When someone asks what my workplace looks like, I expect them to imagine something specific. A large desk. A decent chair. A monitor. Maybe a few sketches tacked to the wall. Something that looks like a studio.
I do have a studio. It exists, it has its square footage. But if I had to say where most of my illustrations are created – I'd have to point to the couch.
For years, I couldn't quite accept this. I associate the couch with rest, with TV shows, with idleness. The studio is associated with seriousness, with craftsmanship, with a deserving place for a creator. Yet it is on the couch, with an iPad on my lap and an Apple Pencil in hand, that the sketch, composition, and first layers of color are created – essentially everything that is most important in an illustration. I go to the studio later. At the very end. To finish the commission on a computer with a large monitor, check colors, and prepare files.
So the studio is – to use a cinematic metaphor – an editing room. Important, but not where the story happens.
It helped me stop thinking of my workplace as something that had to look a certain way. An iPad doesn't need a desk. It doesn't need special lighting or an ergonomic chair. It needs a charged battery and a moment of peace. The latter, of course, is the hardest to organize – but that's a separate issue.
I have illustrator friends whose studios look like warehouses – stacks of sketchbooks, boxes of pens, paper samples, old prints. I understand that. There's a certain richness to it, evidence of years of work. I don't have that. Most of my professional history sits on a hard drive.
I don't know if this is good advice for someone just starting out – because perhaps it's better to build a real workspace, with ritual and space. But if you discover that you think best on the couch or at the kitchen table – that's not a sign you're doing something wrong. That's just your office.
Plans
However, the studio has its plans. In the room where for years there was mainly equipment and empty space, I want to arrange something like a gallery – an open studio to which I will invite clients. Not an exhibition in the institutional sense – no halogen lights, white walls, or descriptive plaques. Rather, a space where works hang as they would in a home. In the warm light of a lamp. Without the distance that every official exhibition creates.
This is a place to discuss commissions, but also to show what an illustration really looks like – printed, framed, on a wall. Because between a file on a screen and a poster in a room, there's a difference that cannot be described. You just have to come and see.
Okay, now that I've written about it, it's high time to finish this renovation!
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