Other artist's studios

While I'm doing all the things I either like to do or feel required to do to get ready for Christmas, I'm still thinking about art. Not making art except for making gift tags but still thinking about the next painting.

Photo of my messy studio.

Am I the only only artist who has a great curiosity about other artist's studios? There are two magazines out now that feature studios so I'm guessing there is a market for this topic. 

Stampington & Company has published a premiere Winter 2008 issue of Where Women Create. The cost is $14.99, about 162 pages and features eleven women artists and their studios. Four of the featured women own stores and each spread is 10 pages long. As always with a Stampington magazine the photographs are lush and detailed. The pages are dense with photos, words, design elements and extras. I cannot understand why they placed white filigree embellishments over many of the photos. The edges of many photos are busy with intricate borders around them. One of the two page spreads featured a large photo which took up about 2/3 of the two pages with 26 smaller boxes of images around the edges with close ups of shelves or cubby holes. Take your time and don't try to see everything in one sitting. Your brain will rebel.

The other magazine is put out by Cloth Paper Scissors and is called Studios. It costs $7.99, is about 100 pages and is the Fall/Winter 2008 issue. They featured 30 artists with a variety of pages per artist. What I especially liked was how clear the lay outs were as well as being easy to read. I wanted to know more about the artists in the Where Women Create magazine. For example their name, where they were from, what their media was and a web site. It think it was mainly there some place but I gave up early. The Studio magazine had clear easy to read fonts with the name of the artist, where she lived, a brief paragraph at the start of the feature called "what I do" and the dimensions of the studio they worked in plus a web or email contact. 

So both magazines feed my need to see what other artists are doing in their studios. I would buy the Studios magazine again but not Where Women Create. Each magazine should feed our muse and give us some good ideas about arranging our own studios. The Studios magazine was generally much more practical with less advertising and less fluffiness.

So buy them, enjoy them and make up your own mind. There's something be be learned from both of them.