My FREE studio makeover!

I have spent a very busy weekend re-vamping my art-room, all for free! How, you may ask? Its bit of a long story, but here goes:

We moved into our new house just over a year ago, and I managed to convince my husband to let me have the "shop" area of the house for my art-room (a dirty, dusty workbench with some wall shelving in one corner of the utility room), and he could use the "garage" (a room with a garage door to the front yard, but too narrow to actually park a car in it). I was excited to have my space, and to have a nice long workbench- I envisioned myself working on multiple projects at once and finally being a productive artist. We have a small budget for house renovations and updates, but since the house is very outdated throughout, i had to make do with my space as it was, despite the gouged out work surface meaning i cant use it to draw, and despite the decrepit indoor/outdoor carpet full of muck and dust on the floor. What little budget we had was used to make the "garage" into a workable shop so my husband could start on the big renovations upstairs.

As time progressed in my little art-room, I realised it WASN'T an inspiring space, and it wasn't a place i really wanted to be, or worse, create. I brainstormed as to why this might be, and figured that it must be my lack of organisation, that all my stuff was everywhere, and ungrouped and basically hard to find. In a little "AHA!" moment I started collecting all the empty baby food jars (my youngest was learning to eat at this point), and I used them to group all my "stuff" together. Each type of pencil, each type of tool, even each type of embellishment got its own jar. The end result was a neat, organised room, where every little object was easily seen. This should have been the end of my problem...right?

Wrong! Unfortunately the carpet was still mucky, the room was still dusty, and because of my allergies, every time I went to create, I found myself itching and sneezing. I talked to my husband about replacing the carpet (preferable with something that could be wiped to remove messes) but it just wasn't possible at this time. Darn!

Fast forward to last Saturday morning; I was flipping through a copy of Cloth Paper Scissors:Studio's, daydreaming and wishing we had the means to have a nice studio like the ones in the magazine, when i noticed that what was catching my eye about most of the studios was not all the fancy furniture, and specially functioning storage solutions, but the colour that people had in their rooms. Staring at a purple studio, i suddenly thought "Wouldn't it be nice to have a colourful art studio instead of a dirty, used to be primer-white studio?" Sure, i didn't want a purple room, not really my thing, but it got my brain ticking...When we bought our house we also inherited a large number of old paint cans, which i gathered up and stored under our stairs, but amongst those cans was a half can of a gorgeous red (currently on our bedroom wall-nice colour not great for sleeping)...What if I used that paint to make a feature wall of colour, brightening my room up might make it a friendlier space!

So a wall went red, and while i was under the stairs digging around i found some other nice colours that i knew we weren't going to be needing elsewhere in the house, so I ripped up the carpet, and painted my floor a lovely chocolate colour! So 1 wall red, chocolate floor, and dirty everywhere else...the freshly painted wall and floor inspired me to go all out (or maybe it was the paint fumes), so i ended up painting every other surface in my room(except the roof) using left over coffee colours and a light beige and a glossy off-white for my shelves and desk!

I am so excited! The room looks 10 times bigger, is thoroughly clean and bright and is very ME! Spending most of my waking hours in there over the weekend has also given me an attachment to the room and I am actually excited about being in there, and working!

I think the best thing is all the changes in my room have been FREE! Free storage that works just as well as any of those expensive art-specific storage solutions. Free decor that stirs up my creativity and excitement. Just waiting for the last coat of paint on the floor to dry, and ill move all my stuff back in there and get to work! YAY!

I will start to blog...I will start to blog...I will...

Okay it has been forever since i have posted anything on here, and i really need to get my butt into gear! As part of my 2010 art goals, I AM going to blog more. I AM going to get my studio into a working space (renovations elsewhere in the house means i have hockey gear on my floor and a marble castle on my desktop). I AM going to create regularly. I AM going to enter art competitions and try and get into some sort of show. I AM going to start living like the artist I AM...lol.

So here goes 2010...hopefully the year im going to start making progress!

So Darn Tired!

I want to create art, I really do...but i also want to sleep, undisturbed, and for once wake up to my own body clock, instead of someone else's - or waking up by getting my hair pulled, kicked in the face or headbutted by the baby who starts thrashing the second he wakes up.

The problem with things as they stand at the moment, both getting art done, and sleeping undisturbed are both relatively hard to do (though the sleep is definitely harder- i can muck while they play, i cant really sleep).

It is times like these that I wish homemaking was like other jobs- i get so envious of my husband sometimes- he gets to come home when the day is done, he gets to take naps on the couch after dinner, he gets to play computer games during the day on the weekend (not just during naptime!), and most of all he gets holidays- days where he doesnt even have to go to work!

Now, I love my kids, and I do love being a mum, but the last full 24 hr period i got "off", I was in labor! I have just managed to sleep train my youngest so he is sleeping until at least 5am in his own bed without waking, but before that i had about 18 months of waking up several times a night, sometimes for hours at a time (this is counting the time while i was pregnant and sick etc). I just want to have some good sleep so i can organise my brain and then actually be able to create!

Maybe I should do a series on sleep meditations...lol.

Art- Dam

My second child is just about 12 months now, and as such I am finding myself a bit more time to start art projects. Despite this new found freedom, I am hard pressed to fully start and finish projects that I am coming up with.

It is not due to a lack of creative ideas, or vision, it seems to be the opposite! I have so many ideas for what I want to do next that I am trying to juggle multiple projects on an already cluttered workbench, and hopping from one to the other with the attention span of my three year old!

I have hit an art dam!

Just so everyone is caught up with the scope of the dam, heres a list of projects that i have currently started in the last month:

Things to hand out/trade (advertising material):
- ATC's
- Business cards

Things to possibly sell:
- Altered Book covers
- Bookmarks
- Postcards
- Altered boxes

Artworks:
- "you make my heart glow" electrical assemblage
- several random collage paintings
- a detailed research-based series on angels ( i havent gotten much past the detailed research part and a few prelim sketches yet)

(and yes...all the "s" at the end of the items denote that i have not started just one of these, but many)

This list does not include all the random ideas i have come up with and stored away for later, nor the floundering i have done trying to figure out what direction i should head in to start becoming a real (read:salable) artist, or whether i should just become an art entrepreneur while trying to build a bigger portfolio...or just try and get into some government job with a retirement plan and give up...lol!

Art dam indeed. I just wish i could commit to something and complete it! I typically start getting into trouble when I am working on a project and something needs to dry, so i start something else, and then keep progressing further from the original project from there...or the kids wake up and i leave it all in a mess and then feel uninspired when i come back.

I guess the art dam could also be stemming from getting older, and looking at the world around me and realising that its gonna take alot more than making lots of art to actually get somewhere with it all...hmmm...if only!