Operation: Pass the Sketchbook

Another image from 1000journals.com. I bet ours will look even more awesome.

Alright guys, here’s one plan for our annual communal sketchbook (any suggestions on how to make it work better will be appreciated).

Once I’ve got everybody’s long-term email and at least a temporary mailing address, I’ll make a mailing list and send it out to everybody. I’m thinking it could work like a phone tree, where each person just ships to the next one on the list. We could organize it so people who live close to each-other are grouped in the list, so the book’ll have shorter trips in the mail. Or if we wanna be more random we could do it alphabetically, or…whatever, really.

But to do this I’ve gotta get everybody’s info, and I’ve only got 3 or 4 people so far. I know how busy everyone is—my head is exploding and I’m not even graduating this semester! But since lots of people ARE graduating, I want to at least have all the information before the summer. Don’t worry, I’ll keep bugging you. :)

So, next thing to figure out is how long each person will hold on to the sketchbook. The average size sketchbook will have enough pages that each of us gets to play with more than one. We could figure out how many each of us gets and then each keep the book until we’ve filled up our allotted pages. OR (and I like this option better) we could each do one spread and pass it on. This way the book would cycle through the list more than once--we could see more of what everyone is doing and those who are at the beginning of the list don’t get jipped out of seeing stuff.

I also think scanning the pages as we go is a great idea, and we can post our progress to the blog, and have digital records in case we decide to self-publish. We can think about that more once we’ve actually filled up a book.

And on to the stickiest question: who gets to keep it when we’re done? My thought is that we should make it totally random. We can pull a name out of a hat each year, and the winner gets to keep the book. No one can win more than once until everybody’s got a full sketchbook. That way there’s incentive for people to keep participating each year. ;)

Well, there’s a rough plan anyway. Whaddya guys think?