy to remember!

In a word, that was huh-huh-huh-HEAVY

Sketchbook Confessional: March 2023

The Sketchbook Confessional is a blog where I look at the past month and all the art and creative things I did in that month. Like a backwards to-do list, the Sketchbook Confessional is a ‘done’ list.


Painting:

In March I continued my Mountain Paintings series. I paint these on plexiglass that is either clear or already a color. It’s been fun to do and see what happens with the various color backgrounds.

I had a lot of fun making these.

I’ve started a new painting series that I call Space Cowboy, featuring cowboys and deserts, night skies with stars, galaxies, ect. I’ve really liked this idea and I’m going to expand on it. Below is a small 8 x 10 study of what I want the idea to look like on larger canvases or panels, which I think turned out well.

In March I also moved back into some realism or sketching in oil with turpenoid and have really enjoyed it.

Now that I am painting in oil after having my baby, I am moving back into realism. I will be focusing on figures and maybe, landscapes, in April. It’s been an exciting way to work again.

I’m not sure why but sometimes I forget how much I’ve trained in realism and also how happy it makes me to paint this way. Maybe writing this will help.

Lately I moved my studio to a new part of my place so it’s more light. It’s been really nice.

As far as things outside of the studio, I did get out to paint a bit en plein air at the end of March. It’s been a very snowy winter, and cold, so it was very cool to get out on a nice day. I painted in oil en plein air for, I think, the first time in a couple years, as most of the plein air paintings I made in 2021 were gouache.

On the digital drawing/design side of things in March, my friend’s cat, Bitty, is running for Pet Mayor of Louisville so I made some button designs for Bitty’s campaign. It was really fun to do this.

Travel:

In March I went to DC for a bit, I saw a friend’s art show, went to the National Gallery, and I caught a bit of blossoming season. I can’t believe my incredible luck with this. I don’t mind being one of those silly, over-the-top tourists who gets really close to the trees and takes dozens of photos. Some sights in life never get old to me, and those include tree blossoms, mountains, and water.

I also stopped by my hometown of Leadville to see a tiny bit of skijoring! It’s always fun to see this whenever I get a chance. Few things are more “Leadville”

Reading:

On the plane back from DC to Denver, I finished reading The Urth of the New Sun. This book brought Book of the New Sun home for me, as I’m sure it does for most people. I won’t say much more but I loved it. I bought The Fifth Head of Cerberus and The Litany of the Long Sun to read next.

Running:

I had some decent running in March! I’m still getting ready for the Leadville Heavy Half this summer. I knocked out an 11 mile run in Boulder that spanned from Wonderland Lake to Chautauqua and back again. I’ve always wanted to do this, and, it’s very possible. I’m not sure why it took me so long to finally do it, but there you go. Every time I run up Chautauqua there’s a lot of elevation gain to be had. It’s also pretty hard, I think at least, to run from Boulder Creek up to Chautauqua and then keep running around Chautauqua.

Sketchbook Confessional: February 2023

The Sketchbook Confessional is a blog where I look at the past month and all the art and creative things I did in that month. Like a backwards to-do list, the Sketchbook Confessional is a ‘done’ list.

In February I reworked some of the drawings I did in 2015, 2016, and 2018, I made them a bit looser and more colorful:

In my original drawings like this, the colors were only blues and whites. It’s been fun to revisit the drawings and redo them.

I added a new piece to this series too:

In February I started a new kind of painting - I am making imaginary landscapes with hikers or backpacker figures in each one. It’s been an adventure to do this. I really like what I am making, with these.

These are painted on clear plexiglass and also color plexiglass. It’s fun to have a color background to effectively work as a built-in underpaint color. Some of the plexiglass colors that I have are very bright or different colors than I would typically use as underpainting colors, so they are a good stretch of my routine.

In February I did a few paintings of Mt. Elbert that I don’t see as finished yet. I will add a couple more touches to these over time.

I added these to this blog to see how they change next month. All I have to say for these is they are super thick paintings and I love them. They will definitely take a bit of time to get done.
I made a few lupine oil paintings also.

The lupine paintings are a fun way for me to get into the swing of things with impasto.

In February I was able to get outside and do a few plein air pieces. I went to Boulder Falls the day before Valentine’s Day and did a few watercolors that I enjoyed making.

I think of romance a lot in February since it’s the month of Valentine’s day and it’s unavoidable, but I also think of February 14 as exactly half of February, most years. I also like that there are so many flowers in the supermarkets because they are green and there’s not much green around in Colorado in February. It’s such a short and cold month, not as dark or cold as January, but still cold. I do like running and skiing in the snow but I don’t mind the idea of beaches and sun.

Running:

I signed up for the Leadville Heavy Half marathon and knocked out a few runs in Leadville in February. I have a long way to go before June. As far as training, what I’m up to is going for hikes or runs whenever I can get childcare for Baby Jewell, or the occasional stroller run. I think the stroller running makes me stronger but who knows. I also don’t want to put Baby Jewell through running in some of the 0 degree weather we’ve had lately.

All in all I’m happy with my mile splits for any given terrain, this spring I will work on driving down the times for my splits at high altitude or over 10000 feet.

Overall I’m feeling 100% and have felt this way for about a month after getting Covid in November. It really did take about 8 weeks before I felt normal or back to where I was after I gave birth.

That’s what I got for February! Until next time, see you, Space Cowboy.