FULL MANY A MEDIOCRE SKETCH LAY UNUSED*
This “project”, if it can be called that, started form my failed attempt to give my workspace the semblance of order. As usual, I began the task very motivated, for about five minutes or so, and then time seemed to stretch out like a turtleneck on an elephant.
While taking an old notebook to its new home on the shelves, I decided to open it ’just to take a little peek’. I have a love-hate relationship with old notebooks. There is, of course, a pleasure in looking at what you wrote or drawn in the past. Some of this pleasure is due to the content itself, and some is more meta, namely seeing how you’ve grown as ____ (insert job title – illustrator/writer etc.) and as a person. That said, it’s also hard not to see the faults I had back then and be reminded of the many I still have now. I might have tried to become ‘better at’(or just ‘better’), but maybe I haven’t worked hard enough as I should have. As you surly know yourself, this line of thought can easily turn into self castration of creativity.
Wanting to be methodical in the process of procrastination, I’ve started to look at other notebooks, seeing desecrated sketches, many only partially drawn that I haven’t done anything with, nor shown to anyone. Little by little, a silly idea started to formulate. I’ve gathered some of my sketches, some old some newer, some I drew with various pens, some in Photoshop or in Procreate. And here we are...
The following is a compilation of some of the drawing (not all made the cut) composited and curated without much rhyme or reason. I’ve added some visuals, explanations & takeaways on how one might do a better job that I have done here.
Sorry for the long epilogue, I might have exceeded the normal text’s length associated with this format, I hope you don’t feel like I’ve wasted your time. And If you do, here is a semi-cute drawing of a fish:
*The title of the project is a paraphrase of a verse in
‘An Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard’ a poem by Thomas Gray:
“Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flow'r is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”
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I've started by taking photos of some non-digital sketches. I can't stress this enough: the amount of thought given to differentiate good from bad drawings was less than what Ringo gave to writing the lyrics to 'We all live in a yellow submarine'. And as in the case of the mentioned song, if you suspend your judgement just for a little while you might like what comes out of it later on.
Here are some of the photos I've taken:
To make your life easier, make sure that the scans of the images are good enough. As you can clearly see I didn't. That’s how I found myself working extra time in Photoshop cleaning them up while cursing my phone’s camera.
Struggling at the first stages of a project is a big ‘no no’, that’s a sure way to lose motivation from the get-go. You want to build momentum before you encounter your first hurdle that way you will be able to push through. However, if you build too much momentum and hit a wall instead of a tiny speed bump you will go in blaze of glory – we all have abandoned ventures after investing in them a lot of time and effort – it huts like hell.
Disclaimer of Liability: TO THE EXTENT NOT PROHIBITED BY APPLICABLE LAW, IN NO EVENT WILL THE WRITER (AKA 'ME'), BE LIABLE FOR PERSONAL INJURY FROM PAPER CUTS NOR THE DEFLATION OF EGO SUSTAINED FROM READING EMBARRASSING THINGS THE READER (AKA 'YOU'), WROTE A LONG TIME AGO.
Me, ~2010, I can't even..
Next I needed to come with a plan in order to bring it all together, while maintaining cohesiveness, but of course I didn't. So here are my small insights on how one can make his\her life easier and do a better job than me:
The end goal again is to make a cohesive compilation of old sketches. in order to do so, you need to look for the features that are most common among your sketches. Thus, determining which sketches makes the larges body of work while still working well together. Then you can also add the sketches that do not fit all that well, yet could be conformed with minimal work. Here are some essential features you will want to look for:
a. Tools, linework & style - Obviously the various drawings were made with different pens, pencils or brushes, and have different linework and style, you don't want to choose drawings that look too different.
b. Size - Make sure that the resolutions of the different sketches (after scanning and cropping) are close enough to one another, big difference means changing the size of a given image. That can be done, but there is a trade off: if you need to enlarge an image you lose restitution, make the image smaller and the pen\pencil\brush lines' size going to be thinner,consequently, losing the cohesiveness we previously looked for.
c. Narrative - Given the fact that the whole point is to gather unrelated sketches together, looking for a common narrative will be hard, but not necessarily impossible. I regret not even looking for (or creating) a shared narrative, I tied different things together rather interweaving them to tell a story.
The whole process took me about six hours, I’ve started it at end of a work day so the last couple of hours were a rush work to finish quickly and go to bed, rather than leaving it to the next day and go for quality.
I didn’t really intend to do more with it, but giving it more thought I felt that showing the end result and sharing the process and the motivation behind it might inspire someone out there to breathe new life to their neglected work and share it with others. I hope it did.
Here is the final piece:
