Organising My Art Supplies

I am just going to start this post out by saying that I have a lot of art supplies. I never knew how much I had actually accumulated until we moved house, and I realised that I had no logical place to keep all my supplies. It started out with a small table and some baskets, but I kept dumping clothes onto the table and this arrangement soon became messy and way too much effort to properly upkeep. So, the solution? Well, I am just lucky enough to have a dad who knows how to build things, so he built me a set of shelves (which I painted). They are absolutely brilliant, and even if you don't have any friends who are good with building things, then I'm sure ikea has a few units that will do the trick just fine.

Above is a full picture of my shelves. I'll go through each shelf in more detail below.

The very top of my unit is for all those little bits and pieces that don't fit into any other shelf - paintbrushes, index cards, water jar, drawing pencils, colour pencils, pencil setting spray, some incense and a few other things which you can see in the photo. Oddly, the contents of the magazine file actually has nothing to do with art. It's the place where I keep all the psychology journals that I have collected from uni over the past year, I just had nowhere else to keep them (no judgement please!).

The top shelf is for wool and fabric, and the second one is where I keep all my pencils, paints, pens, stamps, etc. I have organised my writing materials into different pencil cases so I know where to find everything.

I keep glue, staples and sticky tape in the little golden basket. And the green ribbon box is just for some of my fidget toys (hacky sacks, beanbags, slinky).

I use the third shelf for my cameras, microphones, and other little things I use in my art journals - such as stickers, images cut out from magazines.

I recently decided it would be a good idea to make these three boxes. I like to keep these things handy and well organised in case I ever have to get a receipt to return anything (or use them in my art journal), collecting little bits and bobs that I'm too lazy to put in the boxes for that kind of thing, and a business cards box which is actually very handy.

To make them I covered three cereal/biscuit boxes with paper and stuck it down. Nice and simple.

The bottom shelf is used for all my art books, magazines, journals, sketch books and (obviously) the laminator. That bag you can just see to the left side of the unit is where I keep all my coloured papers.

I hope that you guys enjoyed this post, and maybe it has inspired you to get some shelves for yourself, even if you don't have a whole heap of art supplies.

Thanks for reading!