In my last post, which was supposed to be published last week and instead was published yesterday, I wrote that I was going to do some maintenance organizing on my art studio. Since I did a major re-org last Spring, I thought it would be pretty easy — just put stuff away, do some cleaning, The End. The hard part, I thought, would be the kitchen table, which was under a famous pile of crap and hadn’t been seen in almost a year. The hardest part would be the filing system I have yet to create.
Well, it turns out that my studio wasn’t as organized as I thought:
Duplicates, Triplicates, and Quadruplicates. Something here isn't working.
For those of you playing at home, that’s two Jenkin’s Greens (1 oz. and 4 oz), two Bone Blacks (both 4 oz), two Raw Umbers (both 4 oz), three Burnt Siennas (two 1 oz, 1 4 oz) and FOUR, count ‘em, four Iridescent Copper Lights (two 1 oz and two 4 oz).
Lots of duplicates are a sign that there are holes in an organizing system. If you’re system is working, you know what you have, and you know what you don’t have; you wind up saving money because you’re not buying things you don’t know you already have at home.
The weird thing is that I have at least three dozen colors of paint, and most of them are not duplicated. So what’s the deal with these four colors? What is it about Copper and Burnt Sienna that makes me think I need to buy third and fourth bottles?
And my troubles do not stop at paint.
The last time I went to Blick Art Supply, I bought a pint of gesso and a pint of Golden 200 Medium. I don’t use gesso all that often, but I had recently looked for it and was unable to find it. I had been certain that I had most of a tub lying around — but it was nowhere to be found, it seemed, so obviously I must have used it up. Right?
I hid it from myself in plain sight
I found my half-used quart tub of gesso when I was cleaning. The trouble is, it wasn’t in my basket of mediums, which lives on the left trestle shelf of my studio table, like it was supposed to be. It was sitting on the right trestle shelf. It was in plain view, but I didn’t look for it on the right, so I didn’t see it.
Again, if my problem was only a tub of medium that strayed from its home, I’d feel like I was in pretty good shape. But when I cleaned out my medium basket, I discovered that I was not running low on Golden 200 Medium like I thought.
... and this is AFTER consolidating two half-used containers
No. In addition to my mostly-used bottle of medium, I had another full bottle, as well as a quart sized container that was about a third full. I poured that into my mostly used bottle. Now I have three pint-sized bottles, two of which are unopened.
Clearly, there is something about my studio organization that isn’t … well, organized. I think I’m out of things when I’m not, and so I buy more, and art supplies are expensive. I know I’ll use all of this stuff eventually, but I would rather not be floating the money I’ve spent on these duplicate items — it’s easily a hundred dollars or more. And that’s to say nothing of the space that’s being taken up by duplicate containers of paint and mediums.
For now, I just need to get this crap off my floor, so I’ll put it back where it was. But I need to come up with a new system. I thought the old system was working well, so I’m stumped.