The Artist's Eyes by Jenn Lee

When John and I were house hunting, we found this house. Overall we knew this house would need quite a bit of TLC due to it’s wild paint colors and general disrepair, but it would definitely fit our large family needs.  When I first saw this room I turned to John with eyes twinkling and said, “This would make the perfect art studio!” We ended up getting the house and moved in last October, but boy has it been an adventure getting to where we are now.

Here we are the to the second month of 2010, and I am just now getting to where I can focus on getting the art studio organized so I can work in it vs. spread out across the downstairs living room!

Every time I turned around I was squeezing between boxes, stepping over things stacked in the middle of the floor or moving Johns stuff to get to my supplies. Let me tell you, it was a literal obstacle course getting to what I needed.

The most important part of an office or studio is organization. To have organization, you have to have storage. Going with my ECO art theme as with my art, I chose to do so in my studio as well.

John was able to bring me boxes from his work. The boxes that cases of copy paper come in from Office Depot, make great storage containers. They are smaller in size than moving boxes and have easy to get into lids. Labeling the front facing side of the boxes allows you to know what is in them so you don’t have to pull down and dig through each container to find what you are looking for.

Another ECO friendly item I used in the art room came in the form of an old door. I sat an old door  top of a drafting table that had seen much better days as well as being too small for my needs. After adding a few screws to attach the door to the drafting table, I now had a nice large workspace and it didn’t cost a dime.

What else does every good office or studio need? Cork boards or message boards to tack up things like items you need to see daily, important papers, notes, inspiration or ideas. I found some old sheets that we didn’t need anymore and I still had a stack of moving boxes stacked in the garage, so I made several ECO friendly message boards. You take a moving box flattened, a couple strips of duct tape to hold the box together, then wrap the fabric around the board, leaving a 3-4″ overhang of fabric to attach to the backside of the board. With the overhang fabric you can use hot glue, heavy duty staples or more duct tape to secure the edges. The result? Another cost free project!

Lastly, since it is a west facing room, I had a nice wall of natural light coming from the window and back door leading out to our deck, but I still needed good lighting for the evening hours that I spend in there, so I had to think of lighting. Now this caused me some extra thought because I still wanted to think ECO friendly. I decided to go with LED lighting. An LED light will last approximately 50,000 hours vs. 1000 hours with a standard incandescent bulb as well as use approximately 20% of the electricity vs. an incandescent. The savings over time on your energy bill will show for itself.

There is a feeling of satisfaction and renewed creative energy when you finally get organized. You can focus on your creativity vs. always hunting and searching for what tools or materials you need. You will find your creativity increase quite a bit without the physical and mental clutter around from the environment around you as well as feel much happier and content.

I hope some of my ideas help you in your own situation. Whether it be a home office, craft room or studio, organizing your space and optimizing it to fit your needs will create a better work environment….in this artist’s eyes.