Choosing Lighting for an Art Studio

Selecting the right kind of lighting for a studio is extremely important. Ending up with the wrong lighting can make your artistic life miserable because lighting affects your color perception. So it definitely pays to investigate the many choices out there to find a lighting system that satisfies your needs and fits your budget. How you work and where you work will be key factors in your decision.

How Do You Work?

If you work in your studio at night, you'll be relying more heavily on your lighting system than someone whose lighting system acts as a supplement to natural daylight. I rarely ever do studio work at night, but I wanted to make sure my lighting system was capable of providing adequate illumination if ever I needed to. Another question is whether you prefer to use an easel or work flat on a table. I prefer the latter so I wanted something that provided good general illumination throughout my work area with a minimum of glare. It also needed to provide illumination for the gallery wall where finished artwork would be hanging. It was important that whatever system I chose had directional flexibility so I could aim light at an ever-changing collection of pieces to display them to their best advantage.

There were a number of factors to be considered as I mulled over my potential choices, which were systems featuring halogens, LEDs, or fluorescents. Each has its advantages and disadvantages.

Fluorescent

Of the three, I'm least fond of fluorescent, having had this type of lighting in two former studios. Ceiling mounted fluorescent light is a popular choice because it's relatively inexpensive, is economical to operate and throws a strong bright light, but I find it to be harsh and hard on my eyes. The typical "cool" fluorescent throws a cold, bluish light, while "warm" fluorescent bulbs seem (to me, anyway) to tint everything a faint shade of pink  Even when a "warm" fluorescent is paired with a "cool" one to get a more color-balanced effect, I still prefer other types of lighting. This type of lighting is also the least flattering to artwork, and overhead fixtures offer little if any directional flexibility.  It's a matter of personal preference, of course (I know plenty of artists whose studios are lit by fluorescents and they love them) but to me fluorescent's positive qualities aren't enough to outweigh my objections to it. So I eliminated fluorescent lighting from my list pretty quickly.

LEDs

LED lighting may be the wave of the future, but after pricing LED systems I decided my budget needed to be guided by the here and now. LEDs put out a beautiful clear and even light, but holy moley, are they pricey! After tallying up the price to equip my studio with LEDs, I decided I wasn't willing to part with a Trump-sized investment to acquire such a system. If you don't mind dropping, oh, $25 or so on each bulb, LED lighting may be just the ticket, but there was no way your frugal correspondent was going to part with that kind of money. Nope, no way. 

Halogens

Halogen track lights installed along the gallery wall. Here, three of them have been directed away from the wall temporarily and back into the room to provide light while we fabricated and painted the shutters during construction A total of six lights occupy this section of the track. Many more can be added but for now six seem quite adequate.

Halogen lighting is what I ultimately chose. Halogens deliver a clear, perfect light for displaying and making art. They provide fine overall lighting and the quality of the light is excellent. It allows me to see colors accurately, yet the quality of the light remains soft and pleasing. The cost was moderate, too: excluding the electrician's fee to install it, the entire system cost about $250.

I chose a halogen track light system that allows me to add or subtract lights which can swivel in any direction to provide illumination as needed. I can direct light wherever it's needed, and each lamp can be repositioned anywhere I want it along the track. I actually had our electrician install two separate track systems -- one over my work area, one along the gallery wall -- so they could be operated independently of each other. This way, I can choose to have one or both in operation depending on my needs at that moment. Each is on a dimmer switch, giving me wonderful flexibility in setting the light levels for all sections of the room.


Both track systems are positioned about 2 feet out from the walls. This is not only a proper distance for lighting artwork, it also works well for lighting my work area so that the light falls in the optimum position over my work table. If I did decide to use my easel, all that's necessary is to direct one of the halogens at it. Their versatility make halogens the perfect lighting system for me.

Choosing Paint Colors for the Studio

The question of what color(s) to paint the walls in the studio had me collecting and comparing paint chips for weeks. My last two studios had white and off-white walls. Many artists say those colors, along with very pale gray, reflect light best and don't skew their color perception. So at first I decided to go that route and chose a clean, bright white for the walls and ceiling.

Big mistake. Once the white paint went on, the look was cold and clinical. It made the space feel as charming as the inside of a food freezer. This I couldn't live with. It was back to the color chips for another try.

Most of my work -- along with my personal taste -- runs to warm colors. I'm happiest when surrounded by sunny hues. Give me light and bright and I'm delirious with joy. (My idea of hell is being stuck in a room with beige or taupe walls and brown furniture. I find that to be very depressing.) Determined to inject warmth and color into my space, whose furnishings are mostly white, I settled on what I thought would be the perfect shade of pale golden yellow. I bought a sample bottle, painted a 2x3' piece of heavy white paper with it, and left the paper taped to the wall for a week to see how well I liked it. Then I bought a gallon and started painting.

Another oops. What had looked lovely on the color chip and the painted sample sheet looked perfectly awful on the wall. When my husband called it "D.O.T. yellow" he was absolutely right. It was the same color as yield signs and school buses. Much too intense, it bathed everything in a French's Mustard sort of glow. I couldn't live with this color, either, so it was back to the color chips yet again.

This time around, I lucked out and found the very shade of pale yellow I had always envisioned for my studio space: Gold Buttercup 310A-2, from Behr. I painted three of the walls with Gold Buttercup, and painted the gallery wall with Behr's Ivory Invitation 310A-1, a derivative of Gold Buttercup that's a value or so lighter. The ceiling was left bright white. Together these colors are just right for my purposes and psyche. Every time I walk into the studio now I feel uplifted.

I think the colors selected for an art studio will largely depend on the kind of art being made, and the interior lighting situation. If I were painting portraits or realistic subjects where paints must be mixed with dead-on color accuracy, I probably would have gone with white for the studio walls. But the abstract and mixed media pieces I create are more forgiving when it comes to such things, and the pale yellow I used doesn't seem to reflect back into the room in a problematic way. It's warm but unobtrusive, while Ivory Invitation provides an inviting yet neutral backdrop for work displayed on the gallery wall.

Why is it so hard to pick just the right colors? After all, it's not hard for me to choose or mix colors when painting a canvas. I think the difficulty in getting color for the walls right must be due to the scale involved and the many variables that affect color perception in the physical environment -- shifting shadows, the movement of the sun, and the gradual change from cooler light in the morning to warmer light in the afternoon. What you see on a color chip may not be what you get when you paint the walls due to the way humans perceive colors in our surroundings. As my experience shows, getting the wall color right can be a matter of trial and error. In this case, the third try was a charm. Anybody wanna buy a gallon of  "D.O.T. Yellow?"