Tysoe's Art Blog

I bought an outdoor lamp to light the way to the studio, energy star with dusk/dawn and motion sensor, so you can pretty much leave it, though it currently does use one of the three switches in the studio which allows you to make use of the manual override feature.

First thing I did was add wiring throughout the two garage walls, install light switches, some new beams to mount 4 foot flourescent light fixtures from.

After installing light fixtures I bought light weight tile backer wall board instead of drywall. This stuff is moisture resistant and thinner, lighter and comes in smaller sheets, easier for a individual person to work with on their own and cut with a utility knife.

Here’s the entrance to the studio from the back garden which is kind of nice 🙂

Here’s looking at the wall by the entrance before I got the mud out and started finishing the walls.  Check out my wife in the background 🙂

And here’s the rest of the studio, a bit of a mess, you can see one of my 4 foot tubes and the two Dazor Task lamps that produce excellent 98% accurate full spectrum lighting at 5300 kelvin temp. Was pretty pleased to find a second one at the local antique store for $50. You can still buy them with the same vintage design for $300 brand new. I like them so much better than the modern lights they sell in Art Supply shops. Discovered these from one of my old painting hero’s Frank Frazetta who used them for a good 50 years in his various studios as do many other illustrators today.

REALLY nice to have working electricity outlets in there now too, and able to see with half decent lighting too 🙂

First thing to be done was to get a better source of electricity through to the back studio portion of the garage. Previously there was a single conduit going through the middle of the roof from front to back with a single light switch and lamp fixture. Not at all adequate.

Here you can see the rerouted electricity cable in the conduit piping that enters the studio through the wooden framing on the left side.

Here you can see the old lighting, One thing that changed in this picture from the last time is that the drywall at the back of the room has been painted which makes the whole place a little brighter.

Notice the size of the cupboards, perfect for large A1 size portfolio cases and large canvases etc.

My wife and I bought a house earlier this year and moved in on the 5th or March. One of the criteria we put on our list was an extra room or space to use as a studio.

In the end we found an adorable little 2 bedroom house with a 2 Car Tandem Garage (where you park one car in front of another.

I haven’t been painting as much as I’d like the last few months but recently started doing up the back of the garage and converting it into a studio space.

This is pretty much how it looked when I first moved here, very dark and dingy with a wooden partition that I’ll probably keep but not much else.

Here’s looking inside on a very bright sunny day. The room had very inadequate lighting so overexposed the photo a little too.

Here you can see the 2×4 wooden framing, not too bad for a garage, but a lot of work needs to be done to make this a pleasant working environment.

It’s been a while since I posted up here. My wife and I recently bought a new house after many years or renting so I haven’t had much time or space to feel comfortable with painting.  I have a Tandem Garage that has the back end converted into a shed which will soon be my studio.

Anyway, I did move some of my stuff in there and continued my Skil Lorien character painting which you can see below.

Probably give it a final pass in a few weeks time. After it’s up on the wall a while, things start nagging at me till I have to take it down and rework it.