By Eric Fortune

Hello Neighbor. Today, I would like to give you a tour of my studio. Prepare yourself. This is where the Magic happens. Welcome….to My World.

Ok, so if we could all look past the raw wood beams, exposed drywall, and plaster you can see my work place. A bedroom turned studio.

As you can see I’ve altered my art desk a bit to allow it to hold multiple desk lamps at a further distance from the table’s surface. This gives me more consistent lighting as opposed to hot spots and shadows from a lamp that is too close to the painting. It does make the desk a little top heavy so I’ve placed small weights on the bottom to help keep it grounded. Was it worth it? Perhaps.

I have another portable art desk in front of my main desk. It comes in handy when I need to lay out ref, other paintings, the cutting board etc. But it’s also great for when art friends stop by to paint and hang out i.e. mostly just hang out.

The rest of the room is mostly for my computer, printer, etc. and hanging files for organizing invoices, clients and the like. I hope it’s not too weird that I have a bunch of my own paintings on the wall. I really just don’t have a lot of room for them and thought they would be even more weird scattered all over my house. Plus I’m obsessed with my own work and spend most of my days staring at old paintings wondering where it all went wrong…

These are a few photos of my basic set up while working. I’m right handed so I keep most of the supplies on the right side of my desk for easy access. I like my light shining in at a slight angle from the left. The windows to the room are also on my left side so that during the day shadows from my hands aren’t being cast onto the area I’m working on. There’s a small Tupperware container which I store my paints in. I lay a paper towel at the bottom and then set my paints onto the towel. Every now and then the paints need to be sprayed with water to prevent them from drying out. In this way I can keep my paints usable for quite some time. I prefer a basic round water color palette for mixing. Fairly simple. Some things that you may not notice that are very helpful when painting: my hair dryer on the left of my desk, and my eye dropper for adding water to paint mixtures. I love my eyedropper. Perhaps someday I’ll do a “What if I won the Lottery Dream Studio Edition”. Or I can sand down the compound and just finish the walls that are already there. Thanks for stopping by. Hope you enjoyed the visit.