The beginning of a new year is a good time to decide whether you want to tackle pre-existing problems you’ve been ignoring, and putting together the Fleet collection finally broke the last straw in terms of my sketchbook situation. I’ve stopped scanning artwork predictably since stardancer.org went away, which means I no longer have documentation or easy access to art from 10+ years now, and if I keep waiting that situation will only get worse.
This is the year I’ve decided I’m going to fix that.
My goal is to catalog all my physical artwork. Not just the work in sketchbooks, but the various paintings and finished pieces in portfolios and binders. Cataloging in this case means the following:
- The piece is archived in a digital format appropriate for reproduction. This requires scanning, because I can’t photograph things well enough for the purpose. ...
In terms of numbered sketchbooks, I am on 133 in the large format, and AZ in the small (small sketchbooks are formatted A-Z, then AA, AB, AC, etc, to AZ, then I’ll start with BA, BB, BC, etc). I have at least twelve binders and six portfolios, and then there’s some loose material I have never organized in bins. This is not a small job… there’s a reason I’ve been too daunted to start it. But it needs to be done, so… I have begun it!
My first step was making the archived files a home, which I did on my external drive (the only one big enough), and copying all the existing scans from all the scattered parts of my computer into one place. I decided to make folders for each sketchbook because it would be easier to see at a glance which sketchbooks haven’t been touched at all, in terms of archiving. (Look at Sketchbook 2, for instance!)
Back in my Livejournal days I started a sketchbook retrospective, so I’m going to go through those posts next and see what I can suck out of them, meta-data-wise. Until I decide on a tagging/sorting program (a task I offloaded to someone much better at looking for software), I’d like to put meta-data about the sketches in a text file in each folder. I started writing similar lists in college, so I figure: recover those, add to them, continue on.
From this point, my plan is to scan at least five old pages a week, along with whatever new work I finish. On Fridays, probably. As a way to keep honest, I’m going to post some of them here and on Locals every couple of weeks. I might return to streaming my scanning process because that was fun… something to consider when I decide how to handle streaming in the future.
This is a big project: years of work, I’m thinking. But organizing it has already made me feel better, and looking at empty sketchbook folders has made me think ‘oh, let’s grab that book and do a few scans so that folder will have something in it!’ I feel that's an excellent start: rather than daunted, I feel interested. Creating an empty structure and slotting things into it is a lot more fun than staring at an empty anything and thinking 'what do I do.'
I want to say my lesson here is: “Start early when it comes to documenting and archiving your work.” But that isn’t the lesson, really, because I was documenting and archiving my work… I just chose the system poorly. When the website went away, it blew away years of work. What I need to take away from that experience is“document and archive your work in a multiply-redundant way, because systems and software and file formats change.” I can work with that.
Regardless, a good beginning. You will be kept informed.
Or at least, I intend it to be relaxing. Hopefully it delivers.
4:22 minutes
Materials:
- Pen: Moonman Starry Glass dip pen, Mars: https://www.jetpens.com/Moonman-Starry-Sky-Glass-Dip-Pen-Mars/pd/31536
- Paper: Strathmore Writing Series 500, lined: https://www.jetpens.com/Strathmore-500-Series-Writing-Pad-8.5-x-11-Lined-50-Sheets/pd/15322
- Ink: Robert Oster, Rose Gilt Tynte: https://www.jetpens.com/Robert-Oster-Rose-Gilt-Tynte-Fountain-Pen-Ink-Shake-N-Shimmy-50-ml-Bottle/pd/25170
In which I talk about the paper, the paint, and the experience of oils versus gouache. Fun stuff, will do more.
Thank you Locals supporters! Your contribution to my art war chest here is what's powering these experiments and videos. For now I'm keeping them public but I may start doing some subscriber-only videos if you all are interested.💖
Thanks for your comments yesterday on the business post... all very provocative, in a good way. I'll try to respond to all of them today.
Some Alysha misc now, since I'm gearing up for the results of the Kickstarter!
Petrov is giving away coupon codes for every book in the Alysha series (and has some leftover coupons for Marda and the business book). You can pick those up here (and please do! The books are bought already, someone should use them!) https://twitter.com/PetrovNeutrino/status/1457344535843987461
Our own @JudasComplex sent along a sample of the Faith in the Service audiobook, which I've attached for your delight! I... haven't had a chance to listen to it. Don't ask me about my past week and a half or so. Putting it here will guarantee I get to it.
After hearing the amused comments during the livestream, I went ahead and added all the ship type illustrations I have inked from the 90s to the wiki. Glory in the rampant adorableness of their anthropomorphic stylings! See those ...
A little comedy today, at least in the link. Transcript follows.
Hi, all. Welcome to this episode of The Jaguar’s Heart.
A while back I was introduced to a comedy sketch about Cuban coffee by a Mexican comedian, Gabriel Iglesias. ( The sketch begins with him greeting all his fellow Latinos and then backing up to say ‘but we’re all different, aren’t we’ which is a segue into a demonstration of how different Hispanics speak Spanish.
It is hilarious. First, because I am a Spanish speaker and a linguistics hobbyist, and his portrayal of various accents resonated with my experiences in trying to make sense of them myself… Not always easy, since from culture to culture, slang and accent are often totally different (and sometimes grammar! Spaniards use a grammatical construct that has died out in many other Spanish-speaking countries, the plural “you.”)
I also loved it because the Cuban coffee part is real. I grew up with Cubans. I know how we are....
One of the most common things I hear (and say) right now is "the asymmetry is the story." Here's one about how none of us are innocent of the sins we hate in others.
Hi, all. Welcome to this week’s episode of The Jaguar’s Heart.
It’s been weeks since the Baen’s Bar incident and I’m still thinking about it... because the longer I do, the more I feel, overwhelmingly, that it’s obvious that the problem is deeper than “this forum was saying stuff that offended us.” We have to back up to the glaring fact that people on opposite sides no longer consider each other human. Nothing I say will matter because the people disagreeing with me don’t think I’m human. They have denied my humanity; they have not bothered to listen to my beliefs, or have fake-listened to them in that way that people do when they’re so ready to prove you wrong that they’re only using your speech to provide talking points for their own ideas.
We have forgotten how to listen.
Increasingly, we have also ...
What if I told you that, after years of requests for the return of my Stardancer.org gallery, I was in the process of recreating it?
Because I am…! RIGHT NOW. flail
CHALLENGES
First, let me tell you why I haven’t had an online art gallery since stardancer went down:
I did not want to put thousands of images on free gallery sites (like DA) because it would be a ton of work, and I wouldn’t have any control over the site (“what if they go down one day”, “what if they start charging per-upload fees”, “what if they have copyright policy changes I don’t like”, “what if they start using their corpus to train AI”, etc, etc, etc). Can you imagine dumping hundreds of hours into uploading stuff only to lose it because the site owners made questionable decisions? Ugh.
I wasn’t capable of coding my own gallery and I didn’t like the gallery plugins for various content management systems. I could have installed a package on my hosting service, but none of the ones I saw were customizable enough, or did ...
I'm just about done collecting all my notes to begin "Red Honey", a lot of which involves looking for sketches... and this one, I overlooked until just now, is of Kediil and Serel. I love toned sketchbooks! They are so satisfying.
Anyway, next week, we begin!
We’re just about at the midpoint of 2025, so I thought today would be a good day to do a Jaguar check-in! What a weird year it’s been. Very busy, family-wise, with lots of both good and challenging changes; I am using up a lot of time on that, but how is that news? You know how it goes.
My current major project is finishing up the second Jokka collection and mailing all the Kickstarter prizes. That should be wrapped up next month sometime, when we start the Red Honey serialization. I tell you, it’s a wild to be scanning old sketchbooks, only to find sketches of the Red Honey characters from the 2000s! This story has been on the backburner a long time! I also unearthed a lot of sketches from the development of the jokka.org website, which I used the wayback machine to archive (as much as possible). I’m thinking of restoring some amount of it to my current website, which is my other major project right now: my website. I feel like ...
We once allowed our neuters to rule us; they raised up a glittering kingdom, one that rotted from its core the longer we permitted that offense against nature to continue. When we refused to address that imbalance, the Brightness and the Void Themselves smote the World, so powerfully that nothing was left of that time save fearful rumors, whispered across generations.
To this day, the World suffers from the blow Its divine siblings struck against It. We should be more careful of our virtue… or we may not survive the second lesson.
