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?

Sketchbook snippets

While I was toiling away at my submission for Etsy's Design Face-off, I took a couple quick brain-refreshing doodle breaks. I probably won't do anything with them but they made Justin laugh so much that I thought I should share.

The first doodle of "the spirit of Etsy" makes me smile and think of the simpler times on Etsy when the rules of the site were pretty much open to interpretation. The "spirit of Etsy" policy was messy and abused but was so sweetly optimistic that I loved it a little.

The second doodle, "Mail time! Thriller dance!" is pretty much an illustration of myself every day at 2:00. I love mail time. When I get that magic stimulus check I'm going to dance like there is no tomorrow.