Cleaning The Under Art Desk Shelf

This fell slightly short of being a “quick project”. So I had trouble sleeping Friday night…again, but this time I was able to actually get some organizing done that I wanted to do last week. This is a shelf on the bottom of my art desk. As a former computer desk I guess this was an option for where the computer could go…provided you could turn it on and off with your toe? I don’t remember how I had the computer on this one though I don’t remember getting on the floor any time I wanted to load a disk or CD. Anyway it became a junk shelf until it was blocked by two big piles of comics. Since I was finally able to move those it was time to go after this.

It wasn’t a hard project and only took a few hours, though there are parts I need to still do, possibly next week and hopefully with a bit more sleep, but I got the important part done and that works for me. Let’s go over what I did, because otherwise this isn’t much of a report.

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A Video About Decluttering Your Art Area

My art station is one of those areas I keep messing with. I thought this week’s project would be rather easy. It’s just some minor alteration and a bit of Operation: A Place For Everything thinking. Then Saturday came and I had trouble getting to sleep the night before. My brain just didn’t want to shut down so I ended up not only unable to work on this week’s project but I missed out on my cousin’s band performing because I was too tired to go. I’m not happy about this.

For you guys who are just into reading I have an article from Simplyleigh Organized about decluttering your office. I went down a rabbit hole of various decluttering art room videos trying to find one to have a decent post for today. I eventually decided that rather than clutter this page (see what I did there) with videos I’d choose one that closest to what I’m doing. So even though I’m not really going into a “minimalist” lifestyle (yet, anyway) this video where The Minimal Mom declutters her kids arts and crafts area would be the one I went with. The tips are well given, it’s not a huge project (the art corner is only a tweaking project…a CONSTANT tweaking project for me, mind you), and it’s kind of fun. Hopefully next Friday I’ll get enough sleep to do a proper Saturday project. In the meantime I hope you get something from this.

Organizing My Art Making Papers

Luckily, R2 doesn’t get nosebleeds.

Most of the art I do these days are digital, with the “artputer” running Clip Studio Paint. That doesn’t mean I’ve abandoned good ol’ fashioned paper as a thing to draw on though. I still enjoy regular drawing, but for most of my current projects I find digital to be easier. That said the various drawers I have my drawing and other art making paper in are kind of mess. So this week the goal was to make it less of a mess. If I want to find my bristol, my computer paper, my carbon paper, or my construction paper among other paper types I need to make that easier.

These various papers are stored in three different drawers; one drawer is part of the set of metal drawers and the other two the plastic drawers by the desk. This is the first project in Operation: A Place For Everything, which I mentioned but didn’t give a name to in last week’s v-log. The mission is to reassess how I store things and dedicate a particular spot for a particular need. The metal drawer box was already “assigned” to “special papers”, stuff I don’t use very often but might have a use for in the future. The other two I really didn’t designate for any particular purpose so things were not as organized as I’d like. So deciding to start with an easy one for Operation: APFE (I’ll work on that) getting this part of the art corner together seemed like the right way to go.

A Few Smaller Projects

Over the past few weeks my projects have been about setting up the digital side of my art corner. I did do a bit more of that this week but I also did a few smaller projects this week as well. Nothing really exciting but it’s still stuff that needed to be done, and with a book report coming next week I wanted something to discuss. That’s the secret tagline of this site. “I have an article to write, I need to clean something!”

So that’s what I did. Here’s a short list of this week’s projects.

Quick Report: Getting The Artputer Going

I’m going to be devoting the next week or so to getting the “Artputer” fully active so I can make all kinds of cool stuff. It qualifies as a Clutter project because it involves me getting my work area going and some things I’ll have to do with the rest of the project days I have available. This week my project was getting it to minimum comic making status for my weekly comic. That included:

The Art Corner Clean-Up: Second Strike

Update on this phase. Due to things happening during the week I didn’t get to devote as much attention as I planned to this part of the project, the one where I went over all the card backs with Transformers tech specs and other profiles, but I did go over them. I did send some stuff to recycling bin while still keeping stuff for a future art project that I still think I need. With that I moved on to the next part of art corner clean-up.

With the keyboard shelf now cleaned out of junk it was time to look at the middle shelf. (The bottom shelf will have to wait until I’ve continued my comic project and hopefully cleared up space for the comics sitting there to go where they belong.) This shelf has collected a bunch of various things. Primarily it’s where I have artwork that won’t fit in my huge art binder because of the paper size. See, most of the art was done on 8X11 paper because that’s what I used for years. It’s what goes into copiers or computer printers and that’s what was available. When I switched to Bristol Boards the smallest I could find was 9X12, and I can’t find binder sleeves that hold 9X12. This includes not only lineart for the comics I make but work on title cards for videos and other things I’ve worked on. Throw in a few magazines and it’s become something of a disaster. So this week the goal was to make this look less terrible.

The Art Corner Clean-Up: First Strike

If you’ve been here long enough you may remember my art corner, the spot I set up to my physical and digital drawing. While not too bad in comparison I just had the urge to clean this spot up a bit. The problem is I had a party to go to this week and thus didn’t have much time to do a big project. That’s on the top shelf there. The bottom shelf are Transformers comics from the IDW run that I don’t have a box for, the box containing my other Transformers comics already full from other companies runs. I like Transformers, obviously.

I didn’t even really complete this project; it would be more accurate to say I moved the clutter somewhere else, but I do a little cleaning and I’ll be finishing this project hopefully over the week. So what’s involved with it?