In November I made hundreds of bookmarks featuring paper birds, and also some larger paper-on-canvas pieces and paper-on-paper pieces (like the above.)
I had tons of fun putting together these birds. I visited Two Hands Paperie in Boulder with friends almost weekly to pick out papers and find new exciting grab bags of paper to see what I could work into my paper art.
I first started making paper art when I lived in my apartment in Austin, TX, after having moved from Boulder to give a new city a try. I tend to make paper cats and paper birds, and I seem to fire up my collage engines about every fall when it gets cool.
In November I also worked on getting photos of some of my texture paintings and uploading the photos to Society6.
I’ve really liked how the textures appear on various products.
Tilted Sun:
I finished about three pages of Tilted Sun and released them in September. I plan on releasing more as I can, however I’ve been so happy with painting outside and with my paper art, that I do not think I will stick to a regular schedule with Tilted Sun.
Feedback I’ve had from my peers is that they do like the webcomic format for Tilted Sun, but, it is a bit hard to navigate. Being 100 pages already, it’s hard for readers to flip back to different parts of the comic and put together connections that may otherwise make more sense in a print format.
If I start a Kickstarter to get Tilted Sun in print soon, I hope you will support it - though I didn’t plan Tilted Sun to be a print book and wanted it to be a webcomic, it sounds like the people have spoken!
NFTs:
Earlier this year, I really enjoyed working with the team at Gacha Gacha Art as an artist, and decided to try releasing a few NFTs on my own.
In a way, I think I’ve always been an NFT artist. Projects like Tilted Sun are extremely difficult for me because in my assessment, I am more of a cover-artist or a splash page artist than a sequential artist. It’s hard to move things in sequence, in color, and make them look perfect and good.
I’ve enjoyed making GIF art specifically for NFTs and also re-formatting old GIF art and making the art a bit more special for the NFT format.
I’ve also purchased a couple NFTs on Ethereum and also Tezos. It’s been exciting to learn about how crypto and art work together in this domain.
^ a couple of the NFTs I’ve bought - I thought both of these were cute and funny so I bought them.
NFTs seem to appeal to the same part of my brain that has always loved things like Gachapon machines, Happy Meal Toys, and blindbox toys where you never quite know what you’re going to get, but it will probably be pretty cool.
When I visited Tokyo, I would buy a few gachapon at a metro station, and sometimes I would open the capsule and have no idea what it was that I was looking at. The plastic character would be from some show, or a game, and often one that I had never seen. I really liked what I got anyways. I think there is something worthwhile in being open to characters that people love so much.
I think it’s too late to be calling NFTs, Web3, or the Metaverse a trend, I think it will become a part of most of our lives more and more as time goes on.
Reading, Watching, Playing:
I’ve gotten really into watching documentaries in the background while playing Stardew Valley on the Switch.
Stardew Valley is so fun and I could play it all day tbh. It’s one of those games where there is always something to do.
I love Stardew Valley
I still play a few DnD games with friends online, and make art for our campaign.
Since my last Sketchbook Confessional was in June of 2021, I’m behind a few months on all the drawings I’ve made for fun for the campaign.
Exercise and Running life:
November fitlady photo :)
I took most of October and November completely off from running, I went out and hiked with my easel a bit but otherwise took it easy. I think this is a fair thing to do as I felt I needed a bit of a rest.
As of Dec 1 2021, I’ve not had alcohol for about a year and a half. I barely think about it anymore, as I have almost no social life and stay home most of the time for COVID purposes and also because I really like staying home, making paper birds, and otherwise just chilling.
I spend most of what would have been my beer money on buying crypto and diversifying my investments. It’s been fascinating to learn about. I never buy so much crypto that I risk my life savings, what I do instead is I spend $50 here and there, money that I would have otherwise been spending on going out. This seems to be the amount of risk that works for me.
Hiking with an easel!
Taking a couple months off running doesn’t seem to be a bad idea at all since I was so into it earlier this year, finishing the Collegiate Peaks 25 mile run (very slowly). For training, I was doing a half-marathon or more just about every weekend. So I think it is good to take some time off every now and then for me. Maybe it is not the same for other runners and they train year round without missing a beat, but for me I really liked taking a bit of time to rest my joints and focus on maintaining health with walks.
I plan to get much more back into running in December and early 2022, wow it feels funny writing that, haha!
Catch you next time, see you Space Cowboy -
Becky