A Place for Everything

Remember this? The cluttered little corner in which I’ve been making my art for the past 3 years or so?




It’s been transformed into this:

But wait a sec, you say. That’s all banjos and Kermits and ridiculously clean flooring, where are you going to make art now?

Oh, I have a whole room for that now.




That was, previously, the little room featured here:

Let’s take a look around!

First we have the computer center, for all my digital art needs. The bookcase next to it holds all my art and design books for easy reference.

In front of the window is a lovely little spot for a stool and the easel. I’ve never so appreciated the light this little room gets and holds - it’s southern light, and is kind of intense in the winter, but right now seems lovely.

The storage thing by the easel was actually once a printer stand. It still does well for holding lots of office supplies and such. There’s an old glass cutting board on top which will be easy to clean after I fling all my dirty brushes around on it.





The drawing/work table is totally cleared off - and will stay that way. No more stuff piling up around the edges! I’ve spent some time there already in the evenings, working out of Vanderpoel’s The Human Figure and the feeling in the room is so different than what I had. There’s something very still and encapsulating and isolating, which tremendously helps me focus. I’ve been turning the PC on to have Pandora running and loaded up Pidgin on there, too, for the occasional IM, but I find myself not even glancing at chats and such. Just happily drawing away! I very much need to download a work/break timer though, like Pomodoro, just to give my eyes and hands a rest and stretch my back every 20 minutes or so.

The closet in the little gray room has become storage central! I think I carried in 15-20lbs of different papers and canvases alone. This was desperately needed though, especially with all the nice substrates I’ve collected over the years, just to keep them both nice and also close at hand. I think I’ve had the same book of watercolor paper for 10 years. Time to use that stuff!

The top of the cabinet also gives me a nice place for finished works to lie flat, at least until I can afford some drawers specifically for that.



Now this whole transformation took me well over a week. In fact, I just got my banjo-hanger today and still have to put shoe molding down in the closet. That was really the issue, when it got down to it - a lot of little things that have been needing to be done for a long time. I ended up cleaning out that cabinet, three closets, half of the attic, laying about 33’ of molding, washing all the floors, throwing out masses of old stuff, and finally finding the good stuff decent homes.

If you work with charcoal, wash your floors more often than I do:



Actually, I have a Hoover Floormate and do the floors once a week, but that obviously wasn’t enough. In fact, everything needed to be washed/wiped down. Everything. All the furniture was pulled away from the walls and swept behind/washed behind. And that shoe molding, yeah. I laid all the laminate flooring you see between 4-6 years ago. Some places never got that finishing touch of the shoe molding. Outside of one closet, it’s done now (and I just have to do the finishing on the molding for the last closet and it’ll be done, too.)

It’s nice not having ½” cracks catching dirt and cat hair gaping open here and there!

The amount of stuff was just overwhelming, too. I have never moved (well, once when I was 6, literally walking from one house to the new one next door) so there was, of course, a TON of stuff and clutter that just builds up over time. Trails that would sprawl across the room:

I ended up going through all my DVD’s, CD’s, VHS TAPES OMG, old electronics, so on and so forth, and putting a ton in a bag to sell and a ton in a box to recycle. I’ve often read that we really shouldn’t keep anything we don’t use in the past 6 months; that might be overboard, but by the time I was done with this project I was quite happy to be casting stuff out right and left (my dresser drawers and clothes closet remain on the list!)

The change, though, has been remarkable. Having a separate space for work and for relaxation is wonderful. Getting my instruments out of corners and closer to a place I might reach up and grasp one has lead to a lot more use - despite my being very out of practice on the bass and violin! I’m still splitting my gaming time between the big PC in the studio-room and my Mac on the couch in front of the TV, but the odd thing is it’s actually lead me to play a lot less, as I find myself with so many other things at hand to do.

It was also really refreshing to do a house-project like this again. I’ve done a lot of painting, stenciling, flooring, refinishing, etc, but basically nothing in recent years. It was great to smell the paint and spackle again and to put pieces of wood together. It’s gotten me itching to build a model or something. Build something again.

But more than anything, I want to put that little gray room to good use. I feel presumptuous calling it a “studio”, especially when it’s such a humble little space. But it’s already giving me a feeling of such concentrated promise. If there was anything I wanted out of this whole project, it was that.

Preparations and Renovations

Lo! The end of classes is upon us!

There is, officially, less than a week left of this semester. Unofficially, I'll have all my work in on Thursday. And with nothing scheduled for the summer, that means I can actually plan to successfully Work for Realz.

This is very exciting for me. Anyone who has read this blog for the past year knows I'm terrific at getting ideas and making plans. Very seldom do I actually get things done, however (I still have an ongoing painting started in the summer of 2009 nearly finished.) There are lots of reasons for this, the top ones being that I'm so often Working on Assignments. I don't know how to only spend 40 minutes or an hour on a drawing. I draw or paint until it's good and right. So school assignments eat my time.

I can also only spend so much time wrestling artwork in that little corner pictured above.

If I really want to get some things going this summer, as I plan to, I figured I need to do some renovating. You see, my art-studio space kind of suffered a crisis several years ago when I put all my stuff away and said I'd never draw again. At the time, I was using a very large former bedroom and had plenty of room for two big easels, a worktable, a drafting desk, lots of bins and carts and so forth. But when I put everything away, I decided to make that room a living space, and so turned 2/3rds of the room into a bit of a home theater - big TV, surround sound, big couch, etc. That left me with 1/3rd to use as a workspace when I started drawing and painting again. As you can see above, it's been a little... close.

The other difficulty is that the computer/scanner is in the other room. These days I go back and forth so often between sketchbooks, Photoshop and Painter that I'm constantly carrying things in and out of the smaller office room, which has also been suffering a bit of an identity crisis. In my youth the office was the "playroom" and sewing room, sometimes even a guest room. Ever since our first IBM PC, it's had a computer of one sort or another in it, and for a while had two. Presently it's got my work computer and the printer/scanner/fax, along with a lot of half-used office/storage furniture. It has a large, poorly-used closet and harbors the catbox. I replaced the flooring and repainted a couple years ago, and it's now a lovely neutral shade of gray.

Behold this poorly composited photo:

The glass desk with the big monitor is where I generally do my digital painting and such. It's been problimatic for years because it constantly conducts static electricity to my (homebuilt) PC, switching it off or killing the USB devices if I dare move (usually only in the winter.) I don't know how much work I've lost because of this, but it's been infuriating at times.

SO, after much deliberation, I've decided to take that little office room and turn it into a studio workspace. It is small, but small can be efficient, too. Small can mean I can turn around and flop a sketchbook onto a scanner. Small can mean I can bring up a reference right on a computer screen in the room I'm painting. Small can mean all the mess is concentrated in one space.

Most of all, small means I can open the door to go to work and close it behind me to stop. If you don't get what that means, well, it's probably the biggest challenge when working from home. When your prime workspace is in the same room as the TV and the couch, it's not easy to focus. When your prime relaxing space is in the same room as your workspace, it's not easy to relax. Secondary to the huge time-eater that classwork has been, this has been my biggest stumbling block. It's time to get a new, clean, efficient workspace in order.

And at the same time, reclaim my living space from the charcoal dust and paint!

Thanks to a nifty little online floorplanner I figured out how to fit all my work stuff in that one little room. The glass desk will be brought into the TV room as a home for my Macbook, which has been living on a lapdesk by the couch for the past year. Thankfully the aluminum unibody makes it near-impossible to shock! My work PC will move over to the unused wooden computer desk with the printer/scanner, and my worktable and easel will get moved in where the glass stuff used to be. Big Cabinet will get shoved in the closet - it WILL fit! Catbox and Cattree get moved into the TV room, to get tucked behind a door. The cats will just have to adapt to their change in facilities!

It really ends up giving me a decent space, with all the storage and tools around me that I need.

It's such a relief - and so exciting - just to have this all worked out. I've been trying for several years now to Get Things Done with the current setup, and it just hasn't been working. So once everything is handed in Thursday, I'm going to moving things around. There's some shoe molding I never got in after laying the floors in here years ago, and tons of cleaning and clearing-out to do. Rearranging closet-space. Spackling and touching-up walls. Getting everything cleaned up and organized and ready to do stuff in again.

At very least, it's a good place to start.