sketchbook project tour

i wish i had some kind of cool artsy april fool's joke to play on you today, but i'm too tired to care. i guess it's better not to care than to, say, call my sister in key largo to tell her our dog got hit by a car, when she immediately burst in tears and i realized it was a horribly unfunny april fool's joke... umm.. yeah that really happened. i'm sorry, i was young and naive! and stupid.

embarrassing... anyway...

 

this weekend i will resume my art-making, after a day or two of relaxing, after weeks of non-stop, non-sleep.  i'm still too lazy to post, but i'm just updating about the sketchbook project tour i am participating in (or at least attempting to..) my sketchbook, full of 1EG's, is part of a library touring around the u.s., along with under 10,000 other sketchbooks. in february, the tour started in brooklyn, ny followed by austin, tx and is now in portland, me. so far, my sketchbook has been viewed a whopping one time! woo, go me! my hard work is paying off! i didn't expect it to be viewed many times, i really didn't know what to expect. i'm sure i'm on the low end and i'm just curious how many views other sketchbooks have and how the views on the higher end have so many. i also wonder if there's a way to publicize or raise interest in mine. who knows. i don't have time to find out or care :)

i was curious how the library system works, and i found this explanation on the site, which is pretty fascinating:

you can search for a book or: "We can also simply have the system pick two random books for the viewer by selecting a theme and hitting “Random Checkout, go!”. This will result in picking out a random book that hasn’t been checked out yet (or if all have been checked out already, it will pick one with the lowest checkouts) and then it will also pick a book right next to it in on the shelf. It picks two books next to each other so it’s quicker to get them to the viewer and to put them back later.

After the books are checked out, the system emails or sends a text message to the artist of the book letting them know that someone is currently viewing their work. This is my absolute favorite part of the system, as it really puts a human face on everything and keeps the artists connected with their books."

so at least if all else fails, the random check out might get me another 1 or 2 views. ha. i still find the idea of this whole thing very awesome, and i'm excited to visit the library once it returns to permanent home in brooklyn once the tour is complete.

i'd also like to note that i have sketchbook #2 in progress, with lots of characters that no one will ever guess. here's a preview above! who knows who it is?! i only spent a few days working on it several weeks ago, with 26 completed and 5 sketched out. i've been eager to continue and dying to finish. of course i won't have time to do either for a long while. why can't there be more hours in the day!

the sketchbook project

if you're wondering what my 1EG sketchbook was all about (the 88 characters for the contest), here is some info. the sketchbook project:

Thousands of sketchbooks will be exhibited at galleries and museums as they make their way on tour across the country. After the tour, all sketchbooks will enter into the permanent collection of The Brooklyn Art Library, where they will be barcoded and available for the public to view. 28838 artists from 94 countries around the world are participating. The tour starts February, 2011. All books will be included in an exhibition that tours the following cities: Brooklyn, NY Austin, TX San Francisco, CA Portland, ME Atlanta, GA Chicago, IL Washington, DC Winter Park, FL

Our Exhibitions are Interactive. The goal of the Project is to get blank sketchbooks into the artists' hands and then completed sketchbooks into the world for viewers to enjoy. We've taken the Project to task four times before, and our fifth go-around has some awesome improvements. We know where your book is at all times, and we're collecting statistics on who's looking at what - and where. We want you to feel connected to your book and the Project as it travels around the country.

It's a library. We'd like to think we're like librarians, wrangling with your book as you release it into the wild. We give the viewer a library card. They check a few books out, peruse through them, and return them to us. Wash, rinse, repeat. We make it easy for you and easy for them.

How we handle thousands of viewers and thousands of books. We use barcode scanners along with unique barcodes placed carefully on the inside back cover of each sketchbook. We hand-wrote a custom library system to catalog all the books, track the library cards, and handle viewers checking books out and returning them. No need to worry: we're professionals, and we've got it under control.

when i received my sketchbook, i was given a theme to run with, however i wished. my theme was "greatest story ever told." i picked it beforehand, and i thought it was a great one. i intended on coming with some kind of ongoing story, but of course as the deadline approached, i had less and less time and far too many pages to fill. i solved my problem by filling the pages with my 1EG's, since they are fast, pretty, and fantastic exercises. 1EG's, all of different characters from some of the greatest stories ever told: disney, tim burton, comics, greek mythology, cartoons, movies, so many more, the best of the best. what i love even more is that it has inspired me to continue making sketchbooks full of more of them. they're extremely therapeutic to draw, and i continuously lost myself for hours on end creating these favorite characters in my own special style. i'll never see my sketchbook again, unless i visit it at the library, which is sad since we all know how attached i grow to my art.. but it was a blast and i think many of you had fun figuring out who they each one was for my contest. (don't forget to email me with your address and which character you want a sketch of if you played.)

feel free to check out the set of 88 1EG characters on my flickr if you would still like to try and figure who each one is for yourself. i will eventually label each 1EG from the sketchbook, for anyone who's curious who exactly they all are. i should have kept to the "greatest story" theme with the front and back covers (photo at top) but i was pressed for time, which caused a lapse in judgement. i don't know what i was thinking. they are still pretty though. i have a ton of favorites, but two of my favorite outcomes (not necessarily the characters themselves) are gadget (rescue rangers) and meg (hercules). i should've given gadget a second arm, but i really love the way the two of them came out:

 obviously, i had to end the sketchbook with a one-eyed girl of myself! ...since i am clearly the epitome of "the greatest story ever told."

if only my wheelchair really looked that cool.