Ten Tips

Snow on Heath
7.25" x 9.25"
Pastel
Casey Klahn

Studio Tips

1. Have as many drawing boards going as you can find. Birch boards, Gatorfoam Board, Fome Core, .5" Sturdy Board, etc.
   
2. An extra easel or two set up in your studio helps you to enjoy/agonize over more than one image at a time. It facilitates creating a series.
3. Divide a full sheet of paper up with several image spaces, and do more than one painting at a time using different compositions, but the same colors.
   
4. Pin your studies up on a wall or bulletin board so you can refer to them.
5. Need table space? Alternately, you might just want the floor space. Knock down tables of all sizes are an essential for me. You can make your own with a leg set from Home Depot.
6. If you haven't made that waist high, 7 foot by 2 foot table for holding your palettes, what's keeping you? Mine allows tables underneath, which is a huge extra footprint.
7. Irwin brand clamps, all sorts, are great for sticking studies and drawing boards onto other boards or edged places.
8. My large studio easel has a 32" x 46" sheet of plywood mounted on it almost all of the time. Because we seal the back of our frames with black construction paper, I was able to enclosure the front side of the plywood with this light absorbing, tape-loving wrap. Now, I can quickly tape a small piece of Wallis directly to the construction paper, or I use the 2" Irwin clamps to add a Gatorfoam Board with a properly mounted sheet of pastel paper.
9. In your father's day, a dull pocket knife was a sin. Get a Stanley utility blade dispenser and tack it on the wall so your utility knife is always happy. My wife, the framer, and I fight over this little jewel.
10. Since I don't have a stereo system in the studio, my wife got me a deluxe speaker system for me PC and now I can enjoy tunes that way. The speaker set has two midbass, tweeters, and a subwoofer.