Sketchbooks All Gone
This afternoon, I finally finished my years-long personal project of scanning all of the sketches I’ve ever made. Well, almost all of them. I’m sure a couple pages have been lost, thrown out, or given away over the years. But for the most part, I’ve captured everything. Loose copy paper drawings. Notebook margin doodles made during class. And, of course, actual sketchbook pages. All told, I have 7559 scans of drawings that were created at various points over the last fifteen or so years.
This image shows a stack of paper from my final run of scanning. I had to remove a lot of spiral binding wire and cut up some of those stupid big old hardcover sketchbooks you used to be able to buy at Borders. The paper in this photo is just a fraction of all of the stuff I went through. But after I’m done scanning and organizing everything, what do I do with it? I just throw it all in the recycling. I like the idea of all of this paper being turned back into fresh paper and being used for new drawings some day. That’s pretty romantic, I guess. But really I’m just happy to have these piles and piles of paper and books out of my house. I’ve been moving all of this stuff around with me for fifteen years now and adding more as I went. I’ve moved all of these doodles across the country twice. Not anymore!
Why am I doing this? Partly it’s because I’m pretty obsessive about digitization and organization (which I think I’ve touched on previously). I guess at some point in the future it will be an interesting experience to be able to go back and look at all of the things I’ve ever drawn. I don’t think it will really be a positive experience, although it will probably make me feel better about where I am presently. Because I’ll be honest, most of the drawings in these books and on these pages are not good. But a few of them aren’t bad, and some of the more recent sketchbooks have a lot of good ideas in them that I should probably follow up on for possible larger pieces. I guess that’s the point, right? A sketchbook shouldn’t be a precious object with beautiful, finished pieces on every page. It’s a place to get messy and work out some ideas and draw offensive things nobody else should ever see. But who knows, maybe somebody at the recycling facility is collecting this stuff.
Yeah right, it’s probably all going straight to the incinerator.
