Sketchbook Project Progress: Spreadsheets! (Patreon)

I have been doing well at my goal of consistent scanning; my target is five historical scans a week and whatever I’ve done in my current sketchbook, and instead I’ve been doing about 25 historical scans a week, sometimes more. I’ve been picking a random book every day, just to keep things interesting, but once I started getting into the final chapters of the new Alysha novel I plucked out Sketchbook 121, which has some scans in it from my initial story development for that book that I know I’ll want to include in the author art backmatter.

Focusing on this one sketchbook allowed me to finish scanning everything in it, giving me my first “mission complete!” in this project. Orrrrrr, so I thought, until I had a look at the folder and thought, ‘and now I need an inventory.’ It’s no good to have the scans if you don’t know what you are, and there’s a limit to the data I can cram into the filename.

I started a spreadsheet, which I hope to turn into a template for the rest of the project, and to a large extent it’s a duplication of the old stardancer website database backend. Not all of the fields I had for that database were useful, so I’m trying to streamline the thing to ‘here’s where the search terms I hit most often.’ I also decided to go with a spreadsheet because I figured it would make uploading into a future database easier (exporting from spreadsheet to database-uploadable-file is standard stuff). And yes, there was a separate decision tree where I tried to decide whether to have one spreadsheet per sketchbook, or if I wanted one master spreadsheet with each sketchbook in a tab; I decided the latter would quickly become cumbersome, which is how I ended up landing on ‘plan to put all this in a future database.’

I thought scanning was tedium, but populating the inventory is like trudging through waist-deep mud, and it can’t be outsourced; while superfans might be able to identify some 20%-40% of what’s in these sketchbooks based on long experience with my ENTIRE published canon, no one is going to be able to look at a few wavy lines and say ‘oh yes, that’s when I started drawing a Jokka and got bored because I put the head too low and couldn’t be bothered to erase it and move it up the page; also, I was sitting in the Starbucks by the university, and I was working on this particular Jokka short story at this time, so it was on my mind and that’s probably Kediil come to think of it.’ I mean, I could page through the sketchbook and say that stuff out loud to someone typing it in for me, but I’m still involved.

So yes. Tedium. The ‘scan and upload what you just drew’ part of this process is intended to prevent me from having to do this all at once at some future date. Or it will, once I decide how I want this template to look.

Currently the spreadsheet has two tabs: the overview (with the themes and physical description of the cover), and the page list (which breaks down the page-by-page content of the book). I’m debating if there’s anything else I want to add to these; long-time jaguar readers will remember that for a while I was doing a sketchbook retrospective on Livejournal that discussed a cluster of five sketchbooks at a time, with a lot more context (I’ve included a screenshot of that). I really liked that data and want it to exist somewhere permanently, I’m just not sure how I want to keep it.

Those of you who’ve known me longest also know that some part of me is considering how to monetize this long and extremely time-consuming process. I don’t have any fresh ideas on that one, but here are some of my considerations:

• Livestreaming the scanning
• Kickstarting the livestreaming of the scanning (really!)
• Writing posts like this for patreon/locals, or posting the artwork
• Doing a ‘best of’ portfolio, which I used to do for auction sights in the early 2000s
• Doing a ‘sponsor the scans’ retrospective, like I did on Livejournal
• Sell access to the archives (not sure what this would look like, but it’s on my mind)

I am not far enough into this process to figure out how to recoup my time, but I want to because this is a monumental amount of work.

So, Sketchbook 121 is not actually as done as I thought. And now I’m going from ‘scan 5 pieces of art a week’ to ‘scan 5 pieces of art a week and document them,’ so as I expected, this project is bloating up nicely. >.>

As always, suggestions are welcome! (And yes, my fellow data-paranoics, I am backing up to multiple sources and investigating adding extra ones. I share your doomsday scenarios….)