I turned a basic room into an art studio

My name is Lina and I'm a full-time artist. A couple months ago, I completed a huge cross-country road trip from Florida to Washington state, which is where I live now. I had to pack up my life, my art studio, and my pets into an RV. My wonderful friend helped me drive and we spent a week living on the road. I'll post a whole separate video about that trip if you're interested, but this video is about my new art studio here in the Pacific Northwest. This is what the room looked like when I brought my stuff in and started to unpack. It's just a bunch of stuff everywhere. I left most of my old studio furniture behind and only brought a small desk and a chair, so this is very much a fresh start. The room has these really annoying sliding mirror doors, which didn't open up much of the closet, so I had those taken off to make that area more accessible. One thing I love is the lack of carpet. I hated the carpet in my old studio, so this is super great. And if you haven't already seen it, I made a tour of my old studio, which I'll link in the description. Unfortunately, I couldn't bring all of my plants, and believe me, my heart shatters every single day. I did bring some, but the rest are in the wonderful care of my mom, who is also a green thumb. Before I could do any work or get my oil paints out, I obviously needed to get some furniture built. My new studio is quite dark. It doesn't get any sunlight, and with the way the building is positioned, we're kind of built into a hill. And there's another building right in front of that window, so it barely even gets indirect light. It's just a very dim room. For this reason, I chose to go with all white furniture just to optimize as much light reflection as I can to sort of make up for that darkness and also make the room feel a little bit more open and larger, since it's smaller than my other studio. This gray shelving is for my closet, which will store mostly shipping and framing materials, some tools, and other things that I use for my business that don't involve painting itself. I really love vertical storage, and I think it's a great way to optimize a small space and leave more room on the floor if you stack shelves on top of one another. I also bought this utility cart, which is a bit similar to one I had in my last studio, except the top level of this one is a flat surface that I can use as an additional workspace rather than storage. Please excuse this obnoxious pink light. It's actually a grow light for my plants so that they don't die in this dark cave. There was no other lighting in this room yet, so just bear with me temporarily. It'll get better. I definitely needed another desk, but it's a small area, so I decided to go with this ladder desk, which also has additional shelving on top, which means I don't have to put as many holes in the walls in order to get vertical storage, which is great since we're back to living in an apartment and your girl wants that deposit pack. I was doing a lot of moving furniture and rearranging things to figure out how I wanted everything, what would be the most comfortable painting setup for me, and just preparing the space to unpack and fill it up with all of my painting materials and everything else. I guess I thought it was a good idea to dance with my painting. For shelving, I went with these rope hanging shelves for some of my plants. I thought they were really cute and they're super easy to hang up. My easel is branded Medan, I think. It's pretty inexpensive. I got it on Amazon. It's an H-frame easel. My old easel was pretty much the same, but it would not have fit in the RV and I would have to take it apart and build it again, which I really didn't want to have to do again because I already built it once and honestly, I didn't even want to build the new one all over again, so my husband was kind enough to pick up the slack and build it for me along with the ladder desk. Oh, and that Ikea office chair is apparently for children. I didn't realize when I bought it, but it works fine for me, so yeah. Here, I'm assembling my lighting setup. I like to use softbox lights. They give off a very bright neutral diffused light. I've had the same ones for like four years now. You can take them apart and put them back together. You can see the base has four of these CFL bulbs. The temperature of these is 5,000 on the Kelvin scale, which is a neutral light, very similar to daylight. Not too cold, not too warm. They go into this rectangular looking umbrella type thing and then there's a piece of cloth on the inside to diffuse light. You can see the inside's also very reflective and there's a second larger piece of material that goes over the front. The material is secured in place with velcro and that's basically the light. Then you secure all of that onto the tripod stand and you can adjust the angle or the height. These are great for filming. I have two of them, but they're so bulky that I normally just have one in the studio and I bring out the second one when I need to take pictures of my paintings for prints. So unless you plan on doing a lot of filming or making your own art prints, you can very easily get away with something much smaller. Finally, it was time to fill the space with my plants and art materials. I'm using the cart for my oil paints temporarily. I might custom build something for them because I have a lot of tubes and I'd like to display them better, but for now this will do. I decided to hang up this sheer curtain with some twinkly lights to make this area of the studio a bit cozier since the closet just looks so ugly to me for some reason. I've actually wanted to hang up a curtain with lights for quite some time but just never did it until now. This was pretty easy to do and the only annoying part was just having to unfurl all the individual light strands. The light has different settings on it and it comes with a remote control which was very easy to use and yeah that pretty much sums up all the main stuff of my new studio and how I set everything up. Alrighty, so now that you've watched me put this all together, I thought we could do a little mini tour of the space. I'll show you around. So in this area I pretty much just have those white shelves that I built and I have some books, some sketchbooks, some primer materials, and my paint thinner, and just things like that. I have some of the plants and not all of them unfortunately. This one sadly isn't doing so hot. It actually had a very bad time on the trip so it hasn't fully recovered. And then down there I have my succulents under a grow light because we don't get any direct light in here and these plants need direct sunlight to live. Then obviously my easel. This setup I've kept as I set it up originally. It works really well for me. And this ladder desk I really, really enjoy and I wish I had one sooner. I think it's amazing for small spaces. So up here I keep my mediums. I have my chair here. I can easily maneuver this cart with my materials. And of course I have some brushes that are slowly dying and awaiting for me to wash them because I'm terrible. I've got some empty canvases that I've primed. I've put a layer of burnt umber on them so they're ready for new paintings. Moving on to this section. This is kind of like a utility closet where I keep things that aren't as aesthetically pleasing and so I hung up this curtain just to make it a little bit nicer looking. Here I have a bunch of my shipping supplies. I have rigid mailers for my 8.5x11 prints and also some of my shipping tubes for the larger prints which I have to roll up. I've got some wood panels for paintings, future paintings, and some smaller ones here. And then I love these baskets. They're foldable and they fit really well into shelving like this and it also makes the area look nicer because I have a bunch of stuff in there that would just look so messy if it was out. So this is a great way to organize it. This is all pretty much a work in progress. It will be changing as I spend more time in here. So these are the mirrors that were on the closet doors. You can see they're huge so even when you open it it did not reveal much of the closet and I like having this here because it actually adds a little bit of distance to the space. So it opens it up makes it look a bit bigger than it is. This is where I do my printmaking and packaging. Planning on getting like a small pop-up desk just to add additional workspace because I need a lot of room when I package and unfortunately the only option right now is the floor or just going to a different room. So it's going to be really nice to have a table that I can take out and just pop it up real quick and have a workable surface area and not have to murder my knees on the floor. So that concludes this video about my new art studio. I know so many of you enjoyed the previous space and so did I but I'm excited for this change and I'm excited to see where my art goes in this new space. I've been really inspired by the forests out here so don't be shocked if you see a ton of forest landscapes soon. Thank you so much for watching. I hope to see you in my next video and I'm wishing you a beautiful and inspiring day.