Make your old sketchbooks matter – going konmari with my drawings

Kirjoitettu 7 joulukuun, 2019 julkaissut illuzz9

At first I would like to thank Andrea Femerstrand aka Noukah (visit her blog at www.noukah.com) for giving out this cool idea!

Do you ever feel a bit ashamed by your sketchbooks and sort of would like to show your sketches, but major of your drawings are unpresentable?

Many of my sketchbooks were far from representable. Pages had gotten loose and ripped while they were in my drawer.

They take up the space from your home and you never return to them. Yet you don’t really want to throw them away. After all, there might be some good ideas or some memories.

But do you even remember what sketchbooks have those ideas?

While some artists recommend that you preserve all your bad sketches too, just to remind yourself how much work it took to produce one good, even mediocre drawing, do you really need that reminder? We already know how it goes.

So why not get rid of all those bad sketches? Cut out the best ones and put them in a plastic folder where you can return to them if you happen to ever need them. Then throw the remaining away.

Sounds great, right? Let’s get to it!

This was no quick deal – it took me hours and hours to go through all of my sketches! Sometimes it was hard to decide whether to throw something away or spare it.

Sometimes one sketchbook that had 150 pages, had only one tiny sketch that was worth preserving.

After all, these sketchbooks were from the time that I began my learning curve.

Going through these sketchbooks made me chew on couple of things: the best sketches or considered breakthroughs came from studies. And also it was refreshing to see different mediums that had forced me to do work that had a very different look and had different ideas. One might not even believe such work would be done by me!

Here are my key takeaways: