 Well, hello my friends and welcome to Monet Cafe, the new and improved Monet Cafe. I have been waiting to say that again for a long time. As some of you may know, who are already maybe subscribers on YouTube or members of the Monet Cafe Art Group on Facebook, my husband and my family, we were flooded out of our home and my art studio due to Hurricane Irma. We lived near a river. The river breached and it totally flooded everything we owned. We rushed for one day to save everything that we could. I was able to save some of my art supplies, not all of them, but we have been blessed. We got rid of a lot of things we didn't need and we got a chance to start over. It's been hard, but I wanna focus on the beautiful positive things and one of them is getting this studio here. We renovated an old home while our other home was being restored. We were living out of a travel trailer and made the best of that, but it's been so nice to finally get this room, a small 10 by 13 room in the home we're now living in, made into an art studio. So I thought, what a great opportunity for me to show you guys or anyone brand new to this channel, kind of some neat tips on how to organize your home studio. Here at Monet Cafe, we've focused mostly on home artists or beginner, even two intermediate advanced artists, but mostly how you can make things work on a budget out of your home and really just we enjoy each other and we share and grow together. And I have to tell you, the Monet Cafe Facebook group is amazing. You guys blessed me so much during this trial in our lives for me to be able to be able to look at your artwork and everybody to encourage each other and it's like a movement, an artistic movement and it's such a beautiful thing. So we've got a lot of neat, exciting things I've got some great new video ideas and one of them I'll give you a sneak peek right here or an idea of what we're gonna be doing. I happened to live not far from where Mount Vision Pastels are manufactured and I spoke with the owner and he has agreed to let me tour the factory and I wanna make a video of the tour so you can see how pastels are actually made and also I would like to talk to him about creating a Monet Cafe starter set like a particular pastels I pick out that are great for kind of our focus which is a more of a loose impressionistic style and also there's so many people who ask questions when they begin about which pastel should I get, what values and colors so it'd be neat to have a little starter set with our name on it. So we'll see how that goes. But anyway, I thought this will be a great opportunity to share what we've done in our studio. My husband is so creative and so talented. He's helped me with a lot of the ideas in here and it might help you in coming up with how you might do some things to help your artistic studio be more creative or functional. So I'm so excited. Here we go, a little tour of the new and improved Monet Cafe. Oh, and it's Christmas. Merry Christmas to me and everyone. All right, let's do it. All right, welcome to the new Monet Cafe studio and I'm going to give you just a little 360 turnaround here just so that you can see it's just a 13 by 11 room and I've had just an interesting time in trying to arrange a small space like this to be very effective and productive for all of my needs. I had an interesting challenge in that not only did I need this room to focus or function as an art studio but I also needed to make it work for my home office, for my other business. Some of you might not know, I don't think I've ever mentioned it that I use both sides of my brain. I have my artistic side and I have a small bookkeeping business that I do as well. And I just, instead of having this in another room, which I did not have, we don't have the space in this small house. The house is only like 1,400 square feet but I took this closet that was in this bedroom and we converted it to make it a little office for me just for my paperwork and my filing purposes. But the reason I'd like to show you this right now is because some people may not even have a room for your space to create an art studio. You may just have a closet and just take any little space that you can in your house and make it yours if it's not being used that much. A lot of times people will have a guest bedroom that hardly ever gets used or like I said, a little closet like this. So this is just a bedroom closet. I've taken a curtain, I mean not a curtain rod, a shower rod that would normally go in a shower and put between the sides here. We have a curtain, this is not actually a curtain. This is a tablecloth that's from Walmart. I think it's that Pioneer Woman series or stuff. But anyway, I liked it. It was colorful and artistic. And so that is just function, if I wanna just close this off or whatever. But also I thought I'd show you, I have my filing cabinets for artistic purposes. You could put anything down here, maybe shells down here to store your papers, your pastels, your paints. And these are from Ikea. And this is also a neat little cabinet from Ikea to store things in. So you see, you could just get really creative. We just bought some wood from Lowe's and I painted it and stained it. And we cut it to fit the closet, put some brackets up. And again, this could function so well as a little small home art studio. So that's just to give you an idea of what can be done in a small space. But now, back to the room that I have, I needed to make it function for, well, I said two purposes, three. My bookkeeping business, my artistic where I paint, but also where I create the videos. And this computer over here is the one that I use to create the videos for Monet Cafe YouTube channel, which comes in handy to keep my computer separate for those purposes. But anyway, over here on this wall is where I guess this would be the productive storage part here because it's where I store most of the supplies that I have. This was a piece of furniture I had in my home that flooded in the dining room area. And I converted it to artistic purposes and I think it's worked really well. Some of the things that you might have to store are I have sketchbooks up here. I have my foam core board that I use to store my pastels. I have a video on how to do that. I love art books, so a little section on art books and my little guy, Leonardo there. And then I have a shelf just for my pastels. You pastelists out there probably already know we just can't have enough. So I just can't wait to get some more pastels too. But I'll just deal with what I have for now. But anyway, here's some more bins and I wanted to let you know accessibility is key. I found that it helps me a lot to have baskets and open spaces rather than cabinets that you have to open because when you're in the midst of producing something or you're in artistic juices or flowing, you don't wanna have to stop and open a cabinet. You wanna just be able to grab it. And having good order is really gonna help with that too where you don't have to hunt and search for it. So I still could use a little bit more order in some of my things down here. But you get the idea, I have like all of my things I use kind of for under paintings in here. I have my tapes. These are like some of my blending tools. By the way, these packing peanuts work pretty good for blending. My husband just gave me all of these from the package we got. Then I have like my fixatives and various other products in here. And so, you know, you can kind of see that it's a neat way to be able just to keep it organized and open concept shelving. Now over here, I just have another little space here. I'm hoping I had to cancel my art lessons. I'm hoping to be able to have students back in here again and do some art lessons. This is just another neat little, some brushes I have in a piece I got from, where did I get this from, Jo-Ann's Fabrics. And another little Ikea piece that I love this because I'm keeping all of my pastel papers. These are like ones that I have prepared myself. You guys may have seen some of the videos I've made on that. These are just various little sanded surfaces I have that are smaller. And I have some watercolor paper cut here. You may have seen the videos where we use watercolor paper and create our own pastel surface. And then I've got various other papers up here that I like that I'll hope to do another one on the different surfaces. I have one, a video I did on that, but I'd like to do another one as well. Now, I love these little shelves I got from Ikea. They're great for displaying your artwork, but they're also, I'm thinking I might put some baskets up there to store paintings that are not quite ready for me to take to anywhere to sell or to a show. In other words, these are, let me find one. Like here, this one's already ready to go. It's already packaged up. But so these are safe just to put in a basket and they're not gonna get damaged or anything. So anyway, that's just neat. More storage, the better as far as I'm concerned, just to have places to put things. And if you've just got wall space like this, you might as well utilize it. Now, one part of a studio that is so important, and if you've been painting for any time, you know lighting is everything. So we found these lights that I put around where I'm typically going to work at this easel. I don't have my big board up there yet. But these are lights from Lowe's, I believe, yes. And it's just a track light that you can actually turn these bars to shape them the way you want. Lots of track lights have more of a spotlight, a light that shines directionally bright at one spot. And it's really better to have the light go everywhere. We're almost like it's an overcast day where the light is just consistent and kind of like coating the room rather than a spotlight anywhere. And so I found those are really nice. I'll see if I can find the name brand of those. And then I also just have these can lights that my husband and I put in the ceiling here. This is, like I said, this is an old house. It's a 1950s house. And so we have totally renovated it. But these are really neat little LED can lights that are pretty easy to install, especially if you don't have a wood ceiling like we have here. And the neat thing here is I have a combination of warm and cool lights here. Okay, these LEDs are on the cooler side, which when the number gets higher, it's cooler. A lower number is warmer. I think these are like 3000s and these are like 2000 or something. So these are a little bit warmer, but it gives me a nice mix of lights in here. So I'm not too far on one end of the warmer cool scale. So anyway, so this, let me see over here. Yeah, this isn't just another little station that I have over here. That I will sometimes work from. I use this little gadget right here just to put my phone on to use for video purposes or taking pictures sometimes. And so as you can see for a small room, I've got quite a few blue places I could work here. So let me back up here and show you again. And I also wanted to mention this piece of furniture. Wow, what a blessing to find this. I found this at a store called American Signature. I was originally thinking I was gonna have to have two desks because of my other business situation. And I realized I can't have two desks. This room, I just won't have the space that I need. So when I found this, I thought this is perfect. It actually, both sides of this can close up. These right here, I haven't locked in right now, but they lift up, oh no, I don't. They lift up and close up and so does this side. It's on hinges and it closes up. So this could literally just be a very narrow system right here. If I moved all of this off of here, it would be a very nice little craft table. But it also has lots of storage underneath for more things like papers and just palettes and things that I use. And the other side as well has some of the cabinets and drawers here. So it's really unique and my husband and I call it the transformer because it has so much functionality and ability to change to suit your needs. So there is my little studio again. And I just pray I'm able to create more videos that will help anyone who is interested in pastels or sometimes we cover a few other mediums but mostly pastels and that you guys will learn and grow and enjoy this beautiful artistic journey. So thanks guys and please subscribe to the channel if you haven't already. Look for the Facebook group, Monet Cafe Art Group. Mention in one of the questions that you found out about the group from the YouTube channel. And I can't wait to meet new people and also I am so glad to be back with all of my dear, dear artistic friends in Monet Cafe. Blessings and see you soon.