Spring Cleaning Your Artist Studio or Seeking a Boost of Inspiration? Come to Our Artist Swap!

The weather is warming up, the pollen is attacking, and it is officially Spring Cleaning season! As artists, our creative working spaces are one of the spots most prone to chaos in our homes. The act of creating is often a messy one, requiring a wide range of materials and tools. It doesn’t help that one of the common side effects to creativity is a powerful sense of curiosity and the ability to see possibilities in just about anything. These traits are admirable drivers that allow artists to accomplish great things, and they also encourage artists to pick up an average of four million and six ^{[citation needed]} various creative hobbies.

It’s very common for artists to move through phases in their creative pursuits. Creativity begets creativity, after all, so frequently an artist’s path can lead them to dabbling or even mastering everything from painting to sculpture to knitting to jewelry making to metalworking to sewing and beyond. This is not a bad tendency, by the way; learning multiple creative disciplines leads to a more wholistic understanding of the arts that can help improve any and all of your crafts. Sculpting can help illustrators better understand three dimensional form, painting can give jewelry crafters the foundation of color theory to improve their pieces, and graphic design can help costumers stay aware of design principles like proportion and repetition that make for more appealing outfit compositions, as just a few examples.

Experimentation and hobby collection is an important part of many artists’ process, and it makes them more versatile creators. It only becomes a problem when the half-finished projects or materials from abandoned creative phases start spilling over in the studio and getting in the way of your current work.

Cleaning and reorganizing the studio can become more difficult at this point because oftentimes shame and self-recrimination enter the picture. Leaving a project or a hobby behind can feel like failure, and we often hold on to things for much longer than we should in the hope that we’ll get back to them one day. The important thing to keep in mind that the time spent on trying new things, regardless of whether you finished them or even liked them, is never wasted. You still exercised your creative muscles and learned something new, and all of that helps the rest of your artistic pursuits. It is okay to let go of the projects and materials that are only burdening you with clutter and guilt so that you can make room for new pursuits!

I (Carman) have continually faced this very challenge. I’ve gone through phases with nearly every medium taught at The Art Center, plus additional things like needle felting, weaving, pillow making, and resin pouring. Every new medium taught me skills that have helped my illustration or allowed me to solve small problems in daily life, but over time the stuff attached to them becomes a hindrance to me.

The best method I’ve personally found to root out what materials I might want to hold on to for future projects or the expectation that I might return to a craft is to ask myself a simple question: do I enjoy doing this, or do I enjoy the idea of having done this? If I enjoy the actual process of creating something, it’s worth keeping the materials around even if I do not currently have time to engage in the craft. But if I just want to have the finished product in hand and don’t like the making of it… well, that’s an opportunity to support another artist instead, and free up my time and space. It also feels better when I know my unused supplies can go to another artist who will actually get use out of them.

On Saturday April 25, The Art Center is hosting an Earth Day Artist Swap to help artists offload the materials that are no longer serving them and pick up materials they might use or want to try… all for free! It’s the perfect chance to both clean out your studio and exercise your creative curiosity with a new medium (or just stock up on materials you already use). Bring a bag and “shop” the materials that have been donated, chat with fellow artists, and find some fresh inspiration! No need to haggle, bargain, or trade; just bring things you don’t want to use anymore and take the things you want to play with.

You don’t need to donate anything to participate, but if you do want to bring stuff in we ask that you follow Scraplanta’s guidelines for creative reuse. Leftovers from the swap will be donated to either The Art Center for use in camps and free programs or to Scraplanta, so we want to make sure that we bring them things they can use. The only other items outside of Scraplanta’s guidelines that we will take for the Swap are small organizational tools or vending display materials. No large pieces or heavy furniture, please; we are a small staff and do not have the storage or transportation capabilities to handle those.

While you’re here for the Swap, consider joining Scraplanta’s workshop on papermaking with recycled materials! This class is open to adults and kids ages 9 and older, so if you’ve been looking for a fun workshop to do either on your own or with your whole family, this is a great option!