Relatable, years after a career change I’m still hoarding nice sketchpads and watercolour paper because anything you do with them has to live up to the material.
you'll never be able to do work that will "live up to the material" if you don't ever use it
it's just raw materials, leaving them sitting in a closet is a worse insult to them than using them for a shitty sketch, at least from the shitty sketch there's something on it and you learnt a little something from the process of doing it
amateur artists often have this problem, pro artists do not fucking care, we will use that expensive paper to take notes on a phone call if that's what's handy, it does admittedly help if you know damn well that the $100 block of ultra-swank watercolor paper is going to end up being used to make multiple pieces that go for 10x the cost of that, but you can't get there without burning a ton of materials
take out every pad and just draw some kind of scribble on every page, now it's ruined, now start filling up those pages with drawings instead of having a stash in the closet that you never touch because it's Too Good
fill them up with shitty studies and sketches
you'll never be able to do work that will "live up to the material" if you don't ever use it
it's just raw materials, leaving them sitting in a closet is a worse insult to them than using them for a shitty sketch, at least from the shitty sketch there's something on it and you learnt a little something from the process of doing it
amateur artists often have this problem, pro artists do not fucking care, we will use that expensive paper to take notes on a phone call if that's what's handy, it does admittedly help if you know damn well that the $100 block of ultra-swank watercolor paper is going to end up being used to make multiple pieces that go for 10x the cost of that, but you can't get there without burning a ton of materials
take out every pad and just draw some kind of scribble on every page, now it's ruined, now start filling up those pages with drawings instead of having a stash in the closet that you never touch because it's Too Good