Art Studio Tour & Organization Ideas

[Music] carolyn duby here what's the play for today uh today i've got an art studio tour for you and along with showing you the studio i'm also going to explain to you how i make the decisions that i make and the logic or not so logical logic that i use to decide where to put things so let's head on up to the studio let's take a walk up the rainbow flight of stairs and i have to say on this staircase the landing is my absolute favorite part so here we are at the top of the stairs and before i turn the camera around before i show you what it all looks like i want you to know that i cleaned it up just for you i made sure it was super clean and tidy looking just because i was going to be showing you this isn't what it usually looks like this studio has been 25 years in the making when i started doing this stuff i had a shoe box full of stuff and it all fit in that little thing and now this doesn't fit into shoebox anymore but what i've learned along the way is that there are two things that are really important to me when i'm creating an art space and that is flexibility and visibility now i need flexibility because i'm going to change my mind and i need visibility so that i can remember what it is that i've got and i know where to find it this art studio is actually about the same square footage as my last one except that one had lots of almost little rooms in it compared to this which is just a bigger open space and that became really important to me this time because i'm finding i like to really spread things out i need to be able to see everything so to have a lot of table space options that was a huge deal to me and i also like to be able to move the tables around easily so that's why i use these inexpensive lightweight ikea tables they're easy for me to move by myself and underneath them i have rolling drawers also from ikea so that i can pull them out for extra workspace when they need it or i can rearrange things whatever my needs are i have that flexibility these tables are much easier to move around when they're cleaned off but they're usually not like this this is actually what things look like most of the time in the studio big piles of stuff out and things strewn about on those tables you just saw a whole bunch of paper and stuff so how do i decide how to organize it before i talk about that i need to talk about whether or not you're a hunter or a gatherer now i'll bet you can guess which one i am when i describe them hunters know exactly what they want and they specifically want an exact item so they are hunting for that thing now gatherers aren't quite sure what they want but they'll know it as soon as they see it so they need to browse through things peruse through them and so if you're a hunter you're going to want to organize things one way and if you're a gatherer you want to organize things another way now by the way i make it sound like it's clearly this camp or this camp and that's not how it works when it comes to ephemera and scraps and little bits and bobs i am a gatherer when it comes to me wanting a specific paint color or a gel medium i am definitely a hunter so you can absolutely be a combination of those things but think about how you like to create because if you're a hunter you may want to put everything by color by type by size by style or if you're more of a gatherer you may want to do what i do and that is put a whole bunch of stuff in a box now one of the nice things about doing this is i will rotate my boxes around because you see whatever is at eye level with me that's what gets used things that are way up high i don't see them as much i don't get them down as much so the things that i love or what i notice and every so often i will actually move stuff around and put a different box of scraps and leftover and ephemera up there and it's like it's a whole new thing to me because i didn't remember what was in it from before so it's a great way to keep your studio constantly fresh and engaging is to just move some things around easily which is why having stuff in boxes can be so handy the other thing that i find about ephemera and storage of stuff is to have enough space for it as we're moving out of the old studio i found some drawers of stuff the things that i loved and i wanted to save that i'd sorted by color and i hadn't used them in years i actually have them here i've got the blue and purple bag i've got the reds and yellows and oranges bag here and guess what they sat in those drawers forever and weren't used part of the reason was because i couldn't see them they were in a closed drawer it wasn't really a well-labeled drawer either but the other thing is it was a really small drawer so it was tight in there so i only saw what was ever on the top and not was on the bottom what i like to do is be able to toss my ephemera almost like a salad so that i can move things around in the box or the container and i can see what's underneath i'm always on the lookout for good ways to store my things to organize in the studio and anything that allows me a lot of flexibility and gives me a lot of visibility for my supplies that's a win in my book now these are baker's racks from a used restaurant supply place so i think they were around 100 bucks i mean i had to clean them up a bit but they were worth it and then i did buy the trays for each one i think each one was about five bucks but these are basically like the perfect drawers to have for mixed media because you can put a ton of stuff on these they're not very deep so it's not a ton of stuff but it makes it easy to sift through to see what's there sometimes i will store ephemera on these sometimes it's projects they're in the works it can be anything that i want them to be so much flexibility and right now here i've got them all in pretty tightly one after the other but guess what if you want more space between some if you've got taller stuff just don't put another tray there ton of flexibility these can be used like a drawer or a tray that you can put out on the table use what you want and then put it back so it makes clean up a breeze which i absolutely love because i hate spending time cleaning things up right next to those baker's racks i've got my gel printing tools now this is a repurposed shoe cubicle and all of these little nooks they're just perfect to hold all of the wonderful little pattern making things that can be found around your house to make prints with and one of things i adore about this way of storing them is that i can easily get to them and i can see what i've got because if it's out of sight it's out of mind with me how i feel about cleanup that played a huge role in how i organize stencils when i started i put them in binders and page protectors i carefully organized them into folios when i started to get a bunch i tried all sorts of different ways to do these things the problem with every one of the ones i did was that it just took a lot of time to put them away because if they were wet or still damp they were hard to put in the page protectors it just it was just more work that i was willing to do to clean up so that's when i stumbled across j hooks now these are little adhesive hooks that you know you can get the idea why it's called a j hook it kind of looks like a j i ran into these when i was in a store looking at stuff and i realized hey those hooks are kind of cool and would be great to hold stencils so i found a place to order them and by the way everything that i'm talking about here that i can find a link for to direct you towards i will have that all down below and then over in the blog post at a colorful journey.com so you can find all these things what i'm talking about now the rack that i put these on because once i've got the little j hook on it i can just hang them right up there and it's put away and it's done now this rack i am sad to say is no longer available this company is no longer in business but you can take this idea and run with it because you can do things like take an old lampshade and rip off the fabric around it and that becomes a rack just like this that's what i use when i'm teaching another thing that you can do is attention bar you can actually hang them on that what about wire shelves and you can hang them on top of those anywhere you can put one of these kinds of things on there one of these hooks you can hang your stencils not all stencils can handle having a little hang tag on them because some of them are more like a mask and they're just there's nowhere to put it it would get in the way so for these i end up using little metal clips and these are ones that actually came with this and i don't use nearly as many as what came with it but any kind of little clip to hold onto the ones that you can't get one of those j hooks on now if you happen to have stencils that are intricate and wonderful and when you put them next to another stencil they tend to sort of grab onto the little bits in there there's something that you can do about that and that is simply putting a piece of transparency between them so i put a j hook on here piece of transparency and that goes between any of my friendly stencils that seem to stick together a bunch that sort of latch on that piece of plastic keeps that from happening let's talk about your most important real estate in your creative space and that is whatever is within arm's reach of where you usually create those are the things that are the ones that you use most often now the shelves that i've got behind me here in my area are adjustable because you know what i'm going to change my mind over what i want near me or what i like using so having shelves that can adjust over time is really important for me and i tend to put my paints and my mediums around here because those are the things i grab most often so should you organize these things by color should you organize them by type so all of your acrylic paints together all of your watercolors together all of your oil pastels together should you organize them by size of tuber container should you organize them by brand so that like all of your golden paints are together your open ones and your acrylics and your watercolor but all of golden goes in one area well it just depends on what what serves you what you enjoy for some people having them by brand is good for some people it's by color for me it's a mixture of just about everything i just said the tubes that you see there those are all by color and on this side it's grouped completely differently it's not my color over here it's for the most part by brandon by type now why is it so different over here than over there i don't know i just know that boy oh boy if i change that i get really uncomfortable i love having lots and lots of stuff here so that i can see it all i can easily get it down by having things in containers i can easily pull it off the shelf without knocking stuff over because wow does that drive me nuts when i'm trying to reach the thing on the back of the shelf and i'm knocking a bunch of stuff over so this works over here whereas over there i've got all the paints piled up on each other again no idea why one side is that way and one's that way it's just what feels comfortable to me i will say that everything right in here the eye level part those are the things i use more often and the higher up we go the less often i use things stuff that's way up on the top shelf that you can't see right now i rarely use those things because it requires a step stool for me to get up to them the sink back there that was one of the toughest decisions that i made for the studio because one it's gonna be wherever it's gonna be like once it's put in it's not moving again so i had to think really hard about placement and the other thing was is finding the type of sink that i wanted because what i wanted was a big utility sink but i didn't want anything really deep and i looked at restaurant supply places and i looked in hardware store i mean i looked everywhere and the one that i landed on this one the minute i saw it i knew it was it this is actually a dog grooming sink and the thing that i love is the flexibility because it comes with this sort of tray or cover here so you can have counter space if you want it but you can also remove it and now you've got a great big sink that you can use so i love that flexibility that's really where they had me it was the flexibility that's when i couldn't say no but i didn't always have whoops well we'll just pretend you didn't hear that off camera okay um well i didn't always have a sink like this and i've worked in studios at times where i had no running water and one of the things that i would do is mason jars and the reason why i love mason jars is they have lids that can seal tightly so that means i'm not going to spill it when i'm carrying the water to different rooms taking it back to the sink and what i'll do is i'll have some with clear water and some that are empty and i'll just pour about half of it into a jar and that becomes my paint water and that way basically i've got water there to clean out my brushes that kind of thing the other thing that i will do is i will take a plastic tray now this actually is from the scrap booking section it's a little bit bigger than a kitchen one and i will use this fill it with water and it's now a place to clean things off soak things whatever you need i actually also use it in this sink as well because i don't always need as much space as what's here so if i've just got a little something i will actually clean it in that as opposed to using the whole big sink and that way i use less water and i can reuse that water until it gets really grody and gross which also explains why that trach looks the way it does now i'm okay if some things get gross and grody kind of like plastic tubs but i don't really want the walls to get that way so in the splash zone where i do my main creating i actually put some contact paper up on the wall to create basically a plastic layer of protection to protect most of it the windowsill the window shade yeah they're kind of on their own and they're just gonna have to deal what happens but the walls got a little protection no matter how big your creative space is there's only so much you can put within arm's reach so i like to maximize that space as much as i can anywhere i can put something i want to do that so on the wall i actually put some command adhesive hooks so i can hang the brayers up there it's something else that's right there with an arm's reach so that i can easily grab it when i need it another thing that i've got is hooks up there to hold some of my spatulas and those kind of tools so that they're easy to grab up there i've got my camera set up and if you're interested in me putting together a video going into more detail about the camera setup and what i used for that just let me know in the comments and i'll put that together for those of you with hawkeyes might have noticed this earlier in the video in the background this is a magnet board and i chose a magnet board for this wall because i wanted flexibility i wanted to be able to put a little stuff up or a lot of stuff different kinds of things i wanted to be able to shift and change to what i needed like right now it's got all sorts of things that have crossed my path when i've been unpacking things and rearranging things that i don't want to forget about so i'm putting them up on the wall very much as an inspiration board now in the near future all of this stuff is going to be coming off of here and what's going up next is all the stuff i'm doing in my next online workshop and if you want to be in the know about the next workshop if you want to be a part of the fun and get the best price on it then make sure you get signed up for my newsletter here's the nook at the back of the studio this is where i've got my sewing machine and yep you probably spotted that magnet board right there so now you know those two big things that drive how i decide how to organize and set up my studio flexibility and visibility because i want to be able to change my mind i want to have a lot of options and i also need to be able to see what it is i'm going to totally forget that i've got it the flexibility part that is why i chose the shelves that i did up here on the wall because you can actually move them and turn them so if i want to have them go around a corner you just have a lot of options with it and the more options there are the happier i am because i know somewhere down the road i'm going to change my mind well thanks so much for joining me today if you've been enjoying this video if you found it helpful i'd so appreciate it if you gave it a thumbs up and if you'd like to see more of my videos hit that subscribe button that way you'll know as soon as i've got a new video out and if you'd like to see more of what i'm up to you can find it all over on the website at a colorful journey.com thanks so much for letting me be a part of your colorful journey

Channel: Carolyn Dube

Views: 20,880

Rating: 4.9148936 out of 5

Keywords: Art studio tour, art studio organization, art studio organization tips, art studio organization ideas, stencil storage ideas, organizing paints, organizing your art supplies, organizing your ephemera

Id: aYTaoU03Aoc

Length: 17min 14sec (1034 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 05 2021