The Painting Studio
This is my painting studio with work in progress as I prepare for a show.
The Painting Studio is where I create and experiment with a variety of mediums to create my Art. For many years I’ve worked in Oils, Acrylics and Watercolors as well as dry mediums like pastel, colored pencil and graphite. Most often I combine some of these into my Mixed Media paintings. There is a large size easel to accommodate the canvas paintings and drafting tables for drawings and colored pencil work.
The palette and brushes are on a table next to the easel. I don’t like to hold the palette even though it has a nicely romantic notion of what an artist should look like. The brushes stand in clay flower pots (a nice touch since I paint mostly flowers and gardens) and are held with aquarium stone since it slides easily. I group the brushes by type so that it’s easy to find what I need.
I use a glass palette on a white table. It’s easy to keep clean with a scraping razor. While I’m working I rest my brushes on ceramic stands to keep the paint and table clean. Near me is a poster near as a reference which clearly indicates the transparency of certain pigments since I work a lot in glazing techniques. I find this both colorful and useful.
I have specialized illumination installed that is balanced for color accuracy specific to fabric design studios since so much work is done on canvas. I’ve written about how I went about selecting the lighting in my studio in my Art Blog post here. The primary window lighting is north light which reduces color shifts as the sun moves during a day of painting. Since color is extremely important to me I need to control the balance of lighting in the studio.
Generally I use a glass palette and scrape it clean with a razor at the end of each day. I line the tubes up to match how I have the pigment on the palette so I can quickly and easily choose the right color when I’m adding more paint to the palette. I lay out the pigments in spectrum colors for the most part.