Making My Living Room Into an Art Studio

Here is a Time-Lapse of me and mother disassembling my living room and turning it into the art studio it will be in my movie. I wanted to build the set before completing my storyboard because it allows me to visualize and personally practice and try some of the movements I will request my mother to do.

To achieve the messy, too busy creating to clean, a little bit insane look for the studio we did a variety of things... starting with research

Here are some art studios that I found on Pinterest and analyzed to prepare for this.

Takeaways: 
#1. The floor needs to be covered in canvas tapestries, preferably dirty, paint-stained and splattered to add texture and show that she does art every day.

#2. She needs to have abundant materials. Paint and paintbrushes need to be stacked at every surface that is empty to create a messy look. I brought the desk down from my room, draped a white sheet for more texture and covered it is dirty napkins, empty pasta sauce jars I found around the house, sketches, stray paint bottles, spray paint and tin cans full of paint brushes

#3. She also needs a lot of storage. Paintcarts or cabinets full of paint show that she is a professional and has a lot of materials accumulated. Luckily, my mother is an artist in real life so she was a stockpile of her favorite acrylic paint at my house already so it was not difficult to recreate.

#4. An easel is very easily recognizable by non-artists as a tool used by visual artists and painters, so having one would be essential in allowing all viewers to make that connection as early as possible. Unfortunately, I did not have one in this house, and going out to Fort Lauderdale to get it out of a storage container in the middle of a pandemic seemed problematic; however, Michaels was having a HUGE sale and I was a able to get the easel we are building in the video for 75% off! Building it was kind of hard because we had to do the majority of the building based on pictures since we could only find instructions in French.

5. A lot of completed and unfinished pieces of work from the artists. Turned Canvases, sculptures, and sketches scattered all across the floor are common in art studios. To do this I moved around 15 of the sculptures that can be found all around my house (mostly created by my mother) and scattered magazine remnants, past sketches of mine, as well as markers and colored pencils. I like how they create a subtle chaotic mood.

Here is the final product: