I did a big rearrange of my studio (the one half of the guest bedroom) a couple of months ago. (For my last studio tour, see here!)
Five Things I Love: Studio Edition
Today, New Yorker cartoonists are posting photos of their studios on instagram under the hashtag #newyorkerstudio. Here’s a peek into my studio, and five of my favourite things in it.
One of my main takeaways from my time at Yaddo was that I want to draw my graphic novel with ink on paper. Insane, i know. The pages in my pitch were drawn on the iPad…
And while I like how it looks, clean and easier to edit etc, I was really just blown away by how much i enjoyed drawing physical pages. It was surprisingly fast, and so intuitive to lay them out side by side to visually edit them as i went.
So a big reason why i draw comics to begin with is that i carry deep immigrant guilt about “wasting” paper and supplies, and comics can conveniently be really tiny and take up no space at all! and also it’s so cheap, requiring only paper and pens, so there’s no cost/time barrier to doing it (because each additional obstacle reduces my likelihood of doing the thing by like 10000%).
So honestly, pitching the graphic novel on an iPad was in large part because i just couldn’t wrap my head around using THAT much paper and all the space it would take up. But alas….. it was time for a change.
So I got rid of my tilting glass desk (I wasn’t getting much use out of it anyway) and picked up a second-hand LONG TABLE for $40!
You can sort of see in the photo that I put an old shoe rack under the long table to store different kinds of paper so that it’s easy to access but still out of the way. We are going to get over our fear of using paper!
Crucially, i also got a new chair with a foot rest that adjusts to either counter height or to proper short-person sitting height depending on what i’m doing that day. Previously, i was using a secondhand office chair with a seat cushion on it, but once the hydraulics started to fail I couldn’t stop ignoring how bad it was. Don’t underestimate the effect that a few adjustable inches can have on your horrific neck strain!
I put my scanner on one end, which has already made my life 10000x easier. Previously, it was inside of a cube shelf so it was really hard to access and i couldnt even open it all the way unless i took it out, which decreased the amount of scanning i was compelled to do. Now - i’m scanning every day! I also clipped an IKEA pegboard to one end of the desk to maximize desk space for comic construction.
Lastly, I got a laptop stand that has room to store a bluetooth keyboard and mouse underneath, which is a small change but AMAZING for ergonomics and reclaiming desk space — it was starting to feel like horizontal storage which made me not want to sit down.
Some areas still need work…
… but I am VERY happy with this refresh, and feel MARKEDLY more energized to work and draw. It’s possible I’ll need to do more reorganizing once we get seriously into the drawing phase, but more on that later.
For paid subscribers, a look at some of my rough/warmup sketches, and some sketchbook comics (from Yaddo and some recent travels).
Thanks for reading! <3