A permanent sketchbook

I’ve added my sketchbook back to the site nav.

I can’t remember why I originally removed it. It may have been because I hid it on my homepage and thus had to also hide it in the site nav. Whatever the case, I’m over it. I put it back.

It’s October now, which means it’s Inktober, which is why I’m thinking about my online sketchbook. I’m not satisfied with how it is currently, both in workflow and execution. The problems:

• Adding sketches to it is cumbersome. I have to write a bunch of markup, and it’s an afterthought to when I publicly post them from my phone on Twitter.
• The organization is unsatisfying. Currently, I’m posting by year (2021, 2022 sketches…) which works but ultimately doesn’t consider different categories the works could fit into (subject, medium, series)

I don’t have a solution for either of these yet.

Some things I’m musing upon:

• How to manage sketches in eleventy. Currently I throw images into posts, like a traditional blog. This forces them to live only in one post at a time, so there’s no per-sketch organization.
• If I stick everything into a data file, then I can tag each sketch individually, and they can live in multiple contexts. But I’m unsure if this is the best option, or just one I’m gravitating towards because it’s the only tool I know for managing data. There’s a bit less markup involved here than the previous option, but it’s still writing JSON.
• Collections I would like to display, which are multi-year endeavours or specific subjects: inktober works, hourly comic day, figure studies, urban sketches, xyz series fanart, film studies.
• Yearly sorting is nice for demonstrating skill progression (and embarrassing for highlighting the lack of)
• Emphasize that this is an archive more than it is a showcase or portfolio, so it also includes the unremarkable and bad works.
• Where to put the nsfw stuff?