I’m generally an organized person plus I like to put things in order. A place for everything and everything in its place. At least at the beginning. I’m not an overly neat person so entropy works its chops on me and things slowly get disorganized until one day I have to clean things up. It takes a while to get to that day though.
Then there are the times that I have to come up with a whole new order to put things in. I’ve got to rearrange my space until I have things where I need them to be. That’s where I found myself with my drawing table recently.
You may remember my previous blogs where I wrote about buying some new Pantone markers. Well, I had to find a place to put them. They came in these flat boxes of nine markers a piece and I have eleven of those boxes. For the first two weeks I just stacked all eleven boxes on top of each other and stuck them on the surface of my drawing table.
After I was done using them I cleared out a spot where I could move them too. But they were a bit tricky to move. Moving a stack of eleven inch and a half tall slippery boxes wasn’t easy. One time they all slid over and more than half of the markers slid out of their box. It took a while to put them all back so I knew I couldn’t keep moving them whenever I wanted to use them.
Over the years I’ve found that the key to using any particular art supply was to have it handy. If I tuck something away I’ll never use it. It’s hard enough to make anything in this world and any obstacle that gets in the way decreases the odds of ever getting anything done. So I knew I would have to find a handy place for those Pantone markers.
One of the things that you can buy for a drawing table is a side tray. It’s a plastic tray about six inches wide by thirty inches long. It attaches to the side of a drawing table and has all sorts of compartments on it for pens, pencils, and lots of other art supplies. I bought one with my drawing table back in the early 1990s and have been using it ever since.
I’ve even added custom things to my art try. I’ve extended it out another four or five inches by attaching another box to it plus I added some pen holders on the side of it. On the left side of my drawing table I even built another side try to hold my other markers. It’s about seven or eight inches wide by thirty inches long and is flat with sides but no compartments. It fits marker cases nicely.
I even built some extensions for the top of my drawing table. I screwed on some short pieces of 1×8 inch pine. I have a houseplant on one side, an essential oil diffuser in the middle, and some more pens on the right. Not I had to figure out where to put the new Pantone markers.
It took me the better part of a Saturday morning and afternoon to organize everything. I spent the first hour moving things around to try and see if I could find a good spot for them around the studio. With that I tried to figure out an easy way to move them. Maybe in a big box. I came up with nothing and that’s when I decided to try and fit them on my drawing table.
The upper left of the table was the most obvious spot. I had some random stuff up there already so there was a good chance I could relocated some of it. By upper left I mean the actual surface of the table and not the side tray. I don’t usually like stuff on the actual surface of the drawing table as that’s my working area that fills up with whatever I’m working on at the moment. After messing around with the placement of the markers I decided that it wasn’t working. I ended up deciding that I was going to have to push the markers onto the side tray.
I had to clean out the top part of the side tray but the good news was that I could. It was, sort of, an out of the way area that didn’t have a lot of stuff I needed at my fingertips. I would also have to level it off a little. The compartments in it made it hard to put the marker box on top of it. It wasn’t steady. I had to make a platform out of foam core board to get it to stay.
Then I needed a second spot. The spot I had the markers in wasn’t good for a stack of eleven boxes. I would have to break them into two stacks. I tried the top left and it almost fit. I was so close but something would have to go. I would have to remove my parallel rule.
A parallel rule is for doing mechanical drawing with a triangle. It’s like a permanent t-square. It slides on wires up and down the table and gives you a straight edge to draw straight lines with and to sit a triangle on and draw more straight lines. I used it a lot in the 1990s when I was drawing comic book pages but I haven’t used it much in recent years.
The parallel rule only takes up the top four inches of the drawing table so it’s out of the way. I’ve never bothered to remove it because I hardly ever use the top four inches of my drawing table. But now to be able to fit the markers on the top of the table I was going to have to take it off. So I did.
The parallel rule is only held on by a few screws and some wires so it wasn’t hard to get it off but it made me feel a little sad. It had been part of my drawing table for over thirty years and seeing it go made me a bit nostalgic. Since I removed it I haven’t missed it at all but even now I get a little melancholy thinking about it.
It must have take me from about ten in the morning until two in the afternoon (with a lunch break) to find a place for those markers. It seemed like it should have taken less time but I had a few false starts. In the end it seemed like the perfect spot. Not I look up at it and it’s like they have always been there. I can’t ask for more than that.
And here is a video of the setup. https://youtu.be/Mt9BU03C8Fw