Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Sketchbook

Street View, originally uploaded by carolsLittleWorld.

This is another image from my “Mexico in Blue” series. I hope you like it.

For those of you looking for a creative opportunity in which you can participate, I should also let you know that, over at the Arthouse Coop, I’ve signed up for the Sketchbook Project. What’s a Sketchbook Project? You might be wondering and, once again, I would be here to fill you in with all of the juicy details. (According to their website: “it’s like a concert tour but with Sketchbooks.”)

The way the project works is all who sign-up (ahem: that would be me and, um, possibly you if you’re interested) receive, in the mail (ahem: that would be your actual mailbox and not that email thing you twitter on about) a sketchbook. Yes, an actual sketchbook (ahem: behold! The Moleskin Cahier) The rules are simple: you have to use the sketchbook, the actual sketchbook that they send you. You can fill it up with doodles, drawings, photos, paint, rip it to shreds, draw on the cover, draw outside of the lines, finger paint, or even whistle dixie if you’d like, so long as you send the sketchbook back to them once it’s either completed, or the deadline comes about. They’ll receive your book and create exhibitions around the country from all of the sketchbooks they get. You’ll be able to track your book and see who opens it over the course of the exhibition, and the book eventually winds up in the Brooklyn Art Library, along with thousands of other sketchbooks, completed and sent in from around the world. They’ll eventually put a digitized version of your sketchbook on-line but the fun, the real fun, the nuts and bolts of the project, comes from the fact that you get to carry around and doodle for months, into this nice little sketchbook that somebody provided for you. Anybody can participate, from anywhere around the world, so long as they’ve got some kind of a mailbox, PO Box, post office like agency, or can otherwise get and send a small package (read: sketchbook) in the mail. (Ahem: relax, it’s not cocaine, so it should be street legal.)

In case you’re wondering who these “Sketchy” people are, they are the same folks who brought us the Scavenger Hunt project and they have many other projects on their website that you can sign-up for, should you be interested in creating some art, need a new hobby or the like, but don’t really want to make a career out of it. Even if you do want to make a career out of it, I suppose having an exhibition as the “Brooklyn Art Library” is not really a bad thing now, is it?

The sketchbook project offers themes, which you can adhere to (or not) as the case may be. The theme I have picked for my sketchbook will be: “Make mine a double.” I picked this theme because, well, because it’s easy to draw circles, even when, perhaps one is drunk, so I figured that would be a good theme. (My doodles are going to be about drinks, drinking, glasses and barware, the search for the perfect margarita, swizzle sticks, lipstick and phone numbers on napkins, cocktail shakers, bottles, spouts, spigots, barkeeps, pub crawls, bar bands, and the like.)

There’s still time to sign-up and participate if you are interested in contributing to the project. (Ahem: for all of you photographers out there, it must be said, you can actually go buy a glue stick and, um, stick away at a sketchbook in case, you know, in case you are shy about drawing some foof into a book that the entire world might be able to see one day.)

Sketchbooks to artists are kind of like pianos to rock stars, only, shall we say, a bit more portable. Yeah, all that and I can’t wait to get mine.

Until next time…