Moving in, starting with the essentials pic.twitter.com/8pWI0WWyPV
— David Malki ! (@malki) August 5, 2015
I’m back from Gen Con and I’m moving into my new studio in West Los Angeles! In the next few days I’ll be catching up with the Roll-a-Sketch drawings ordered in the last few weeks, as well as the Kickstarter. Thanks for your kind support with those, I look forward to drawing your creatures from the comfort of my new digs! Once it is at all… comfortable.
It’s a weird thing, moving; I was in my last place for four and a half years, and in that time a lot has happened, a lot has changed about how I run my business. I have more stuff now, for sure: more inventory, and supplies, and books, and the detritus of a life incessantly peppered with miscellaneous projects. It was a startling thing, seeing box after box after box come out of the old place like a clown car. How did it all fit?
Now, of course, I have the challenge of figuring out where stuff will go, in the new place. I’m trying to be very deliberate with the process, looking at each object and coming up with a sensible home for it (or deciding it doesn’t need to hang around), so we don’t end up simply drowning in boxes and clutter once again, but at a new address.
It’s surprisingly hard! It feels weighty, a real responsibility, and of course giving an object a home is assigning it a value, a purpose, when not everything’s purpose or value is easy to define in a way that implies where precisely it should live. Some things just seem to want to float, to exist only in order to pop up occasionally, without any real utility besides simply being a souvenir of itself.
In addition, I want to look critically at my work habits, the processes I do often and the materials and supplies I need close at hand, and try carefully to design a workplace in concert with the sorts of things I do anyway, or want to do more of. Having a dedicated studio at all is quite a luxury, so I’m trying to take it seriously.
I’d like to invite your comments: what successes or failures have you had with setting up workspaces? What are lessons you’ve learned, or best practices, or things to keep in mind? I work well within constraints, so I guess what I’m really asking for are some rules. Let me know if you have any tips!