Drawing Management

 Drawing management is really only what I like to call the arrangement of your drawings, so that they all are nicely organized and can be easily found later on, when you have several projects on the go at once (like I do!) you can file drawings away in folders, but have you labelled them so that they can be found easily?

Many artists stash all of their art and drawings either in one pile or they fail to organize their work into filing systems to be found later on and this can be time consuming when you know you've done a couple of really cool sketches and you just can't find them, I like to put all of my working sketches into a folder marked unfinished sketches and this folder will be visited alot as you come back to finish some of them abandoned drawings or not.

Other folders you might have:

• Finished drawings folder for all the drawings you believe are finished and can be used immediately for any art project, or they could be the basis of some good colour based designs being that they provide the original ideas to bounce off of.
• A folder for scraps of used paper, I do this often and I don't know why, but sometimes I produce some pretty good sketches and ideas on the used paper, it could be lined paper or old computer print outs.
• Folder for old drawings and ideas that you may use one day, but just not yet, I have many of these and they do come in handy for inspirational purposes when you are experiencing artists block.
• If you are lucky enough to have kept all of your old school drawings or schoolwork that included sketches, then these are great to keep in a separate folder not only for memories but some ideas can be born out of childish drawings.

Managing all of your drawings is really just about good organization skills and realising that every drawing may have it's use for another day and the management aspect of keeping filed archives is one of the best ideas you can do.

Even better is to buy a couple of flash drives to store your drawings on and just like the above folder method you can create some archived folders with pretty much the same names and things to file away as above., I prefer the larger flash drives that hold around 4GB which is quite a lot of space for your drawings and sketches and then you could use the free art software Gimp to clean any artwork up when needed.

File archives are just like any other type of file library, but as it's yours you have total control over what goes where and how you manage your drawings, drawing management is essential to be successful with your art projects.