New Studio Coming Together

I’ll spare you all the details of the lat­est stu­dio move, but it’s com­ing along. Basi­cal­ly I’m mov­ing into my own space. I’m still at Art Explo­sion, just not shar­ing a space any­more. Art Explo­sion is very con­ve­nient to me, and my only real com­plaint with it is that there’s some inter­per­son­al dra­ma there from time to time. In fact, I’ve start­ed to think that all that dra­ma at Art Explo­sion could be turned into a nice web­com­ic if I put my mind to it.

This has turned into a great oppor­tu­ni­ty to turn my work­space into my dream stu­dio. I’ve put some thought into what the space should look like and put the draw­ing table in the mid­dle of the space, fac­ing the door. It feels more open and more as though it is real­ly my space. It gives the draw­ing table the focus of the room, where­as before I’d always been sort of shoved off to the side. That may end up max­i­miz­ing the floor­space, but I now have more floor­space than before and floor­space isn’t what I need to max­i­mize. It’s work­space, not a dance floor.

I’ve also restored my old Mac G4 tow­er to keep in the stu­dio. I don’t do much with the com­put­er at the stu­dio. Most­ly I use it to dis­play ref­er­ence pho­tos, and that does­n’t require a lot of horse­pow­er. I picked up a 17″ Stu­dio Dis­play of the same vin­tage (and con­nec­tor) as my G4 tow­er from some­one sell­ing it on Craigslist. 17″ isn’t a huge mon­i­tor, but it was cheap and I don’t need a lot of space for check­ing ref­er­ence pho­tos. It’s cer­tain­ly more screen space than the 12″ iBook I’ve been car­ry­ing back and forth to the stu­dio. I won’t have to do that any­more, but I should prob­a­bly try to find my old thumb­drive to trans­fer files with.

The mon­i­tor is on the wire shelf behind the draw­ing table, putting it just at the top edge of the draw­ing table where it will be easy to see. Not so easy to con­trol though. I haven’t fig­ured out a good place for key­board and mouse. In a per­fect world I might get one of those minia­ture wire­less key­boards and maybe a track­pad , and just mount them per­ma­nent­ly onto the draw­ing table. That might not be such a per­fect world, but they’d at least be handy and not slid­ing off the table.

I’ve still got a bunch of orga­niz­ing to do, and I’m plan­ning on some­how get­ting my old couch over to the stu­dio before it’s all through. For the moment though, I’m back to being able to get some work done in the stu­dio. I’m actu­al­ly anx­ious to get the couch moved not so much because I need a couch in the stu­dio but because right now the only place for it blocks my fire­place. This forty-degrees-and-rainy weath­er we’ve been hav­ing has real­ly made me want to toss a duraflame onto the hearth. If this keeps up, I’m tempt­ed to chop the couch up and burn it.