Category: home studio

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Monday Morning Art School: how to set up a studio on the cheap

Our ancestors produced masterpieces in badly-lighted, small, cold cramped spaces. You don’t need to spend a fortune to furnish a studio.
The Testrite #500 easel has served me well for many, many years.

I recently got an email about how to set up a studio. After counting about $20,000 in construction and equipment, I laughed and pitched it in the trash. For most new painters, such an expenditure is not justified. Buy expensive easels, taborets, and lighting systems if you can afford them and like pretty things. But never confuse equipment with competence. Nobody ever painted better because he or she had pricey equipment.

When I first started painting professionally, my ‘studio’ was a corner of my kitchen. I had toddlers then, and I worked when I could steal time. The basement was damp and moldy, with occasional freshets of water across the floor. There was simply no room for a dedicated painting space.
Autumn in the Genesee Valley, by Carol L. Douglas. Pastel dust is a bigger environmental concern than oil paint in a small space.
So I threw down a mat to protect the kitchen floor and set up an easel by my son’s high chair. For a taboret, I used an old rolling kitchen cart. I retired it, eventually. Now I’m using a hand-me-down taboret from a retired artist friend. You can buy used rolling kitchen cabinets for $25-50. They’re durable and have storage and a wooden top. The only functional difference between them and the pricey oak cabinets at the art store is that they don’t come with pretty stainless-steel turps cans. Use a coffee can with a coiled wire or pebbles on the bottom. It works just as well.
My teaching studio is furnished with Testrite #500 aluminum easels. They’re less than $100. Mine have survived a few decades of student abuse. When a part gets lost—as they inevitably do—I just buy a replacement online.
Mohawk Valley midnight, by Carol L. Douglas. Oil pastels are less likely to go airborne, and sometimes they’re fun to goof around with.
My own work easel is the Testrite #700, which handles 60” square canvases with no trouble. Anything bigger, I just lean on a wall. I think aluminum easels are great value for money, especially if you’re in a climate with big humidity changes.
The best light source you can have is a north- or east-facing window. If you lack that, you used to have to buy expensive daylight florescent tubes or an Ott Light. Now you can put LED daylight-balanced bulbs in a regular fixture. (These are not appropriate for video, however.)
Just as better lightbulb colors have dropped in price, so have air cleaning systems. I have a $5000 heat-exchanger/filter sitting in a case in my garage. It’s no longer necessary. The introduction of cheap HEPA filter air cleaners made it obsolete. (In general, it’s not the medium but the pigments that are dangerous in art. Worry more about pastel dust than your Gamsol or the vegetable oils in your paints.)
Niagara Falls, by Carol L. Douglas (pastel)
It’s a bad idea to clean your brushes in the kitchen sink. If you don’t have a utility sink, you can make a dry sink. Buy a used sink; our local ReStore always has them. A 5-gallon bucket underneath can catch your drain-water and a 2-liter soda bottle is sufficient to clean most brushes. If that’s too big for your space, be sure to scour your sink carefully after each art cleanup. You don’t want to add pigment to your food.
I use a tie rack, set on its side, as a drying rack for boards and a plate rack for canvases. If a canvas is large enough to need extra support, I simply put a piece of cardboard behind it while it dries.
I bought my flat files used from a printing shop that was going out of business. They’re the one thing that doesn’t have a real-world analog that’s cheaper, but they’re also heavy and take up a lot of real estate. If your collection of papers, etc. is small, you can put it in flat cardboard frame boxes and store it under your bed(s).
Now, to catch my plane!
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Home studio or artists’ cooperative?

Would moving enhance your career? Probably not.

My former studio.

My first professional studio space was a corner of our kitchen. The light was good and it had a laminate floor. A few years later, we enclosed our garage, adding full-spectrum fluorescent light bulbs and cat5 wiring.

Then we moved. I rented a space on the top floor of the Hungerford Building in Rochester. It was a large room facing east with beautiful light. Eventually I relocated my studio to the third floor of our house. This was a quirky, beautiful space with great light and lousy headroom. After a few years of bumping my head, I reshuffled my workspace in the former master bedroom at the head of the stairs. That studio was 325 square feet, large enough to teach six students. Here in Maine, I have a large, light room that’s about a third of the total square footage of my house.
My current studio.
A dedicated home studio seems less expensive, but that is an illusion. The median list price per square foot in the United States is $140, according to Zillow. Special-purpose industrial space averages $11.25 a square foot/year. My last studio’s only upgrade was a better lighting system, but that still cost me thousands of dollars.
It is only cheaper to work from home if you already have space to burn. For my friends in New York City, where space is at a premium, a rented studio is often a better option.
Will your projected art income can really cover an additional rent payment? A home studio is already wrapped into your current rent or mortgage. Renting a studio is cheaper than adding on, but the cheapest solution is to repurpose an underutilized space you’re already paying for.
A professional studio needs good light (natural and enhanced), adequate storage, room to work, a space for office work, wi-fi, and separation from other people and activity. If you’re teaching, you also need to consider access to a restroom, handicapped accessibility, and safety.
Storage is something we often fail to consider when calculating our space needs.
Art materials should be kept away from food prep areas. That’s especially true of pastels, which allow pigment to be airborne. Having said that, risks associated with oil paints are overstated. Still, the pigments in art supplies—and some solvents—aren’t good to ingest. I ran a whole-house air cleaner in my first house.
I need an orderly environment. It’s difficult for me to pick up my brushes when there are dishes in the sink. I don’t like visitors to my studio. It was that need for order that drove me to a rented studio when my kids were little. However, I found myself leaving work every afternoon at 3:30 when my youngest child got home from school. I had more flexibility than my husband, who worked from an office. 
Is the neighborhood in which your cooperative studio is located really safe? In Rochester, my studio was on the fringes of a tough neighborhood. I could work late at night in my locked studio; the parking lot and corridors were the problem.
325 square feet was sufficient to teach six students.
How introverted are you? Some artists are challenged and motivated by other artists nearby. Others find community to be a distraction. However, the network you build in an artist’s cooperative can be invaluable; so too can their cooperative art shows.
Will an outside studio enhance your career? Unless you’re in a prestigious cooperative, no. Neither gallerists nor potential clients judge you by your address; they care about your work.