I love my art room. I just love it. It is my favorite room. One of the very first things I did when we moved into this house was to claim one of the bedrooms for my new art room. The animals usually move freely around in here and while I’m painting I usually have one to three dogs sleeping around my feet. Riggs is sleeping on the floor beside my desk as I type this. There is a permanent dog bed that gets moved around depending on where I’m working and a few blankets too now that it’s getting cold (vizslas like to be covered at all times).

We lived in a one bedroom condo for ten years and even if I wanted to paint, nothing really made me feel more lazy than the idea of having to dig out my art supplies from our storage locker in the basement. And the cats. Oh the cats. Two wild bengals with a magnetic-like attraction to batting paintbrushes and pencils off the table. And then painting at the dining room table where we threw our mail and winter coats? No, the mood to paint didn’t strike often. 

My art room is one of the key factors in my productivity. I have all of my art stuff organized, in one location, and I can close the door if needed (keep cats away from drinking paint water, keep dogs away from licking delicious-to-them oil paintings). And I can literally be in the middle of a project and get up and walk away and know that everything will be there when I return, ready to go.

I have two easels. Once I started oil painting I realized I really needed one easel for oil paintings, and a second for acrylic. The reason? If I have a few acrylic paintings on the go I’ll regularly prop one on the floor against a wall to dry while I work on another. Not really a feasible option for oil paintings which dry markedly slower. I started having nightmares about Beesa and Wiggis (the cats) marking the paintings by rubbing right up against them. So two easels it was. I set up a caddie in between that houses all of my oil paints and mediums, brushes for oils and acrylics, and odds and ends like transfer paper (white saral paper! just the best recent discovery!), masking tape, coffee filters (for filtering used paint thinner), paper towels, and some other odds and ends. I try to really maintain a minimalist working area – the caddie only houses supplies that I use all the time. 

I have a big dining room table opposite from the easels. This was a great purchase. This is my multipurpose work area. There’s so much space. I use it for paperwork, writing, watercolour painting, everything. The desk light is an LED TaoTronics lamp, another great find. It has five different light colour settings and ten brightness settings. I never turn it off. At night I just put it on its dimmest setting and that way if I walk past my art room in the middle of the night for water or to let a dog outside I can peak in to check on everything 🙂 I have projects everywhere. On the floors, on the walls, everything in varying stages of completeness. I find it really inspiring and motivating to surround myself with my work in progress like this. 

Between my easels and my dining room table I have a wood drafting table that I only use for drawing. All of my acrylic paints live in a big tupperware container underneath the drafting table. And all of my paintbrushes and pencils and pastels are housed on my wooden bookcase in the corner. You can see more projects scattered about here, ready to go. And you can also see my acrylic palette propped against my easel. I found that scrap of wood in my dad’s workroom in grade 12 in a pinch and I have used it for every acrylic painting ever since. It’s getting kind of heavy with old paint but it’s also kind of neat to see it changing colour depending on what I’m painting. I think about retiring it and hanging it up in the art room like a my own Jackson Pollock-inspired acrylic splatter on wood… but then I wouldn’t have a palette so I don’t. 

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I have art hanging up everywhere. I used to be really afraid to hang anything up permanently but I have a hammer and a jar of picture nails in the art room closet and I just hang paintings now as I please. If I make a mistake I just pull the nail out and try again and don’t tell my husband :). I like being surrounded by my old paintings. Even the ones that I used to cringe about. There’s a bunch of those. It’s kind of nice to be surrounded by where I’ve been while moving forward into new directions with my art. 

So that’s my art room. Welcome! I’m really looking forward to letting you in on some of my upcoming projects really soon. Stay tuned! 

Thanks for visiting!