How decluttering and tidying can help my work process...

I'm not a naturally tidy person. Surprise. The trouble with tidying up is if you don't do it often you know it's going to take hours to do it properly. I'm off to Italy very early on Thursday morning so I want to come back to an organised studio space. It's tiny so it's extremely easy to fill the floor with piles of this and piles of that.  How often do you tidy up? I tend to leave it til I can't bear it any longer and that isn't through laziness. I'm not one to loll about.

(Says it all really, I love this little character I drew a couple of years ago)

(work I made for a series of books published by Lion Publishing in the early 2000's)

Earlier on I threw out quite a lot of work that was just bad and didn't go anywhere.. equally  I came across work I did between 10 and 20 years ago that still looks good.. dated perhaps but good quality; and of course I came across a lot of sketches and more recent work that I felt needed to be in a drawer towards the top of my plans chest as a reminder of things that I want to develop. The next step, apart from continuing the clean up and hoovering of old spiders webs, will be to make a board of inspiration from some of my favourite sketches, paintings and reference images per subject.

( This is a really old watercolour sketch, I don't know what's going on in the bottom righthand corner but I love the way I painted the pears and the simple shapes that describe the cushions. It's flat painting describing something very 3 D. I can see I enjoyed the patterns.)

When I get back from Italy I have to tackle Christmas for Moobaacluck (my personalised gift business) as well as find time to continue with my 100 days of Florals that I am doing over on Instagram. I know I want to do some Christmas florals so hopefully both projects will feed each other. I'm really looking forward to that and as I thought, writing about it really helps me. Whenever I've tried writing about ideas by hand I'm left with an illegible mess!

 (An old portfolio piece, I loved painting that tea bag in particular; I've always fancied illustrating packaging but never have. This is what I consider my old style. I want my work to be looser now. When I painted this I don't think I'd used a computer to do anything but scan work into and crop for emails.)

I have not finished this process. I will blog more about the second half next week.

Slam dunk. Day one done :) ... tea time.  I'd love to know how you keep organised, do you have routine behaviour? Or wait until you can't function before you tackle it?