i was having some trouble upgrading my coppermine gallery, so i decided to screw it and use nextgen gallery as my image gallery. it’s good because it’s directly integrated with wordpress, and it was pretty easy to hack the search function so that the wordpress search will pull image results too.

here’s a hint: try searching for “shooting”, “sword” or “mecha”. you won’t be disappointed.

• new and improved sketchbook galleries

i’ve added another gallery to my sketchbook archive – this one is a large-format drawing pad that’s mostly from 1992 with some drawings from 1993. there are two exceptions – a horrible early attempt at an anime-style girl that is probably from 1990 or 1991, and the “unbreakable comb” drawing which is dated 1994.

this gallery also includes some watercolors and pastels.

as with other large items, because these pages are bigger than my scanner, some of the drawings are cropped. as i’ve said before, i’m ok with this for two reasons:

1. who do i think i’m talking to? who is going to care? no one, that’s who
2. i tried to crop the pages so i would lose as little as possible, so it’s fine

view the sketchbook gallery

so i was looking through my archives for an original sketch that i could use for my next full-scale illustration and i realized an entire sketchbook was missing.

somehow i missed the one called “property of no one“, from 1996. looking through it, i can see that it’s probably because there’s a lot of text i wanted to redact – it’s so full of emo bullshit it’s almost insufferable – i probably planned on getting rid of that embarrassing evidence but then forgot and never got around to it.

well, i’ve gone through and edited out most the shameful displays (leaving just enough to be interesting since it seems 1996 was a very sour year for me and i wouldn’t want to lose ALL of it) and posted it to the archive.

it’s got some good mechanoid sketches in it, and i think i’ll go with this mecha reindeer for my next project.

i’m also going to get back to the task of scanning my remaining artwork, and i actually have gotten almost everything populated with keywords which makes the archive more searchable.

yay hooray

oh man.

we’re really getting into the dregs now… but i’m committed to this project and so i will keep going!!!!!

YARRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

anyway.

this new batch is a small collection of loose drawings from around the time i was in junior high school, roughly 1988 to 1991.

still to come:

1. two large format sketchbooks (that i still have to figure out how the hell i’m going to scan) from 1985
2. a large sketchbook from high school (i know it’s out of sequence, but it’s also going to be a pain in the ass to scan)
3. some more loose drawings from when i was EXTRA little

and, for the PIECE DE RESISTANCE, i have what must be the first thing i ever drew. according to the note written on it by my mother, i was TWO AND A HALF YEARS OLD.

the sketch archives

well, i’m on a roll with the sketch archives. i’ve done the first chunk of high school sketches.

these are different in a few important ways. first, my high school drawings were done mostly on loose sheets of paper. i never really organized them in any particular order, so they span a period from 1991-1994. they’re all terrible, but because some of them are older, they’re even more so.

also, i drew mostly in pencil instead of pen, so the lines are lighter and have faded a little over the years. i think the scans came out as good as i could hope for, though.

view the sketchbook gallery

ok, the second coffee table book has been scanned. so ends the “sketchbooks-that-are-actually-books” series, which spans my college and post-college life.

there were a couple pages in this one that i just had to do multiple scans of, because of the way i had spread the drawings across the page.

the next step (aside from adding more keywords, which i’m slowly doing) is to begin the “high school” stage of sketches.

view the sketchbook gallery

i finished scanning in coffee table book #1.

the problem with the two coffee table books is that they are both large-format (11×14) which is larger than the scannable area of my scanner. i REALLY didn’t feel like going through the trouble of multiple scans per page, so i did my best to position the pages in such a way as to maximize the amount of relevant work that got scanned.

i feel comfortable doing this for two reasons

1. seriously, no one is paying attention and no one would ever notice
2. even if someone DID notice, the amount of stuff that’s getting omitted is negligible and inconsequential.

view the sketchbook gallery

i’ve finished scanning and uploading what i refer to as my “normal” sketchbooks. i started keeping them in my sophomore year at mass art, as part of my conceptual drawing class, and just never stopped.

i also have two “coffee table books” which are large format sketchbooks from 2000-2001. they were on the coffee table in my apartment and i invited anyone to draw in them so there’s lots of stuff that’s not mine. since the purpose of this project is to archive my own sketches, i’ll have to sort through those and weed out the other stuff.

the next step after that is to tackle my older sketches, which aren’t all contained in an actual “sketchbook”. i have a few binders full of loose material that needs to be organized and scanned.

before i do either of those things though, i’m going to go through and finish what i started with the first couple books: adding keywords and descriptions.

view the sketchbook gallery