"Nesting" or Purging Every Few Months...
I just finished the bi-monthly cleaning of my workspace. When I first set up my studio years ago, I thought that I, like other artists, would live in a creative "mess", paint, supplies and papers all over the place. (That's the way our studios were at in art school.) I have found that I can't be inspired to create when I feel overwhelmed by the "mess". I love having artwork and inspiration everywhere, but I need everything organized and accessible.
So I began a regular clean-up of my space. I go through my sketches and supplies and don't keep everything the way I used to. The purge feels great afterward. I usually get the urge to do this when I have a big project coming up and I just can't get started, then I know its clean-up time. This time around I even rearranged furniture and opened up a corner of my space which I love. (I can't figure out why I didn't think to set it up that way from the start!)
So now I'm ready to go, no more excuses. I have an exciting opportunity for my book, "The ABC's of Non-Consent" that I will be sharing next week and now have space to prep for it. Stay tuned!
Eat, Sleep, Pin, Repeat!
I don’t know if you are like me, but I save snippets of everything from magazines mostly, or at least I used to do that. I would collect recipes, beauty tips, fitness routines, decorating ideas etc. I had file cabinets and folders full of ideas. The only problem was that after they got filed away, they were never seen again. I had good intentions of making that sugar scrub or refinishing that piece of furniture, but I never did them. Mainly because the folders and files were always a mess. I loved saving the stuff but I never wanted to sort and organize it better, that took too much time.
And then came Pinterest. My world didn’t change right away, it took a couple of years to really understand the power of it. Over the last few years I have created an online visual database for myself consisting of everything I dreamed of doing for my files full of printed “snippets”, but a thousand times better. And now with the category and organization features Pinterest has, I have organized every single thing I have ever pinned.
The best part is that I actually use it. I look up what I need within my boards and do many of the things I save. It’s where I go for inspiration, education or just fun. I have pretty much discontinued all my print magazines. I now subscribe to an app called "Texture" that allows me to read a large array of magazines each month, digitally, which is fine, since I don’t need to cut them up anymore.
Last month I switched my personal account to a business account and hope to use it to promote my business in the future, we’ll see how that goes, (I was a little reluctant). But as far as using Pinterest as a digital scrapbook or filing cabinet for everything I need and everything I never knew I needed, it’s absolutely awesome. Here’s a link to my Pinterest account where you can see how I’ve set it all up...
https://www.pinterest.com/ileneprice/
