Gutting Your Sketchbooks

Don't let the image fool you, each of these sketchbooks is a freaking mess.  Here's how to lighten your load.

When you have a backlog of sketchbooks, which many artists do, there’s a temptation to go through them for two reasons:
1. To pull out any pieces of art that you think you can sell
2. To pull out any blank pieces of paper so that they may be used for future art endeavors

The disadvantages however of this methodology is that you do lose something by ripping out pieces of paper for old sketch books. It was not until I was going through my sketch books for the two reasons I posted above, that I realized how inspirational my old sketchbooks are. When I went through the sketchbooks I had already raided for masterpieces and blank paper, I was disappointed by what I saw: sketchbooks bereft of anything good. Crappy doodles and paint tests. Then I realized, I had taken out any thing of potential value from the sketchbook. As result, I lost history of my progress, and that sucks.

Here are some rules for gutting your sketchbooks that I therefore recommend:
1. Instead of taking out blank pages, continue the progress that you have made in the sketchbook on these blank pages. Maybe you had a fun idea that you never completed, maybe you have the technique you have been waiting for this whole time. Make sure you date it so you can see the progress you’ve made over time. Or, buy a new sketch book.

 2. Taking masterpieces out of your sketchbooks is tempting especially when you want to start selling sketches. Instead, create an index of significant pieces and the sketchbooks where they live. This way, you know where the painting is the when you want to sell it and you can still see the progress around it before you do.

3. Say you definitely want to take out the masterpieces in a sketchbook and you don’t want to lose the history of your progress. You can scan every page of your sketchbook and save it as a PDF. It may be time consuming but you can keep your sketchbooks safer in a fire if they’re on a zip drive.