At some point in my life I decided to start painting. Great, right? It is indeed. To master the craft I practiced a lot, often reusing my previous work to lay another painting on top of the previous one.
Getting better and better at painting I saw that some of my works start to sell: initially to her friends, then their friends, and so on. The usual social thing nowadays, you know.
So everything goes went well up to the point when my hobby started to attract customers.
I can't afford to work in the living room anymore: the paintings are more complex now and have to remain on the easel longer - sometimes weeks. At the same time I can't afford buying or renting a studio.
Some work in progress has to dry somewhere, and there is no more space around the apartment to put any more paintings against the wall.
There are some works that have dried already and waiting to be sold. Those occupy the top of the cupboard, sit behind the curtains, some are hiding in the closet.
A day came when I couldn't continue to do what I love even if I really wanted it. What can could I do?
Luckily I had a little loggia in my apartment, that I decided to tune a bit:
First things first - color, I made the walls and ceiling white. It takes some bravery, but the result is great and clean feeling, as well as the premise starting to feel larger.
Second comes the lighting, it is quite unusual to paint in darkness so I decided to add a lot of light into the ceiling and on the walls. I went with 3600K bulbs everywhere, so that white remains white.
To feel comfortable in the winter, since I live in a cold country I installed a simple electric heated floor setup.
So now it is always bright and warm no matter what's outside.
Then when everything was white, warm and well lit the problem of a workspace arouse. Having just a box you can put an easel in is cool, but doing sketches for example is more comfortable while sitting down. So I needed a table. The tricky thing with the table is that it needed to be wider in the front part comparing to it's back. Throughout my whole life I didn't see any table with such a peculiar shape. I didn't even bother looking anywhere and went straight on for a custom option. It was a bit more expensive, but fit perfectly, and had all the drawers i wanted.
Now the space was ready, the workplace was ready, the following thing to tackle was some device to put drying paintings in. There were and still are plenty of those on Amazon, but due to the weird shape of my new loggia-studio I had to order that one custom too. It's quite simple actually, a board with evenly distant holes in it. And the are some sticks that for these holes. You put the painting between two of the sticks and voila: it dries and does not take a lot of space.
So three problems were solved now, the only one remaining was the storage for dried paintings. By the time I faced that I was already so used to the custom furniture that without any hesitation I took the same route.
As of now I'm completely equipped with the tools I need for my workflow: sketching-painting-drying-storing.
The morale of this story is the following: in case you can't do what you want and love to do, identify what is blocking you, and in case of there is no generic solution find e be afraid to go custom.