Studio Housekeeping
Since I last posted here, I have sent off the art for BOOM BOOM, a 32-word picture book (each word is repeated once so it’s really 16 words, twice) by Sarvinder Naberhaus. It was a mad rush towards the end (it always is) and after I shipped it out, I felt joy, relief, and just a touch of fear (what if they don’t like it?…). Then the next day I came back to this:
What a mess!
Because the techniques I use involve many different tools and materials, things tend to spread out a bit.
My workspace gets kind of cluttered.
Pretty much every surface gets covered with something.
When I run out of horizontal space, I go vertical.
Since I usually am printing more than one image at a time, I need to have a lot of colors available on my inking table.
I try to keep them from drying out with saran wrap, and in order to keep track of what detail is which color, I started labeling the saved colors with a marker (and to keep track of the nine children I feature in the images, I gave them all names). All this needs to get scraped off and wiped clean.
And then I have to clean all my tools.
Plus there is the added detritus left from mounting the art and packing it up.
It feels good to be done with a large project like this at last, but also a little sad. I’ve enjoyed working on this book. I’ve lived with it for many months now. I will miss these characters and their world that I’ve made up, but I look forward to seeing them again, in a year or so, in their new home – the book itself.
1 Comment
Jill Mackay
January 25, 2014Thank you so much for posting this. My studio is in my house and it looks like this off and on quite regularly. In fact I am glad that my studio has a door because when my non-artist friends see a mess like this their faces show confusion as if I must be mad! I love your work and you are a personal creative hero of mine. I make my living designing mostly jewelry components and findings but I am an illustrator and painter at heart. You do my heart good! Thank you!
Best to you,
Jill