packrat poll

[ratcreature]

I'm wondering what other people do with their preliminary sketches and stuff. For each actually finished piece of fanart I end up with a pile of more or less awful and hideous half abandoned sketches, rough composition doodles, sketches to work out body parts, perspective, color, textures, sometimes just a couple, sometimes dozens and more. I have packrat tendencies in general, so it is hard for me to throw things out, but otoh, what do I need a pile with failed sketches of mishapen half-finished stuff for, once I have finished the work?

So I'm curious what other people do:

Poll #452 packrat poll

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 8

View Respondents

How much of a packrat are you?

View Answers

I keep everything, I might become/already am famous and my complete work process is worth preserving for posterity. Future scholars will love my estate. (If they ever manage to find anything in the boxes full of junk.)
1 (12.5%)

I keep some preliminary work, but only if the study/sketch/doodle/whatever looks nice in its own right, might be still of use for something later, is in a sketchbook which I keep intact, or I have some other reason for keeping it. The rest I throw out.
2 (25.0%)

I throw everything out that I don't need anymore once I'm finished with a piece of art. Decluttering is my lifestyle choice.
1 (12.5%)

It's not so much that I want to throw things out, but periodically circumstances (such as moving, running out of space etc) force me to, so I have purges.
2 (25.0%)

I work fully digital, so I don't produce these kinds of paper piles in the first place (and digital storage is cheap and plenty these days).
1 (12.5%)

Your radio buttons oppress me with their limited choices. I will explain further in a comment.
1 (12.5%)

Comments

[goss]

I move around a lot, so I give myself up to a 3-year period to store everything I draw. And after that I start sifting through and throwing out as necessary.

I love my digital camera though, because even if stuff is deteriorating or just plain lame, I just scan or take a few photos before throwing out, just in case I ever need to look at them again.

[ratcreature]

I haven't moved in over a decade, but my place isn't large. So it's still becoming a problem that I have these paper piles. I'm not prolific, but for everything I do finish, I end up with a lot of crap, like pages where I try out how a hand holding something might look like and such. Or the rough pencils of things that I then transferred via lightbox and cleaned up, and so on. And while I'm not pathologically attached to keeping everything, I'm kind of too lazy to sort out what I might want to keep, so more often than not I just dump everything in a pile on the side, and then when that becomes bothersome I dump that pile into a box.

[goss]

I find it gets easier to let go of things with time. After about a year I'm much less attached to all the little bits and pieces. I usually only keep one or 2 prelim sketches if it's a study I think I might find useful again. It's kind of liberating to only hold on to the final thing and get rid of the rest in one fell swoop. Start afresh.

Also, these days I've gotten into the habit of using sketchbooks. It's a bit of a pain to carry round a heavy book when I feel like drawing, but on the other hand there's a lot less clutter going on in my room. :)

[ratcreature]

I have weird issues with sketchbooks. I mean, with nice sketchbooks I get all verklempt and can't actually draw in them. My brother gave me a sketchbook as a gift once, and it has a real nice paper, but I just don't dare to scribble on it, because it such a waste to use good paper for sketches. I often use cheap small notebooks with blank paper to carry around and sketch in those, and these do keep down the clutter. But notebooks are inconvenient to use with a lightbox. You have to scan and then print.

[goss]

HEE! I feel your pain! I have, sitting right in front of me, a *gorgeous*, perfect sketchbook that I got as a present. I've had it for months now, but it's still blank. I just can't make myself mark up the nice clean pages. :b

lightbox

Oooh! I always wanted to get one of those. *adds to growing wish list*

[ratcreature]

Mine isn't actually a real bought lightbox, I built mine myself from some wooden slats, a piece of slightly frosted glass. It's not perfect, because I didn't get the lamps fit inside to illumate all evenly, but it works well enough for my occasional use and cost very little.

[lim]

*barges in to say*

I have this exact same problem with sketchbooks. I had to start mine thinking of it as a piece in itself, like a sort of stone age vid--it was the only way I could mark its beautiful pages!

[gnatkip]

I am glad to see other people with the same weird sketchbook issues. My people!

[ratcreature]

Hee. Shared neurosis ftw. I now mostly stick with cheap office supply notebooks, where I don't feel too bad when I draw some failed scribble, like half a body with a leg in wacky proportions attached wrongly, and don't feel like I wasted special paper.

[lim]

I throw away everything, pretty much. I regularly go through my hard drive and junk all my digital stuff as well omg. I am totes oppressed by useless possessions.

[ratcreature]

Heh. I'm the opposite. I mean, my packrat tendencies are not *quite* pathological, because I rarely keep actually broken stuff hoping it might still be useful for something, and I just don't buy a lot of things so my place isn't crammed full of junk (much), but I have piles of random stuff I haven't even looked at in years.

I never throw things away digitally either. But that is less of a problem, because I can search through digital files easier and they take up less space. Sometimes I do get rid of files, like I recently threw away diskettes with stuff from an Atari ST I owned in the 1990s, for which I didn't even have the computer anymore...

[lim]

Heh. I'm probably pathological...my brother is more extreme than me, even: he opens birthday cards and then puts them straight in the recycling.

I'm not quite that bad. Yet.

But I don't keep anything I've finished because I'm always drowining in things I've not yet finished and if I kept the done stuff in arm's reach I'd probably start fiddling with it again and then my pile would never ever get smaller. If I kept prelims as well...god, I'm quite afraid to think of the epic dickering that would ensue.

Well done on the Atari diskettes. *claps you on the shoulder* They have to fly the nest sometime... :P

[ratcreature]

Well, I'm better than my family. My father kept not just obsolete media, he kept the computers to read them with, which makes sense in theory, but considering the size of the computers back then was inconvenient, especially as he didn't even need the stuff on the media anymore. One example was some kind of Wang monstrosity from the 1970s... the thing took up half a room, and the hard disks were these huge disk in plastic carriers, like more than 50cm. And he still had this thing several computer generations later, i.e. at a time when PCs were around. He had packs with punch cards too. Also he kept catalogs for products, like in the 1980s he'd still have shelves in the attic stuffed full of folders with catalogs of obsolete engineering products from the 1960s. And considering that we've always lived in an apartment it was quite an accomplishment that he managed to get not just one, but actually two multi-room attic spaces stuffed full of mostly papers.

My brother kept old, non-working mopeds in his front yard (before he married and his wife put some sensible pressure on him), also some sort of manual car that worked via pedaling, in addition to one and sometimes two non-functional regular cars, also in general weird junk, like he has a cellar and an attic full of crap, and still some in his garden. Meanwhile I have neither a cellar, nor an attic available, just a smallish closet/pantry for such storage needs. So in relation to my family I'm rather less extreme.

[sholio]

Hee! My husband is *just* like that (he's never met a piece of old equipment he didn't want to keep -- and we own 11 acres, so there is a LOT of room for old equipment!). We are a terrible pair, because I'm packrattish about books and paper things but not really into stuff per se, and he doesn't care all that much about keeping books but he loves to find broken things and fix them up (or, as the case may be, plan to someday fix them up). Our house is going to be a boon to the archaeologists of the future. :D

[ratcreature]

Admittedly my brother did manage to repair and/or sell some of these iirc, and he doesn't have extreme random junk piles in his garden or anything. (which wouldn't be allowed anyway, I mean, it's the garden belonging to his apartment, in a city with more regulations than is healthy about maintenance, not some empty spot in the Alaska wilderness with lots of space and no neighbors, lol) And he got rid of some of the weird random stuff (e.g. one of the weird largish objects he kept was some kind of boxing dummy thing that you could punch? but he doesn't even box), to make room for stuff his baby daughter needs now. I expect that soon her becoming a mobile and inquisitive toddler will do much more...

[shadowvalkyrie]

I have to admit I don't make many preliminary sketches -- usually, I erase and redraw a picture until I'm halfway happy with it. (Yes, I'm aware that's not a good idea, seeing as it leaves rough patches of paper in the difficult-to-draw places, but it's the only way I can do it.) What I do sketch seperately (usually difficult body poses) I keep for future reference if it's any good and throw away mercilessly if it's not.

[ratcreature]

I couldn't work that way, because my first scribbles aren't like the finished thing at all. Like they are a messy loose scribble or not the same size or something. I need many tries before something looks okay. Like for example just now, I came across the pile of sketches for my Waterbender!Teyla artwork, just one human and the pose wasn't that hard, and that pile has one page with small stick figures trying poses, twelve pages of attempts to get the pose and proportions and costume right in the final format, two pages to try the face, two pages to try the hands, one for the symbols, and another page that finally has the final rough pencils which I then copied with my lightbox onto the thicker paper to do the inking and acrylic paint. For my recent HP artwork (also in that pile) with a diricawl I only have two pages of attempts to draw that bird, two pages trying feathers and wings, one page to try different crosshatching textures for plants. So it varies a bit, but 5-20 sheets of paper is normal for a fairly simple artwork, more if it is complicated. I just kind of suck at drawing, I guess?

[shadowvalkyrie]

I don't think so! I rather think you are the artist and I'm the occasional doodler, so I'm just not as much of a perfectionist. I also have trouble picking a picture apart to practice details (like feathers, or hands) -- it simply doesn't work out of context. I also tend to avoid close-ups, simply because small drawings of big things camouflage mistakes well... *g*
It's probably also, that I never actually learnt to draw from books or a teacher (Art in my school was utter crap), so I got myself into a lot of bad habits, and even when I now find tutorials, it's to late and they mostly don't work for me anymore. For example, I theoretically know you're supposed to start with a rough outline: sketch the pose of the entire body, fix the proportions, and only then start on detail. I never do that. I start on one part, do it in detail, then move on to the next part. It makes all my really artistic friends throw their hands up in despair... *g*

[ratcreature]

Heh, while I don't really think that there are right and wrong ways to go about drawing something, it is never too late to try a different approach and to learn entirely new things. Didn't Vincent van Gogh only start as an artist when he was almost thirty? And then he only worked for about a decade or so before he commited suicide with not even forty, so that's not a long time he had to become a great painter. And I think when he started he mostly taught himself out of books too. Of course he wasn't all that successful as professional artist while alive iirc, and rather crazy, but still. *g*

[thirdblindmouse]

I'm a mix of packrat and declutterer. I was raised by undeniable packrats, but I'm a bit of a neat freak, and I have a truly tiny apartment. I constantly strive not to become attached to things, because when I do I hold onto them forever. I have a lot of notebooks from when I was a kid, and my YA novels and children's books are slowly migrating to the shelves of my new apartment. I also keep broken objects whose future use I can imagine, but -- apparently unlike most people who do this -- rarely does more than a year pass before I actually use them.

[ratcreature]

My own problem is only partially attachment, but inertia and laziness. It's just much less work not to declutter.

[thirdblindmouse]

Ah, but it's a great way to procrastinate from real work. ;)

[ratcreature]

I rarely resort to things like cleaning for that. Feeling accomplished while still avoiding things I ought to do can be also achieved by compiling a new thematic list, updating a rec page, re-tagging my journal...

[thirdblindmouse]

Re-tagging is organization. It's all the same category, in my way of thinking. Thematic lists don't do it for me, though. My brain can identify less noble applications of OCD-ness with practiced ease.

[maire]

I can't possibly throw them out -- I love them! Even my worst, scrappiest bits of paper. My house is way too big, and full of stuff I'll never use again.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, I guess in a house with lots of room that is easier than in a small apartment.

[maire]

It's mostly just who I am, though. When I had one room in a tiny flat (what we call apartments, over here), I kept all the same stuff. There wasn't much room to move.