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.