I continue reflecting on my drawing practice and experimenting with ways I use the internet and computers to augment that practice. This morning it boiled down to… “what am I doing with the drawings I generate at Dr Sketchy? where are they going? what’s the point?!” I have a desire to share them with others, and to use them as stepping stones as I work through this thinking out loud, but have many questions about platforms, presentation styles, plugins, and on and on and on.
What inspired me yesterday was coming across a tumblr blog of a buddy from the Sketching classes, Mr. Vincent K. Smith A.K.A Creepstown. He’s set up a tumblr blog for his sketches which is FANTASTIC, and whose site I at once want to copy.
Then of course begins the second guessing. What is all this about using a 3rd party social media site, when I have a perfectly functioning blog right here? Why should Tumblr get me content for free (and the traffic!) when I could be generating that energy at jasontoal.ca. BUT… there is a community of tumblr blogs out there that I follow, why not join them? The lightbox is pretty good and SEPARATE from my blog, a good place to post “quick and dirty sketches” without having to commit to a thoughtful post, and I get the benefit of the huge tumblr audience and all their reblogging and favouriting to help get my work seen. But is pure numbers my objective here? Also, I am an instagram user, and found a lovely little plugin that takes all my IGs and imports them into my blog for posterity. It saves as ‘draft’ by default, by I like the idea that I GET TO KEEP MY INSTAGRAM posts, and could do so wether IG stays afloat or not. There could potentially be similar plugins for tumblr.
I have come to no ultimate decisions about how I will proceed sharing my sketches, but I will make the effort to do so. Not the finished pieces, but the sketches. The 1, 2, and 5 minute poses that we do during our warm up. I often throw these away because I cant keep everything, but inevitably there are little pieces of magic in these drawings that I love and want others to see.
What I intended for this post which was to scan the drawings from my last session and share them in a gallery here and that is all. I am not sure tumblr will play a role but honestly if I can have my cake and eat it too why not?
In this practice I can say it is the actual scanning and file maintenance that is the most tedious task and biggest barrier to sharing. I am going to focus on scanning, uploading and sharing and will continue to experiment with different Gallery tools, Social Media and Plugins to share them in a meaningful way.
