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

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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

[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...