Time to Reorganize

It’s been a gray, gloomy, sleety day. I’m glad I didn’t have to go anywhere. People were saying it was treacherous out there with icy roads and walkways. As I write this, the sleet has changed to snow.

Studio work today occurred when taking a break from my newspaper editing job. I decided to tackle reorganizing my pastels instead of painting. I’d rather paint, but I’ve been putting this project off and now that I have more drawers …

I don’t know where I got my first pastels … someone was throwing them out, so I claimed them. Then, when I moved from charcoal landscapes fully into pastels, I started purchasing Blick brand. I also acquired a set of Yarka pastels from a friend.

I fell in love with pastels and as I got more into it, I next bought Senneliers. I loved the softness of Senneliers. I also got some NuPastels. To store all my new “toys,” I got three wooden, partitioned, two-drawer (trays) cabinets (boxes) which can stack one atop the other. I put Velcro between the boxes so the units wouldn’t slide when opening and closing the drawers. I used Velcro in case I ever wanted to move them around. 

(This photo is of my original boxes of two-drawers each.)

However, I found the drawers tended to stick. Eventually my neighbor planed down the drawer dividers which was where the drawers were catching on the upper. This helped much better than trying to rub soap on the drawers which the website comments suggested.

I can never have too many pastels and I started to experiment with other brands. (Hard to get away from those Senneliers, though.) One of the first new ones were Diane Townsend … and I found those pastels were bigger in diameter and would not fit in the current drawers. That led me to purchasing a different brand, five drawers per box, but deeper drawers.

The next problem was trying to figure out a way to keep all like colors together which led me to purchase another five-drawer box because, with more pastel purchases, I now need two drawers for blues and two for greens, etc. (This was today’s project and only as far as I’ve gotten.)

There was another challenge, though. How to organize the different shades of blue: light blue, turquoise, darker blues, gray-blues, purple blues … Oh, my! Greens, too, with all their various shades. And would a gray-blue or gray-green go in the blue and green trays or with the gray and black trays?

(Photo  is of the new five drawer box with the blues and greens taking up two drawers each.)

And that’s where I stand at this moment. There’s still room in the blue and green trays … oooh, I always seem to be missing shades. What can I get next? ‘Course, I have to finish organizing all the other colors first, ha-ha.