Sketchbook culling

I cleaned my studio during Hurricaine Irene. I think I am one of very few people lucky enough to say that their home looked better after the storm. One of my organization attempts involved gathering all my journals/ notebooks/ sketchbooks/ listbooks from around the house and putting them in one place. Oh what a mighty pile of paper that was! I would have guessed I'd been using about fifteen notebooks (which I knew was a little extreme) but when I gathered all of them up, I found I'd been rotating a whopping TWENTY SEVEN! That is embarrassing.

In an effort to remedy this craziness, I retired a bunch to a box in the closet. Letting go was hard to do because most still had usable pages left. I also hid ten of them for future use since I'd only drawn on a handful of pages from each. I'm down to a reasonable eight.

Cleaning takes me a very long time because I focus on unimportant details. For example, when I found a postcard that featured Arnold Schwartzenegger as the Terminator in my pile of rubble on the floor, I stopped cleaning and set to finding the perfect frame and cut a matt board for it. Meanwhile my floor is still a disaster. That happens constantly.

So, when I was organizing my books, I had to look through each one before sorting it. I was reminded of so many projects I'd forgotten about! I also pulled out a couple good doodle pages like the one above.

That reminds me of this article about how doodling about the subject matter you are learning is a good tool for absorbing information. http://io9.com/5834081/people-who-doodle-learn-faster When I go back to school, my notebooks will be full of on topic illustration instead of my usual penises and dinosaurs and food. What?