3 Studio Upgrades that Improved My Creative Practice
How a table, a lamp, and cloud storage changed everything.
My first supplies from Let’s Make Art.
When I first started painting, my supplies fit inside the Let’s Make Art boxes that would arrive each month. Soon I had a small stack of subscription boxes that held my growing set of art supplies. My art supplies included:
inexpensive watercolor paper
liquid watercolors
two watercolor brushes
butcher tray palette
As my paintings improved, I wanted to start upgrading my art supplies. These investments included:
Better watercolor paper, which meant 100% cotton paper instead of the cellulose (wood pulp) paper I was using. 100% watercolor paper absorbs water better.
Different watercolor paints. I enjoyed learning with the liquid watercolors, but they are generally not lightfast. This means that they can fade really easily. If I wanted to create paintings to gift or to sell, I wanted to upgrade to artist grade paints.
More diverse brushes. My two (a round #2 and #6) had kept me going, but they were starting to wear out and I wanted more variety.
In our one bedroom apartment here in Colorado, space is at a premium. If I wanted to paint, I would move everything that had accumulated off of our shared computer desk, scoot the desktop computer back to the edges of the desk, pull out my boxes of supplies and spread out for a couple hours of painting. When I was done, I would pack up everything back into boxes and return our computer desk to its normal clutter. As my confidence grew, I wanted to paint more, but I developed a new problem. I noticed that one of my biggest hurdles to painting was having to set up and then clean up my supplies every time I wanted to paint. I do not want to count the number of times I thought about painting but then decided not to because I just didn’t want to set up everything. Eventually I decided that if I wanted to take my painting progress more seriously, I was going to have to make some studio upgrades.
The Table
My small but mighty art desk.
My first major investment was a table. This upgrade was small, but the impact was enormous. Since I am a budget girl, my table is nothing fancy. It is a two foot by four foot adjustable folding table from The Home Depot. I cannot even begin to describe how happy this table makes me daily. It has made our small apartment a bit smaller, but we have adjusted. This table made it SO much easier to work consistently. The value of this desk goes beyond the ability to leave out my paints, my brushes, paper, projects, etc. It’s my personal art refuge. It’s not only where I paint, but where I journal, where I write down goals, and where I have inspirational and encouraging quotes on the wall. It’s a space, amidst the chaos, that’s just mine.
The Lamp
As I started to paint more, I wanted to start sharing my progress. I started my art Instagram account jgagnondesigns in May 2020 and I was so nervous to start sharing! My earliest photos and videos were shot with my digital SLR camera. This was ok, but it was clunky. I would need to set the campera up on a tripod and awkwardly balance the tripod on top of the computer desk when I was painting. Then I transferred the videos and images to the computer, and then my phone to edit, and finally I would post them on my Instagram page. It worked for a little while, but most apps are specifically designed for our smartphones and creating content directly on your phone. From scrolling around on Instagram, I saw that a lot of artists I followed were making really beautiful videos of their art process. I was not seeing the same quality with my tripod SLR setup. I started to pay attention to not only the videos, but the actual art studios and the equipment that artists were using. There were lots of different setups, but one that I kept seeing over again was a Canvas Desk Lamp. This lamp was designed with creatives in mind specifically to film with their phones. It was adjustable in height, included a ring light with three different light settings and the ability to dim. It was also compact enough that it would sit on my desk. But it wasn’t cheap. Current costs at the time of writing was $172. In the scheme of life, it wasn’t a lot of money, but it felt like a lot of money just to make art videos for Instagram. I hemmed and hawed and thought about the pros and cons of buying this lamp for MONTHS. I wish I was kidding, but it was literally months. Eventually I caved, probably after too many times of almost knocking my tripod off of my painting table. My lamp arrived, I set it up, and…
It. Was. Magical.
I love this lamp. It has made documenting my art so much easier and has saved me so much time, which when you are working full time and trying to paint on the side is HUGE. I use it for everything:
Taking photos and videos while I am painting.
Documenting finished paintings.
I even just love it as a regular old lamp.
Yet again, I kick myself for waiting so long to invest in something.
iCloud Storage
When I launched my website in January, I found myself working on my computer a lot more and needing access to all of the content that was on my phone. Since I had never upgraded my storage for iCloud, my phone and my account would regularly stop synching. I was often having to email photos to myself or struggling with getting my iPhone and my PC to talk to each other. I found that I was wasting so much time, cumulatively probably hours, just trying to move files between systems. As I started to document more of my process, specifically using video with my delightful new lamp, I would blow through my 5G limit at the speed of light. For a while my inner dialogue was “I’m not paying $0.99 a month for storage; that’s ridiculous. What I’m doing works fine, everything is fine. I’m fine!”
It really wasn’t though. At this point, time is my most valuable asset and I was wasting it. So I decided to upgrade: $0.99/ month for 50G of cloud storage. I justified the cost to myself by saying that if it didn’t make a difference in how I was working, I could always cancel it. This one simple change for $12 a year (seriously $12 a year!!!) has made all of the difference in the world. Now it doesn’t matter where I am working or what device I am working on, I can access my photos and videos just by logging into my online iCloud account. I can film at my art desk using my amazing Canva lamp. Then I can download and edit photos in Photoshop on my computer and add them to my blog post. It has made me so much more efficient and has allowed me to remain so much more consistent in my progress.
Concluding Thoughts
As I think about these three studio upgrades, which upon reflection are relatively small, I think my biggest insecurities were around the money required and whether I was worth the investment. I’m not sure where my money insecurities come from, but I have always had them and they loom large. Don’t get me wrong, I like to spend money, but I am definitely a saver at heart and always need some sort of emergency cushion, just in case. There is the old mantra that you need to spend money to make money. While I am not quite in the make money stage, I am in the stage where I need to make investments in order to make progress towards my goals. I am trying to reframe how I think about these upgrades in a new way. I’m not investing in a table, in a lamp, or in cloud storage. I am investing in myself and sometimes I just need to get out of my own damn way.
Are there any upgrades or purchases that have changed your life so much you wish you had just committed sooner? Let me know.
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