i finally filmed a studio tour for you!

It’s here! I finally got around to filming and editing my studio tour! I hope you enjoy it, and please let me know what you thought in the comments.

You can also watch on and subscribe to my YouTube channel. There are subtitles available, and the transcript is below if you need to read as well as watch. I’d love to hear what you think, so leave a comment here or on youtube, or email me. Sign up to my email list as well for more at www.aratidevasher.com

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Transcript:

Hi, I’m Arati (Arty). Welcome to my studio tour! 

This is the front room in our home, and I’m going to show it to you in four different sections: my desk and workspace, studio organisation and storage, decoration and pretty bits and bobs, and studio lighting. And at the end of this video I’ll show you a little 3D plan of the changes and improvements I want to make to the space and this room. 

Let’s start off with where I sit and work every single day.

(My Workspace)

My workspace is an L-shaped desk combination. The main desk is an eight-seater IKEA dining table and the other two desks are foldable ones that I had in my previous home studio. On my main desk I have my iMac resting on a Satechi hub to increase the number of USB ports and card readers. There’s also an external disk reader and backup hard drive. I use a standard keyboard and a trackpad mouse. Hidden behind my giant monitor on one side is a thermal printer for postage labels. Beside this is my iPad Pro on a stand, behind which I consistently hide my ever growing stack of bits to sort as well as my notebook and fountain pen. The rest of this main desk is used for whatever I happen to be doing that day. Today I’ve been painting, but I also use it for product photography, making reels or tiktoks, packing orders, having client meetings or even just eating my lunch. I’ll do a detailed video on my filming setup, but the gist of it is that this boom arm extends over my desk and I can then put my phone or camera on it and film from pretty much any angle. Of course, a desk isn’t of any use without a comfy chair and this is mine. The other two desks are currently arranged along the side wall. Their surface is covered with a heat resistant lining and a white cloth to make it look seamless. Under it is my printer, microphone and bin and some storage.

(Storage) 

Storage of course is key in any studio, however big or small. This room is pretty spacious so I’ve managed to put long shelves on two walls as well as utilise a cupboard and drawers that we used in our previous home. I’ve also hung slings from the shelves to store paper. Plus, I keep every-day art materials in my rolling cart and I’ve already done a detailed video tour of the ‘art cart’. To store all my materials and products, I have an organised chaos system using boxes and drawers with labels on them so I know exactly what is in each. It looks extremely neat and tidy but the inside of the storage may not be quite as organised as I would like. It’s always my intention to tidy up within the boxes, but as I work and take out things and put them back, I never really have the time or the inclination to actually have a tidy up other than chucking things back in the box.

(Pretty Bits)

Most of the walls in my studio are covered in storage, but I do have this one wall which I’ve covered with artwork… my own artwork as well as some by others. I put up pieces that I find beautiful, that inspire me, some of my samples of new work that I’m thinking about or experiments and layouts. On this wall are images of work by Maddie from Also the Bison, Andy Wilkes, Isabella Whitworth, Octavia of Tink Outside the Box, Dan Hillier, Emma Carpenter Illustration, April from Monkey Mintaka and Vikram Madan, all attached with masking tape so I can move them around when I feel like it. My niece, who loves drawing at my desk, puts her work up here as well and changes it out often. Aside from this wall I have a few frames on the floor which I use for photography and some bits and bobs below the shelves that I collect on my walks and from the garden. Plants, of course, are always present in my home and they’re switched around from room to room throughout the year. I’ve also got this little sticker by April of Monkey Mintaka, hiding the logo on my iMac, reassuring me that yes, I AM ARTIST!

(Studio Lighting)

My north facing room has a lovely large bay window, letting in plenty of even light during the day. However, since I live in England, for most of the year it’s pretty dark after 3 pm in the afternoon, and even sometimes all day if it’s raining. So not only do I need studio lights for filming and photography but also ambient lighting to allow me to work comfortably on an every-day basis. This is why I have a variety of lights that I can use together or individually, all with a colour temperature of around 5600 kelvin. So I’ve got led strip lights under my shelf which can be dimmed to a really low light or brought up to a really bright light. Then there’s an IKEA desk lamp with a diffusion cover to soften its light, and a set of studio lights that I use when I need to film or photograph products on dark or rainy days. If you’d like to know more about these lights, let me know in the comments, and I’ll do a separate video on just studio lighting.

I feel really really lucky to have this space in my own home, when before 2013 I never really had a space to work. I used to just work on the floor or borrow a friend’s dining table, and then after that in our previous flats, I would have to work either on the kitchen counter and then clear it away or in the guest room being constantly turfed out whenever we had people over to stay. So overall I’m pretty happy with the studio, the one thing I am trying to do though is downsize the amount of stuff I have. It’s a result of running multiple businesses for more than seven years, but now that’s ending – as I said I’m closing down my silk painting stuff and I’ll be able to either get rid of it or put it in storage in our shed. 

I also want to open up the space a little by putting pocket doors between this room and our south-facing living room, so that I can enjoy the brighter light and be more connected to the rest of our home and the garden in particular. I’d also like to add concealed storage with a centralised workspace but that’s very much a long-term plan, somewhere down the road. In the meantime, I constantly experiment with my space trying to make it more efficient and less cluttered. So in my future vlogs and videos, keep an eye open for some changes. I’ll link a playlist here for you to watch. Some changes might be subtle and then others might be more major, especially if I move that table into the center of the room sooner rather than later. 

I hope you enjoyed this tour of my home studio. Thank you so much for watching and I will see you in my next video. Bye!