Studio Habits: Clearing Physical Space to Make way for Mental Creative Space.
The curious, deceptively simple mise en place ritual of several longtime professional cartoonists.
Editors Note:
I’m starting a new substack in 2024 to discuss these very topics: the behind-the-scenes process of creating all kinds of art. You can sign up by clicking the link below.
October 9, 2022
Columbus, OH
This weekend I was wandering around the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum in Columbus with fellow cartoonist Maria Scrivan. We were fresh off the behind-the-scenes tour, shamelessly drooling over the original artwork on display by Charles Schulz. The wide-ranging exhibition celebrated what would have been “Sparky”’s 100th birthday.
A photo of his pristine, minimalist studio caught my eye, and I noted to Maria how clean it looked. “Oof. He makes my studio look like something out of an episode of Hoarders.”
Whenever I’m working on something, I bury myself in my studio, turn off my phone, and get submerged in whatever the job requires. I don’t come up for sunlight until it’s done. But, when it is, I clean everything up again, ready for the next job. (Otherwise, my brain is a bag of cats.)
This is what my studio looked like while I was working on a recent piece for the New Yorker.
Immediately after I emailed the Cartoon Editor with the finished artwork, I packed up my studio and it once again looked like this:
As I hunched over and gawked at Sparky’s studio in awe, Maria said,
“My studio is a total mess while I’m working: It looks like a bomb hit it. But whenever I finish a project, I must pack everything away as a sort of ritual to exorcise it from my brain.”
It stopped me in my tracks:
This is the third time in a month I had independently heard the exact same thing from other professional cartoonists.
Tom Richmond, the brilliant illustrator and caricaturist behind many of the movie parodies in MAD, had just told me the exact same thing when we were at this year’s National Cartoonists Society Reuben Awards in Kansas City.
It was almost identical: He sits down to work on a project, he allows himself to kind of explode pens, brushes, ink, paper, and scraps of reference images all over his space, and it looks like a disaster zone after a hurricane.
This is a man for whom I have an all-consuming case of studio envy. He is the most organized cartoonist I know, so it surprised me to learn that he allowed himself to create a mess to bury himself in the zone.
Then, when he sends off the final art to the editor/art director he takes his time in a personal ritual he’s had for years, where he goes around the studio and packs everything away, puts trash in the bin, stores his pens, ink, brushes — whatever he used in the process of creation — in their places. Then — and ONLY then — can he move on to the next thing in his day.
This is one of the great things about hanging out with other people who do the same thing you do: you talk shop, you share thoughts, experiences, and ideas, and more often than not you learn things about my favourite part of the profession:
Every professional artist works out their process as they go. They sometimes change it, experimenting with new tools and technology, but other times they get so married to it that they work the exact same way for decades at a time.
The other cartoonist I had a conversation with was Garry Trudeau, the cartoonist behind Doonesbury for the past 52 years.
He had shared a photo of his studio, post-clean-up. I said I was so envious of his pristine setup because my studio at the time looked like Louisiana, circa 2005.
He said,
“I’ve long had this odd, celebratory habit — right after I make a deadline, I pick up my studio, ready it for the next one.”
There is definitely something to the process of cleaning away your physical space to make way for the mental space needed for the next creative project. If you’re a creative worker, leave your process in the comments. I will never stop geeking out about this stuff.
Update: December 2023
As a recommendation from Lauren LeDonne and Anthony LeDonne I just finished reading “Work Clean: The life-changing power of Mise-en-place to Organize Your Life, work, and mind” and this all makes perfect sense now.
Resetting your workstation before and after a project is a replicable ritual that does a lot of heavy lifting to clear mental space.
Read more:
The Key Habit of History’s Greatest Writers, Artists, and Creative Geniuses.
Creative Fuel with Anna Brones has a fantastic post about messy creative spaces just out — you can find it here:
Your studio is much tidier than my kitchen.