New Studio Tour

The new studio at our house is finally unpacked, setup and ready for making some art!  This room has taken the longest to arrange and a challenge to situate because it is almost octagonal. To make the most of the space, I consolidated my supplies and got rid of some old storage bins that were no longer necessary.  Watching one too many home improvement shows, I had quite a few projects in mind for my studio. Dad helped me to build and rebuild functional studio furniture.  Actually, I mostly supervised, provided the hot tea and Christmas music. We started with the letterpress cabinet my parents salvaged before they left Ohio.  It was about a foot taller and missing 6 drawers.  We cut it down by a foot to make it usable as a press base.  The drawers were also rebuilt, their musty particle board bottoms replaced with fresh birch plywood and given a coat of glossy white spray paint. This July my girlfriends and I are reuniting for Frogman's Print and Paper Workshop in South Dakota-it's time to get the press up and running. 

The letterpress cabinet rebuild, before and after.

My favorite part about the studio are the big windows-so much light comes in and makes it feel very airy and fresh.  I wanted everything to have that light and airy look, so painting the disparate pieces of furniture was a must.  In Texas, you can still buy oil based paint in all of its shiny, glossy glory.  I used it to refresh the letterpress cabinet, a rolling storage cart and a worn chair from my dear friend Marge.  Giving the studio furniture a coat of paint, putting some cheerful patterned contact paper on the metal flat files and legitimately organizing my supplies makes the space functional and inviting.  My plan was to make the most out of what I already had but still make it feel new...to that end, I repurposed a 5 foot piece of scratched plexi from my grad school days in 2007.  It has moved through 3 apartments and lastly to our house; I couldn't bring myself to toss it, but didn't want it shoved in the back of a closet anymore, either.  It was too banged up for framing at this point, so I cut it down slightly to make a solid and shiny drawing surface on my work table.

Since 2010, paper cranes have been a major theme in my artwork.  Steven and I even collaborated on a few works of art for our Wonders & Blunders exhibition in 2011.  When we got engaged, we decided to fold 1,000 together for our wedding.  Now the ceremony backdrop lives on the back wall, a sweet reminder of our wedding and a source of inspiration for future works of art.  The final project for this room was a pegboard display, to hang paintings in progress and keep them off my work table in the meantime. Steven had leftover peg board from a tool storage project and I was inspired by a DIY I found online.  It was easy to put together using a nail gun, miter saw and spray paint. Many thanks to my Dad for working on these studio projects and helping to move some seriously heavy art equipment up here with Steven.