I recently unearthed a pile of my old sketchbooks from my college days back in the late 1990s. I had dug them out in order to make some high-quality scans for archival purposes, and then post selected works on deviantART. Most of the material isn’t very good, but there’s a sizable amount of it, given that I was an art student at the time.

The books are mostly filled with comic book and cartoon character design, as well as interface sketches and animation roughs. I was drawing and animating back in college like I had a purpose. (Which I did: the pursuit of a degree, and all that. Sadly, it all ended up being a fool’s errand; it’s quite depressing to look back on this stuff, but I digress.) I was also doing a lot of cloning back then; that is, I’d try to copy professional works by hand, in an attempt to try and learn “how they did it.” I’m not going to bother posting any of the cloned crap to deviantART, as they’re only inferior copies of well-known images.

I even found a large newsprint tablet, which I used in my introductory drawing class. It’s all still life stuff rendered in charcoal, and unfortunately there’s a considerable amount of material missing: the pieces I had to remove from the tablet and turn in for grading. I did get all of the stuff back at the end of the semester, and it was rolled into a tube and stored…somewhere. I have no idea where any of it is, and I’ve got a feeling it’s permanently lost. (I may even have thrown it away in a fit of rage or sadness.)

But let’s get back to the sketchbooks, because that’s where things get weird. When flipping through these books, I laid eyes upon pieces that I haven’t viewed in over a decade. Many of them I hadn’t even thought about in years! Memories came flooding back when I found this stuff, not all of them pleasant.

Then I got to the pieces I didn’t recognize at all.

I actually found things I’d drawn in the sketchbooks…and I don’t know what the hell they are, nor do I remember drawing them. This goes beyond simply not knowing what a particular subject is. This is also not knowing why I drew a particular piece, and that’s far worse. Art comes from one’s mental state, and I can usually figure out why I created certain pieces as a reflection of my feelings and thoughts at the time.

Not so with this random stuff. Those memories are completely missing, as if they’ve been surgically removed. I’ve strained and racked my brain to remember, but to no avail. It’s unsettling to see things that you created but have no memory of them. It’s like someone else produced them, even though they’re still clearly your own.

Aside from these tangible artworks, I also stumbled across my Flash archives while reorganizing my hard drive recently. (The animation program, not the superhero.) These things were buried pretty deep down, which is probably why I hadn’t come across them until now. I did a lot of short animations back in college, as well as fake movie trailers and Web interfaces. One trailer in particular, Resurgence, was actually my independent study project in Flash; I spent months teaching myself the program and building the final product, but it’s rather crude and embarrassing to look back on now. The original transparency art I used to create Resurgence fares a little bit better.

Anyway, while I remembered most of the stuff in the archives, I came across a significant amount of material that I just did not recognize. As with the sketchbooks…I know I created them, but why?! This is even more aggravating than the sketches, since these pieces are not static. So not only were they drawn for an important reason, they were animated in a certain way also for an important reason. Granted, most of them are scraps, but that doesn’t lessen their meaning. If only I knew what the goddamned meaning is!

This whole ordeal has been incredibly frustrating. I obviously created these works for important reasons. And now I don’t know what those reasons were. It almost sounds like the genesis of some grand conspiracy theory spy thriller. More likely, though, it’s just something critical that I forgot, and it’s irritating the living shit out of me. It’s like little pieces of my life are missing.