The short answer is: chaos!

To celebrate my finally achieving my MFA, and to give myself someplace a little nicer and more pleasant to work in, I am finally decorating my studio. It is the smallest bedroom in our house, but gifted with ample built-in storage. Unfortunately, even that is still not enough for my huge stash of reference books and the large flat files I use for finished artwork. Not to mention all the miscellaneous craft supplies, souveniers, and other junk I accumulate.

Way back when we moved in, lo these 2 years ago, it was the weekend before the beginning of the semester, and I was still in the MFA program. As a result this room was thrown together quickly and with little to-do, made functional enough for me to get by. In addition to all of my art supplies the room was also home to stacks of boxes and other bits of random furniture which we didn’t know what else to do with at the time. The room was packed. It was perpetually a mess, with only the area around my drawing table clear and only the art supplies I was using for my thesis work at all accessible.

So for the past few weeks the room has been disassembled as I’ve been going through all of the furniture and boxes and sorting out what needs to stay and what really should go. Among the things discovered when going through some of this buried “treasure”: two boxes of financial paperwork, my missing dip pen supplies, a stereoscope and large box of images to go with it, and a huge stash of family photo albums left behind by Dad when he sold us the house.

I don’t have any true “before” pictures; those accompanying this post are after the initial clean-up phase when I was testing my chosen paint colors. It’s the boldest color I’ve ever put on a wall outside of a theater production, but there won’t be a whole lot of the actual wall showing when all’s said and done.

Since I’m mostly only able to work on it on the weekends and some evenings, and I wanted to keep up my drawing as much as possible at the same time, It’s been taking over a month so far. The room had not been thoroughly cleaned in years, so the woodwork required a bit of scrubbing before I could start priming it. There is quite a bit of woodwork in this room considering its size. There was really no place to easily relocate the few large pieces of furniture, so I had to get creative about working around them.

I did have a little bit of help with this project: my resident Tall Guy painted the ceiling for me. It’s the one painting task he feels comfortable with.

And he wasn’t the only one “helping.” I suspect I could have done a little better without the contributions from the fuzzy faction of the household, but this one in particular was having a ball hiding under the tarped drawing table for her patented “surprise attack”

I’m almost done with all the painting… photos of the finished product coming soon!