A studio journal spends most of its time on making things. Keeping them is the less interesting half and the one that quietly undoes the work, because paper records every room it has ever been stored in.
Paper is the most sensitive thing in the studio
Cotton rag, wood pulp, canvas and the sizing in all of them take up and give off moisture with the air around them. Stable conditions matter far more than dry ones. Paper that sits at a steady middling humidity will outlast paper kept bone dry for half the year and clammy for the rest.
Swings do the damage because the sheet changes dimension each time. Cockling along one edge, a wave through the middle of a sheet that was flat when you put it away, a gesso ground that develops fine cracking: all of that is movement, and movement comes from the room rather than from the materials.
Foxing is a condition report on your storage
Those small rust-coloured spots that appear on older paper are the clearest signal there is. They need moisture and they feed on impurities in the sheet, so they appear first on cheaper paper and in the parts of a stack nearest a cold wall.
Once foxing has started it does not reverse. The spots can be reduced by a conservator at real expense, and that is all. If work in a drawer has begun to spot, something about that room has changed, and the rest of the drawer is on the same path.
Where the cause turns out to be the building rather than the housekeeping, getting mould removed in Cincinnati or wherever the studio happens to be is the right call before any work goes back in. Growth on plaster behind a plan chest has a moisture source, and the source outlives any amount of cleaning.
Where not to put work
Not against an external wall. Not on a concrete floor. Not in a loft, where the temperature swing across a day is greater than anywhere else in a building. Not in a cellar unless it has been proven dry over a full winter.
A plan chest in the middle of a heated room is better than an archival box in an unheated one, which is not what most people expect to hear.
Interleaving, boxing and the small details
Acid-free tissue between sheets, buffered board above and below, and the whole stack flat rather than leaning. Nothing in a plastic sleeve long term: the sleeve traps whatever moisture was in the sheet when you put it in and holds it there against the surface.
Rubber bands, paperclips, sticky notes and newspaper all leave marks that become permanent within a couple of years. Label the box, not the work.
The habit
Twice a year, open the bottom drawer and look at the sheet at the back. The back of the bottom drawer is the coldest, least ventilated part of any storage you own, and it will show a change weeks before the rest of the chest does. If that sheet is flat, clean and smells of nothing, everything above it is fine.