Sketchbook Confessional November 2021

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

Sketchbook Confessional September 2019

Welcome to another 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.

Art:

I drew on my iPad on the Washington D.C. Metro as the train carried me away back and forth across the Potomac each weekday. For some reason this month, I had a lot of seatmates who were fans of art and who asked me questions about art.

This doesn’t always happen! Usually people are a bit more shy and watch me draw with a couple flicks of the eye and they go back to playing Bejeweled as the car goes screaming past the Pentagon. Either way, it was nice to meet some people on the train. One fellow rider told me I should be a tattoo artist, and I thought yeah! I could design tattoos, just not jab them into people.

The stabilizer tool in Clip Studio Paint does a good job of letting me draw even, smooth lines even as the metro car jolts and jives.

So, I stuck to simplicity when drawing and drew pretty repetitive things, like these crystals:

As I was having pretty much the busiest professional month of the year, I realized that I’d kept kicking the re-release date of Tilted Sun into the future, and that there would never be a perfectly good time to relaunch it. Like every point on a sphere being equidistant from the center, every time would be a bad time, so I might as well relaunch at will.

If every day is total chaos, why not do it today?

And so on September 10, Tilted Sun went live again! 75 pages of Tilted Sun are now out in the world.

If you haven’t read, start at page 1: https://www.tiltedsun.com/comic-1/2018/5/5/page-1

New pages update every Tuesday and Thursday and you can check the newest page on TiltedSun.com any day. <3

Alex and Lambda the cat from Tilted Sun

In September I also worked on more drawings with themes of love and romance.

And, I kept up some practice on hands and other challenging things to draw, like glasses. Ever try to draw glasses? Holy smokes.

Travel:

Earlier in September I went to Harper’s Ferry to paint en plein air.

I’d never seen so many tourists in such a small place. Online guides all mentioned that it would be crowded and that parking offsite was the best thing to do, and I didn’t quite believe it until I was riding into the city on a bus packed with 40 other people from various countries, India, China, Europe, all to see Harper’s Ferry.

The floor at SPX

I also went to Small Press Expo, or SPX! I spent wayyy too much money, or, the way I see it, the exact right amount of money on amazing creations from indie artists and authors.

It was so great to meet new and old internet friends and also a few comic artists I’d been following for years. Super to meet Henry Barajas, Tom Siddell (Gunnerkrigg Court, bottom right) and Chloe Giroux (bookmark to the right is from her!).

The panel at SPX with Jessica Abel about working efficiently and organizing your time was amazing. The full title was “Butt in the Chair: How to ensure your comics projects get the love they deserve.”

Of all the comic book topics you could talk about at a convention, a seminar about being diligently organized probably doesn’t seem like the most exciting thing on the planet, but it was the most energizing panel I’ve ever attended. It was even better than learning how to draw Ninja Turtles.

Abel's approach to documenting time and responsibilities was the most realistic take I'd ever seen on art life - way more realistic than hoping for a savior project, or cranking out grueling, unattainable hours under a #neversleep mentality. One of her slides is below: "You act your way into thinking differently. You can't think your way into acting differently.”

The headliner event for Saturday evening was a panel between Chris Ware and Eddie Campbell. It was a pretty funny conversation, I remember a moment where Eddie Campbell said he was in the process of coloring From Hell and had to keep himself from fixing 'mistakes' or what he perceived to be mistakes. Chris Ware was great. He described some idiosyncracies of artist life where at one point his wife found him on the couch as he was sewing mockup dolls for Jimmy Corrigan and was busy stitching together doll clothes. I think most artists relate with these kinds of moments, where what you are doing makes perfect, logical sense in your art world, but to the rest of the world, it just looks like you are agonizing over tiny brown pants.

Related Blogs:

Plein Air Painting at Harper’s Ferry

Tilted Sun

Sketchbook Confessional August 2019

Sketchbook Confessional July 2019

Who wrote this?

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

- Becky Jewell

October - November 2017 Studio Update: A bit of everything

This month I began working in a new format - miniature paintings!

A miniature of Mt. Elbert in Leadville, Colorado

Another miniature of Mt. Elbert - about 3 x 3 inches

Myst!

These mini paintings take about as much concentration or more as a larger painting, say an 8 x 10. Decisions just have to be better and more precise. 

I'm still working through painting my memories, many of which involve video games from the 1990s - up next is a painting of an Arcology from Sim City 2000. Here is the underpainting and the original Arcology: 

On the other side of the studio I have been finally working on something that has been in my to-do pile for months - lettering my comic, Tilted Sun. 

I'm accomplishing the lettering project in Clip Studio Paint (Formerly known as Manga Studio). Although learning Clip Studio Paint took a few painful failures for me and several Googlings of how to get text to work the way I wanted, it's been worth it. (I might try illustrator for this too, soon?) 

All in all lettering has made the comic more real. I've set up about 60 pages of the comic so far without any words, just scribbles of notes of the words that I wanted to use. Ironically this has worked to make the images more expressive - the images were working almost like a silent film until now. 

The font I am using for the comic, Sequentialist, which is a pretty rad font! 

The first part of the comic also took different turns than I expected - I had most of it written out but then decided to discard a lot of the first, second, x drafts, in favor of what felt better, or indulging "what the comic really wanted to say". 

It continues to take me a long time to work on this comic because writing and doing art for and lettering a full color comic takes many hours of thought at different levels. Oil painting feels like a break compared to it. It works for me to spend time on both, especially since paintings emerge into the world as physical objects, and the comic just lives in screens (for now).  So, painting is the day-by-day mini reward that helps me keep going through the comic. 

All in all October was a solid month and November is off to a great start! Thanks for stopping by on the blog, and catch you soon!