Artist Studio Planning
An artist studio can be as uncomplicated as your kitchen or dining room table with your supplies in a portable roll-around set of plastic drawers from Willy Wally World or as complicated and complex as an entire building custom built for your particular art studio wants / needs.
Either way - it takes planning for the most efficient usage of time, space and supplies. My friend came over last Saturday - I have a wooden box full of tube watercolor paints - it is sitting on the corner of my computer desk right now because I do not have anywhere to put it at the moment and I didn’t want to put it away - I thought I might get a chance to use them and actually do some watercolor painting - I didn’t but when he saw the box of paints - his assumption was that I had started painting in oils again - my easel for oils is folded up and in the garage right now - there is no place to keep it standing in the room, partly because of the way the room is set up - there are two doorways - one regular size doorway to the kitchen and then a double size doorway into the living room. If I were painting in oils - the easel would be in the middle of the room with a wet canvas on it 
in the drying process.
Nowhere in this house is it convenient to put up my easel and leave it up for me to be able to paint on it whenever the mood happens where I want to paint in oils - the easel takes up quite a bit of room and it is only a metal Stanrite not a large wooden easel - and this house does not really have good light at all in the 2 or 3 corners where it would fit for leaving it up without making it nearly impossible even for just me and the dog to move around the house comfortably with it up.
I didn’t choose this house - it was my daughter’s house and she chose it - it is an okay house … but for this working artist … it is not. When I was trying to decide a few months ago whether or not to buy this house or not, I never could pinpoint all of my major objections to living here the rest of my life beyond it not having a shower and it being old which means to me that it is not energy efficient - getting new hardie plank has helped immensely but that did not resolve the most pressing problem for me as an artist - it’s not convenient for painting for me - for someone else, they could be just fine painting here - for me, the lack of light where I need it with the convenience of the right spaces for my art equipment was the problem I could not articulate into my mind.
I figured it out tonite what my main problem with buying this house had been and why I was determined that I did not want to buy it. I went to Manvel to talk to Advantage Housing (ask for Amy - she is fantastic - tell her Barbara said to talk to her!) about a land / home package - I picked out the floor plan I want for my manufactured house {NM105 for anyone interested in seeing the floor plan with my sunroom for my studio} - I asked about the windows (two sets of glass with what appears to be about 3 or 4 inches of space between them) and found out they are that way for the energy efficiency - the air space between is kind of like insulation in the walls [that's how I understood it, not exactly word for word what I was told LOL].
An artist spends a lot of time in their studio - the sunroom is bigger than the master bedroom (unless you include the master bathroom in the calculations) but I spend very little time in the bedroom - I sleep there - the rest of the time I am not in the bedroom - I do not plan to put a TV in my bedroom - I tried that before - I didn’t much like having a TV in my bedroom - guess I am not a TV in the bedroom kind of person - I’d rather have my drawing table in there than a TV (even if it has my Playstation 2 hooked up to it - to me, bedrooms are for sleeping and that is what I do in there. I need room for the bed and a dresser and nightstand - there is plenty of room for them in the bedroom. There is plenty of room in the living room for the TV and there is room in my grandson’s room for him to have a TV in there to play video games when he is not in the art studio with me or doesn’t want to watch movies.
My point is that if you are getting a new place to live, be aware of what you need in your art studio space to be comfortable, efficient and content working on your art so you can make sure you have it - for me, it is about light, windows and airyness with wall space for my L shaped computer workstation, wall space for my drawing table, corner space for my oil easel with room for my computer desk chair, wall space for a bookcase to hold my art books and enough wall space for whatever I get to hold my art supplies. The sunroom has two walls of windows - lots of light and it is not a small room so it also has that airy feel to it while having plenty of wall space (4 wall spaces) and corner spaces (3 corner spaces) to meet my needs.
If you are not getting a new place to live, look at your art space and determine how you can make it work better to meet your needs as an artist. It may be as simple as buying a taller bookshelf with drawers in it maybe to hold your supplies or as complicated as needing a new table easel for a card table in a corner. You won’t be sorry for making your art studio life better - it will show up in your artwork if you are more happy, comfortable and content in the area where you create your art. I have a friend who cannot paint unless she is in the middle of the house with everyone coming and going - she says the changing energy & tide of life noise with changing light inspires her while another loves working in a dark bedroom with on Ott light as her light source any time of the day or night. They know what helps them best so they have created workspaces that make their art studio efficient for them. Until now, I’d never thought about it - I just put my art stuff where-ever it was convenient or would fit out of the way of other people in the house and stuffed the extra stuff elsewhere if there wasn’t enough room for it to all be together. Use your imagination and creativity to improve your art studio as it is or to plan for the new space like I am doing. Get to know yourself better - that makes us better artists too!
