How to Organize Art Supplies

Video Transcript

"A very well known painter named Milton Avery lived in New York City and he married another painter, and supposedly he worked in one corner of the living room for many, many years. He painted very lightly and didn't buy very much paint. I am very impressed by that because Milton Avery is most unusual. Anybody who works in art tends to make a big mess. And one of the problems is, how do we keep the big mess organized enough so that we don't drive our family crazy and drive ourselves crazy. And as we go into different mediums that we would try, how are we going to keep all these things straight. I'm going to use my studio as an example of one way that I organize paint and that I organize my things. And I will just walk through some of these things and show you where I put things. I work mostly in oil or water color. For oil I have a large number of paints that I keep in a paint box and of course I try not to let things build up very much. And I don't take all these with me when I go outside to paint. And I have both large and small brushes. And oil medium and so on that I use. AndI clean brushes in another area. For water color, I have my water color brushes and my water color paints over int this section. And when I paint either int he studio or I go out on location I need easels. I have a full easel in here that I can take or set up here. Or I a half easel that I have here, there's a little painting of my daughter's dog on it. Or I have another large easel that I can use for, for water color pastel or whatever. Right now I have some at a coffee shop. I'm doing a show later this week. I have some a t a shop at a town nearby and so on. But I also have things here. So I need to put them some place. And when you hang pictures in a show you tend to hurt the frames very frequently unfortunately. I have a rack here that I can put finished water color paintings into. So this rack folds up. I can take it when I do a show. Inside the box that you saw earlier are, there are screw drivers and, and razor blades and that kind of thing, and tapes and wires. There are drawers filled with more gadgets and tape, and the linen tapes, and the other kinds of special tapes are pretty specialized and sometime their expensive tape measure. We never clean acrylic. My husband helps me frame, we never clean acrylic with Windex or anything that would make it cloudy. You have to use this special acrylic cleaners. So I hope that this has shown you some of the vast numbers of just pieces of paraphernalia that are useful in making art. And I'm very lucky to have a big studio to be able to put it all in. Some people have bigger ones and some smaller. But in, whether it's a bedroom and you're putting things under the bed or whether it's a big studio we will all garner a few too many things and need places to put them. I hope this has helped you get some idea of the ways that at least I store materials. This is Eileen Pestorius, until next time."