To deal with my frustrations, I decided it was time to make my studio better. Not perfect, just better. I was tired of navigating the space like it was Fibber McGee's closet.
I had stacks and stacks of papers, books and magazines, boxes of old documents awaiting filing (either in the cabinets or, in most cases, in the proverbial circular file). I had also made a critical error in my initial studio setup, putting my drawing area against the wall and my writing area by the window!
Here's the initial chaos.
Stacks falling over, stuff precariously balanced atop bookshelves, no moving room between writing/office space and drawing board. Every thing I needed to get at to draw properly was at least three moves.
Here's how it resolved.
More effective use of space, and much cleaner. Right now, the studio is the cleanest room in the house, and it's not because the rest of the house is dirtier (the rest of the place is not too bad)!
By switching the drawing and writing areas, I was able to get a better flow. It's still not perfect. I want to rearrange the bookshelves slightly. The old media stand beside the short bookcase, which serves as a tabouret/ storage for some unwieldly odd shaped art supplies like triangles and ellipse templates, is now on the opposite side of the room from the drawing board. There are still some papers to sort, but it's down substantially and they are now in one location as opposed to an uncountable number of places. For some reason, putting up art in this room has proven to be a rather annoying prospect.
I'm toying with getting a strip of peg board to mount stuff like big triangles and long T-squares.
I have a reluctance to getting everything just so. Historically, whenever that has been achieved, that's when I have to move. And I hate moving.
Until such time as either or both of those things happen, this is not perfect. But it IS better. There's more of a Zen flow.
The new-ish space is inspiring, or else I've let go of my inhibitions, because a few days after doing this, I realized what the big issue was with the current page, and now I know how to resolve it!
Next: the frustrating page and its resolution.
