A bit of a different blog post this week.
I am spending a lot of this weekend cleaning my apartment as I am renting and have an inspection by the property agent next week. So some of my sketching plans have disappeared. I thought about sketching my cleaning tools, but realised I would not be getting any cleaning done if I did that !
Instead, I have added any drawings that I have done in the past in relation to cleaning and they are the images scattered through my blog today.
Today I am writing about how I locate those drawings and sketches from the last 10 years in over 63 sketchbooks that are sitting on top of my mantle piece.
The answer is Flickr. Have you heard of it? Flickr (owned by Yahoo) is an online photo management and sharing website. You create an account and upload your scans/photos and it also allows you to organize your images. It was around before facebook, many other sites today.
I joined as a member in 2008, mainly to share my sketches with my family interstate. My sketchbooks are often my daily journal, so my family could keep up to date with what I was doing in Sydney .
I scan all of my sketches and upload them to Flickr. I have over 4600 images on Flickr . I then add “tags” which are descriptive keywords. The tags are the key to finding images. I can do a search through the archive of my “Photostream” and locate any drawings that match that search term. For example, for this page I searched for the words housework, dusting, cleaning, tools, broom and dirt .
Once I have found the image I can see the date I sketched it and find the original on my computer or in my sketchbook. I decided early on to include the date in the title eg 18Feb2017. My early scans are not great as I had not really learnt about scanning and I did not have Photoshop. Now, I have access to Photoshop software and I use it can ‘clean up pages’ ie. remove the edges of the sketchbook, remove scratch marks and make the background paper lighter (scanning often picks up every mark and distorts the colour a little). I do not do anything to the sketch. I sometimes remove the words so that the images can be used in another context on a website on printed ( such as on a birthday card).
Of course, searching through the tags is only as good as the information that I put in the description or tags in the first place. Gosh , do I sound like the Librarian that I am? When I started I was not very consistent with my tagging and now when I am rushed, or lazy I forget to add tags.
A small part of the floor where the dining room/living room meets the kitchen. Hmmm another part of the house that needs cleaning
Some of my early Flickr friends are still on Flickr, others are on other sites including facebook , instagram, websites. I post some of my drawings on the various sites (below) but everything goes onto Flickr, as it is my archive and database.
Instagram : alissaduke1
www.alissaduke.com
I also have organised some of my Flickr sketches into”Albums’ . Albums are a great way to keep sketches grouped by topic or theme. Some of them are :
My family history project drawings.
curious about Albums ? See them all
There are many ways to organise and locate sketches so that you or anyone else can search them. What do you do?