Man With A Plan

I am always inspired by De La Soul, whether it was the chronic bouts of agorophobic isolationism I experienced in Asia, taking me till 11 most days to venture out of my hotel room, to now when I have no idea what I'm doing or planning to do.
Specifically, in 'I Am I Be' Pousdnous has the following segment that always sticks in my mind:

If I wasn't making song I wouldn't be a thug selling drugs
But a man with a plan
and if I was a rug cleaner
betcha Pos'd have the cleanest rugs I am.

Of course it seems that even getting a job as a rug cleaner is a tall order these days. But the sentiment is nice, and the sentiment is real.

So I know I need a job, some kind of job, any kind of job because I need a space of my own to do what I want. Long-middle term I actually need a workshop, you see because I want to become a 'renaissance man' it's the only thing that will make me satisfied I feel.

So I have drawn up plans for a room for me:


I figure I need roughly 3 x 4 meters at least. I've decided I don't need built in robes, having more or less lived out of two piles for the last 8 years of my life 'dirty' and 'clean' my clothing just isn't complicated enough to warrent exorbitancies like BIR.
Then with the bed I'm taking a page out of Michelangelo's book:

In his personal life, Michelangelo was abstemious. He told his apprentice, Ascanio Condivi: "However rich I may have been, I have always lived like a poor man."[20] Condivi said he was indifferent to food and drink, eating "more out of necessity than of pleasure"[20] and that he "often slept in his clothes and ... boots."[20] These habits may have made him unpopular. His biographer Paolo Giovio says, "His nature was so rough and uncouth that his domestic habits were incredibly squalid, and deprived posterity of any pupils who might have followed him."[21] He may not have minded, since he was by nature a solitary and melancholy person. He had a reputation for being bizzarro e fantastico because he "withdrew himself from the company of men."

AFter a year of living in a garage, all I really want is one of those spartan camp cots to sleep on, rather than a big twin bed that dominates a whole room. That is so I can have a big table in the room. Crucially removed from the wall. A big table allows you to spread shit out at a workable height, and work on stuff that is larger than A3 in scale. I guess I'd want a smooth wooden surface so I can do cutting and shit with a stanley knife.

That stanley knife would be kept in a storage unit, just one of those wheely set of drawers, that I can stash all kinds of wonderous pens, brushes, inks, clutch pencils, carpenters pencils, charcoal etc. in.

That's next to desk 1, a drawing desk. With one of those angled boards, a set square, the works. What architects work away on, that shit. Graphic designers too. Maybe if there's room an overhead projector thing as well.

Then desk 2, is the computer, the bane of modern creativity. I need a scanner, screen and graphic tablet, because learning to paint with a mouse is worse than learning to paint with a chinese calligraphy brush. Albeit the one time I drew with a graphic tablet at Harvards, it was still incredibly hard. But it's hard in the touch-typing sense, not the completely counter-intuitive sense.

Then some bookshelves, for books that I use for reference, inspiration. I think I'm one of the few people that accumulates books that actually does constantly go back and refer to them. I dog eared almost every single page of The Female Eunuch. And some times when economics gets confusing, I go back and reread Growth Fetish or The Black Swan & shit. Anyway, it's also for storing all the notebooks and visual diaries. I've almost gone through as many visual diaries this year as I did in my Studio Art 3/4 year. Which I am pleased about, but at this rate I'd fill one of those bookshelves in 5 years.

Lastly, the key component of it all - the walls, the table is removed from the wall so I can actually storyboard. That makes writing for comics so much easier, because you can rough the layout, speech bubbles and everything, then pin it up over 6 meters of wall and refer to it as you draw the pencil roughs.

This is going to be workshop Mk 1. Which I am calling Freedonia, because I just watched Duck Soup last night. (oh the days before laugh tracks made for... awkward... comedy).

That's the plan. Now just to pay for it somehow.

I am I be.