My Creation Station

I'm a little bit late to the party, but I made it none the less. Hopefully making me just fashionable late. Hopefully!


Sean in his creative wisedom decided to organize an impromptu internet carnival of sorts, in which artists share their workspaces with the world. Thus giving us all a glimpse into the settings and places of some our favourite creations are made. I've been learning a lot so far, and been very impressed and surprised by where people are working (nothing like I imagined!... yet much more similar to me)

We are collecting the series of posts from everyone over on ART Evolved. Feel free to share your Creative Space with the world, and send us the link at artevolved@gmail.com to get added to the roster.

So here is my creative space. Well the small section highlighted by the arrows anyways. This is my desk/office/den/study/business operations centre.

In fact this is my only personal space in my whole house. Due to living with Lady R in a 4 person househoold, and her getting the seperate study attached to our room (as she is the university student), I had to settle for a desk in the corner of our main bedroom.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not bitter. Though I'm a bit resigned to the fact it is the only part of the 3 story house that is exclusively mine.

Despite this slight sovereignty, as my space is in a shared room, my desk faces a constant threat of invasion by Lady R's things from the dresser. I must be constantly vigilant to keep the build up of invading hair care products, jewelry, makeup, and clothes from overwhelming my tiny santuary.

The heart of my workspace is of course my computer. You'll notice not only is it nestled in the midst of my mess (me and Lady R are traditional scattered left handed ppl... we organize things by spreading them out rather then piling them up. So you'll pick up that the whole room is a little on the messy side :P ).

My computer itself is quite a mixed up entity. It was originally a laptop, but a couple days after new years its screen died. Requiring me to purchase a monitor, which considering it was the cheapest I could find is REALLY nice!

This is where 90% of my creative work (that you guys see anyways) occurs, and thus results in my being at my desk a large amount of my home time. I do miss the days when I could take my puter to places like the TV room or my neighbors rooms and be sociable. However as this isn't even remotely an option I don't fret it.

To the left of my desk is this, my information collection station, comprised of a white board and quark board. The two in unison, while primitive, are incredibly effective.

For my creative projects I will record such key things as specific screen resolutions or file formats on both.

Overall in life this is even more important as this is my lifeline to work. All my key work information, minus the scheduling (which I moved into a calender book, to avoid double bookings that my old mono whiteboard system caused), lives here. As I'm the teaching version of self employed, it is vital I have phone numbers and contacts written up here. (Which is why the white board looks odd in the photo, I've blurred all the information so that none of my sensitive info gets misused. Not that I don't trust you people, I'm just not taking any chances)

On the non-computer side of the desk is my "utility" space. You'll find everything I use in my life here. This can include books, DVDs (such as in this photo a big inspiration to me the Muppet Show), my camera and its support gear, my cellphone (which I don't really use... hate them SO much!), my watch, multi vitamins (a huge part of how I keep healthy substitute teaching!), and writing equipment.

Most important of all of this is my water bottle space. I've found a trick to staying healthy (supplementing the vitamins... which I think are the key to my success this year) as a substitute teacher is to keep very hydrated. This helps flush a lot of harmful things out of my system before they can cause trouble, and so I drink between 6-8 litres of water a day.

Right beside the monitor is another extension of my computer. These are quite literally my external harddrives. Unlike the commerical versions of such drives you can buy, these units are harddrives from my old computers that have been rigged to function on my desk. The one in the forground is literally Delta Patrol the movie. If anything happens to this the movie is screwed (I'm meaning to back this up!).

Watching ever vigiliantly above this is my toy Kookaburra. A random gift from Momma R, to celebrate my new found obsession with these birds during my trip to Sydney. I like to think she'll (it's a girl I've decided) keep the harddrives safe till I can back them up.

Here is a closeup of my main trinket collection. They include the cool little wooden Dinosaurs given to me by Sister R for Xmas, and my manditory Batman fig. As a big fan of Batman and his creative solutions to problems, I try to keep the Bat influence high in any of my workspaces. Given to me by Dave last time I was in Canada, this figure also reminds me of him and my peeps back home in the Great White North.

That does it for my tiny personal space. Despite how small my claim on the house is, we have plenty of public space, including my favourite place of the whole house. The roof also known as SKYLOFT!, which is a giant glass room surrounded by a rooftop enclosed balcony.

From here we have a rather commanding view of Dunedin. When I need somewhere to think (and pace... I'm a total pacer) I come up here, and let the vast openess of view open my equally vast imagination.

s Dunedin benefits (and suffers) from rather sporadic weather, the views up here vary quite a lot throughout any given week, that alone month. So I'm never short of variation for my inspiration!

That does it for my workspace. Many of these photos are from the virtual tour of the house I've been meaning to do, but never quite get around to. If it is something people would like to see, I'll try to do it. If not meh.