📝 Building a Creative Archive
A museum of one's own
Keep your own scrapbook, your own museum, your own archive.—Austin Kleon
Starting a New Season
Last April, I set myself the task of doing a proper life spring clean, which primarily meant getting my admin and digital lives in order. A major part of this endeavour has been sorting and organising my photos—the ones I store directly in my iPhone, and something I hadn’t done since the beginning of 2022. Coincidentally, that was also the time when I began writing The Sketch Club.
The best way to start a new creative season is by first clearing space—purging, tidying, and letting go of what came before. As artists, we can adopt and benefit from the ritual of spring clean—not just in our homes, but in our creative practices.
Rediscovering the Past
As I transferred and organised photos from my phone to my laptop, I found myself reconnecting with much more than just holiday memories and travels around the world (I spent a year working and traveling in New Zealand two years ago). Among the photos, I found some little treasures: images of book covers I’d planned to get hold of and read, artworks that had inspired me, quotes that have resonated, and process shots of my own drawings and paintings. What began as a spring clean quickly turned into a rediscovery of a rich, emerging creative archive—my own museum, as Austin Kleon puts it.
This experience taught me something valuable and set the foundation for a habit I now hope to maintain: to regularly organise the scraps, or fragments of inspiration I encounter in my creative journey, and to revisit this evolving archive, this museum of one’s own of past works and gathered inspiration.
Building a Creative Archive
The first step, of course, is to be intentional about capturing and storing what resonates with you. I tend to photograph or screenshot anything that sparks something in me, from books I want to explore, artworks I admire, to quotes I’d like to re-read. Looking back through these images feels like traveling in time, stepping into a room full of inspiration, of things I love.
A creative archive can hold both your own work and the work of others. It can be organised by project, by theme, or, as I prefer, chronologically—by year, month, and event. For my Creative Archive, I’ve built on that structure by adding a few key folders organised by month:
Books – covers or pages of books I’ve come across and want to read or reread.
Drawings – digital illustrations I have done or photographs of my own sketchbook pages and paintings.
Inspiration – images from exhibitions and any sort of artwork, quotes, etc., I found inspiring (aka, Julia Cameron’s filling the well concept).
This is simply my way of doing it—for now, but I do encourage you to create your own. That’s the beauty of it, and it will naturally evolve over time. I am definitely planning to change the system eventually. And that’s perfectly fine. Your creative archive should reflect your needs and current interests and be flexible and resilient. I am even considering adding a few folders or tags with a different theme—perhaps photography, a collection of quotes, or even things I want to draw. The point is, it works as it is now, and that’s more than enough.
A Lifelong Practice
Anne Lamott reminds us in Bird by Bird that creativity happens in fragments — and those fragments are worth capturing, however small or messy they may seem: ‘If you don’t capture them, your ideas will slip away like dreams.’
I’m committed to making the keeping of a creative archive a lifelong habit, and I encourage you to do the same! So far, it’s been deeply rewarding. It’s been giving. Not only does it make it easier to revisit past work or discover a new book to dive into, but it also enriches the creative process itself, treating influences and inspirations as potential tools. This Creative Archive is becoming my constellation of fragments — of what fascinates me, what fuels me, and what I hope to create next. It’s both a resource and a reflection of my evolving interests: a quiet, yet intentional space where creativity has room to grow—a museum of one’s own.
✏️✨
Happy sketching!
Ana
I’ve been wanting to do this for a while but am not sure of how I want to organise everything! The other factor is that I’m increasingly drawn to analogue over digital but it seems daft to be printing out photos… I probably need to be more intentional about researching and give myself a deadline to start this process of organising or it will never happen… Lovely to read your news as always Ana 🧡