An update on updates post SEA travels

Meta update

Hello folks! This past summer, after saving up for many years, my wife and I quit our jobs to travel through Southeast Asia. During this time, I kept a little notebook in my pocket where I jotted down quick notes about what I was doing throughout the day, with timestamps. During down time (especially bus rides), I would use these notes to reconstruct our days in blog posts logging what we were doing from day to day and week to week. Unsurprisingly, we ended up spending more time doing things than I spent logging them, so I fell behind pretty quick. I wanted to catch up on the blog even after we got home four months later (and I still do), however as more time has gone by since we resumed working, I have not figured out how to make the time for catching up with these yet.

Originally I was thinking I would hold off on making other blog posts until I got all the travel posts up so things would stay in chronological order, but it's become clear that this way of thinking has actually just stopped me from posting any updates at all. I've decided I'm going to start posting more regular updates interspersed with the backlogs from the travel. This will mean that any future travel updates will show up out of chronological order in my RSS feed, but I will list them chronologically in the blog index I have on my site!

New cities, new chapters of Creatives Club!

As far as other life events, my wife and I moved back to Colorado after traveling, which is where we lived before our four and a half years in DC pre-travel. We stayed in Denver for a few months, which was enough time to start up a new Denver chapter of Creatives Club, the art club I started in DC! The idea of the club is to make a space for artists in a city to come together at the same time every week (and if not the same place, than at least a predictable place). The timing for the kick off of the Denver chapter was very fortuitous because it aligned pretty well with the opening of a new coffee shop called Art Club Coffee! It felt like an opportunity for a perfect collaboration, so after reaching out to the lovely owners and chatting with them, we decided to start a new collab meetup, Creatives + Coffee! This partnership ended up being symbiotic because we (Creatives Club Denver) needed a meeting space and Art Club Coffee wanted to host some community events, but they were still in the early days of opening the shop (they only opened in June!), so did not have the bandwidth to host these meetups on their own. It has been a lovely collaborative effort, and the owners have become great friends as well.

A couple months later, we moved to Boulder and I started a new job working with data at a public school district in the area. Since moving to Boulder, my friend Earl took over as the main facilitator at Creatives + Coffee so that I could start a new Creatives Club chapter in Boulder! I found a brewery near our house, VisionQuest Brewing Company, that was willing to host us every Thursday. This means that on the weeks I'm feeling brave, I can go to CC Denver and still host CC Boulder!

Some art from the last few months

This first drawing was an exploration in bugs having jobs for a compilation zine with the theme "Life as an insect".

I think these next characters were just some doodles from a Creatives Club meetup, but I ended up really liking them!

I draw a lot of random stuff, but when I'm doodling, I tend to go through phases of common things that I often draw first. Cats, UFOs slices of pizza... It could be anything, really. Lately there have been a lot of cowboy aliens! This next drawing was part of a graphic for the first Creatives Club Boulder meetup (hence "the first rodeo").

This last drawing is also from a Creatives Club Boulder meetup. There were a few iterations of this that started without arms, moved to arms holding a beer (since we meet at a brewery), but I finally decided to go with this last version to put more focus on the act of creating.

Thanks for reading!