Painting the Studio

Since I moved into my condo a couple years ago, I have been slowly painting some of the rooms. The builder used the typical dull beige in a rough flat paint, which marks up too easily and makes for a very blah feel to a room.
I took this week off on vacation to do some relaxing and also to paint the walls in my studio. Of course, the ‘Big Wind Storm’ last Friday, along with the very high temperatures made me wonder why I decided to take this week off! Luckily, I was only without power for about 19 hours. Unfortunately, it was out right in the middle of my painting job! I was pretty bored into the 18th hour, so decided to paint what I could with just the light coming in the one window. As I was working, the power came back on!
Here is a view of the ‘before’ and how messy it usually is in my studio.

Here is a pic after I had a couple walls painted so you can see the difference in wall color.

The left wall, was painted when the power was out. Surprisingly, I only had a couple ‘oops’ spots on the white trim. You can see the dull beige on the right wall. It just seemed to suck the life out of my artwork and made photography difficult. The new paint is a nice light neutral grey, although you might not be able to tell it from white in this pic.
Here is the newly painted, very pristine studio! It will not stay this clean for long. I moved the console to the other side of the room.

One of the main goals of this makeover was to have a dedicated spot to photograph my artwork. I had installed a fluorescent fixture with ‘sunshine’ 5000 kelvin bulbs when I first moved into the condo and liked the light from this setup, so this weekend, I put another fixture in the back area of the room. It is an odd shaped room, with an area off the back that is about 5’ x 8’, which was pretty dark. I figured this space would be a good place for the photography once I got the new light installed.
I wanted a shelf to place the artwork so that it was not leaning against the wall - to make it parallel to the camera lens, I bought a cheap table easel. I think this setup will work pretty nice, since I rarely paint much larger than 11x14. I may paint the easel the same color as the walls so that wood won’t throw off the color in the photograph before I crop it with software.

I’m a big fan of Ikea furniture, so most of what you see here is from there. There are several different brands of wall shelves - West Elm, Ikea and Lowes. I love these types of shelving - makes it easy to display and move around artwork.
Now that I have my big painting job done, I am ready to relax for the holiday and the rest of my –’stay-cation’. I might get back into the studio for painting a picture. I missed last week’s Saturday plein air outing because of the big storm, and this coming Saturday’s forecast is 98 degrees, so I will probably stay inside.