My Cozy Clay Setup_ Studio Tour, Polymer Clay Demo, & Unboxing Fezibo Standing Desk

I'm gonna push you back in. Hello friends, welcome to another Uncomfy and Company vlog. Today's gonna be a little different. I'm gonna be doing a mini studio makeover. I think I'll show you what the studio is looking like and what I'm gonna do to change it. So this is my part of the apartment that is my studio. I'm pretty proud of it so far. We have a lot to work with obviously. I finally have a real office chair, originally sitting in a dining chair. This is Peyton by the way. I'm just gonna push you back in. And here is my utility cart. I just have my little glass slate, my tub full of clay supplies, more clay supplies, all of my resin stuff, my little Home Depot bin for my trash. But yeah, I use this guy every day. So I'm pretty happy with this setup. And I have this little desk riser that my parents made themselves and I just use it for my own personal uses. But underneath it's just really cramped. I want to reorganize this for sure. And I love this desk to death, but as you can see it's just so dirty. I didn't varnish it correctly the first time so it gets really easily stained and there's tons of scratches on it which makes taking photos just really inconvenient because I have to edit out all of this and just cleaning it normally wouldn't work because this desk isn't like varnished or anything. So there's no protective layer. So the paint just seeps deep down into the table. And that brings us to today. I was so excited when Fezabo reached out to me about their standing desk. As someone who works from home for both school and my art practice, I've been feeling the need to elevate my workspace for a long time. And I've been wanting a standing desk for the longest time. Mostly because, I'm not gonna lie, I've been feeling the back pain. My bones are hurting. You'll see Mr. Uncomfy building it for me. If you've built any desk before, it's nothing new. It was super easy to set up. I use my standing desk whenever I feel tired. I just force myself to stand and I'm more productive while I'm doing it. And it's just like the perfect work setup for me personally for packing orders or just to keep myself moving. I love to get more movement into my body whenever I can. And I'm not saying this just as someone who works from home. But as someone who lives in an apartment with roommates, my studio space, like my little corner of the apartment, is my safe space. And I love trying out new things to make it even more of a pleasant environment for me. Your environment, outdoor and indoor, truly affects your mood. And I notice whenever I'm in this little corner of the world, I'm happiest. I feel truly safe and comfortable. And maybe that's too much to talk about a studio space. But that's just how I look at things as an artist. I feel like your studio space should be your safe space. Not a place where you feel artist block, but a place where you feel light and lifted. And look at the sun, it's so warm now that I'm talking about it. So yeah, thank you Fizebo for sending me this desk. I'm going to show you guys a little desk setup, a studio tour, and how I make my desk the centerpiece of my workspace. Mr. Uncomfy is going to build the desk for me, but it's pretty huge. Hey Jen. It's already all over. Stella's joining in. It's a new day and it's time for a studio tour. Welcome to my workspace. This is where I call home most of the time. This is where I respond to emails, think of ideas, sculpt, pack orders, everything. I would say that this is a pretty maximalist approach to a very minimal space. I feel like I've managed to make it work at the same time. Starting with my desk, I really wanted it to be cozy and green. So I always have the vision of plants. I wanted lots of plants, but I ended up with one huge long pothos, which I love her. Her name is Dawn. As you can see, she's crazy long. She spans all the way. I think her wingspan from leaf to leaf is over six feet if you straightened her out. Over here, I have my lovely bamboo shelf. I got her from Amazon and she was also super easy to build. She's super sturdy and I really wanted this bamboo shelf because I've been seeing it everywhere in pottery studios and in other artist studio vlogs. I just love the way she looks and I love that you can hang things off of her. On the top of the shelf is another pothos plant that I'm hoping will grow as large as Dawn over here. His name is Dusk. Basically, the main function of this shelf is to house all of my packing supplies. So I have bubble mailers, cardboard mailers, my packaging tape, and this crate that I found off Amazon as well. This just has all of my packing essentials that I use every time I pack, such as my little box of stickers, my branded stamp, my envelopes, fragile stickers. These little boxes are filled with care cards. And then I have all my thank you cards down there, as well as my glue tape. I love my glue tape. In this box, we have boxes. These are all my baby boxes, the ones I use for most of my clay items. These are also on Amazon. They're so good. Some more packaging supplies, a box filled with paint, a box filled with rigid mailers, and then my pasta machine resides here as well. Moving on to my desk is my lovely iMac. I saved up for her and bought her last year, and she has been worth every single penny. And down here, I try to keep a balance of trinkets for decoration, but also utility. So my vlogging camera, my hard drive back there, this little adapter thing. This crying cow is from Negative Cow on Instagram. She's so funny. But I also usually have a tray filled with polymer clay makes that I like to reference, but it's usually more recent pieces I need to reference. So like these pumpkin goldfish prototypes, as well as harvest cats right now. If you have limited space, one thing I would recommend is utilizing vertical space. This has saved my life because look how many freaking pens and whatever I have. One thing I do want to show you is this guy. It's a little flower. It's meant to hold makeup brushes, but I use it to hold my Posca pen. I'm also a huge fan of mason jars to hold things. Up here is another mini desk riser to hold random things like my label printer, stamps, mini envelopes, stationery, stuff like that. And my lamp over here from Amazon is so perfect and warm. And I also use it to hold my headphones. I think it's just really cute to have them out like this. I highly recommend a utility cart like this. As I said before, a glass slate is really useful if you have art supplies that could damage your furniture. This office chair from Amazon has saved my back when I do need to sit for a long amount of time. But the warrant cats really love it. And yeah, this is my studio space. I also have a printer and a label printer on the other side of the room. But those are just there. I haven't really designed a space for them yet. But maybe if I get another shelf, I'll put them here too. Like I said earlier, your interior environment matters so much when it comes to productivity and your mood. For me, I feel lifted when I'm around plants. So I try to surround myself with as many plants as the cats will let me. I'm planning on adding much more, maybe something hanging like right here. That would be amazing. But yeah, I know it's not perfect right now, but I'm pretty proud of it considering where I started. Yeah, if you have any tips on what I could do, let me know down in the comments. I hope this inspires you a bit to make changes to your work environment. My old space used to be in a north-facing room and to compensate for the lack of natural sunlight, I just made it like a moody lo-fi room. So like use the attributes of your environment to make appropriate changes and you'll be happier for it. So here's one of the customs that I'm going to be working on today. It's a little bee keychain with a cowboy hat on. And for those who were asking what sort of software I use for all my sketching, I use Procreate. I feel like most people use Procreate. I use it for sketching, taking notes, and stuff like that. So it's really useful for mapping out all the features. I haven't done this before for other commissions, but I really wanted her to be able to visualize like, these wings will be translucent clay, the cheeks will be shaded pink, they'll be really puffy like my goldfish. And I also gave her these other sketches that show her what it'll look like with a stinger and a straight face with no stinger and smiling. And of course, she could mix and match whatever features she wanted. She ended up choosing smiling and with a stinger. So I'll be sculpting that right now, actually. All right, so I have my clay colors out. This little dish that I fill with rubbing alcohol for cleaning the clay as usual. And then I don't think I've ever explained this, but you've seen me sculpt on this sort of- I use it as a little platform for all of my sculpts. This is just like an old Perico sealer. I just use it to hold it and for this flat surface mainly. So any small, small lidded jar would work for polymer clay. I really want to get something with a glass surface just because I think it'd be prettier. Like this cap gets really crusty sometimes, but that's okay. Oh, also this dirty old crumpled up paper towel that I use to clean colored clay off my hands. Sometimes it's useful to just get a little bit of rubbing alcohol onto this paper towel and really just like rub your fingers clean of the colored clay. I find that especially red and yellow get- they stain your fingers pretty bad. So I think I'm gonna make the color of the bee by mixing this really deep yellow and this really pale yellow. I just want something in between. Not quite pastel, but close to it. I would use my pasta machine, but I'm too lazy to set it up right now. I don't know if it's showing up on the camera, but this looks like a really yummy yellow to me. Sort of like Laffy Taffy. Now I'm gonna weigh it out. I think for most of my keychains, I like the bodies to be around five or six grams. I think I'm gonna make this one the body five grams to accommodate for the hat that I'll be adding. Another tip I have is to mainly work with your fingertips. I recommend using your fingertips because they typically have less dust and dirt on them as opposed to your palms. Your palms will have like all of the dust particles that are in your room. Someone asked me how to prevent cracking in the clay when you bake it. I think first and foremost, using an oven that distributes heat evenly. If you're using a toaster oven, then it's only that top grid, right? That top grid of heat and that's why you see browning. And as far as cracking goes, you want to make sure that your clay is conditioned. So that means rolling it out with a pasta machine or rolling it out with your hands multiple times, like turning it inside out and forming a sphere again. That way it's completely smooth like how mine looks. If it's not conditioned, and this happens to me all the time, it will crack just because you haven't softened it enough. And by the time it's baked, some parts are softer than others and that forms a crack. That's not scientific. That's just what I think from experience. And as I'm sculpting, I remove dust as I go. With a q-tip dipped in rubbing alcohol. But can she walk in the fire? Can she run in the rain? Can she make it up the mountainside? Can she make it down again? I have often wondered if she'll blow and jump the fence. Will she keep on moving onward or stay and work? Good morning. I just took a shower, did my makeup and everything. And now I'm going to make some breakfast for myself. I'm thinking of making a croissant sandwich with egg and sausage. I think that'll be really good. Also, I still have my hair curler in. You're probably going to see this a lot. Show you what I have cooking. I have my Nespresso ready. I'm probably gonna have some milk soon. I'm gonna combine it with this oat beverage, maple flavor from Trader Joe's. And this oat creamer. So good. Broke my heart in December. We were running for the thrill. You turned in the canyon to the snowbank where I fell. Even still, I remember being two. Was a mutual arrangement. We both knew what to do. She had a star on her forehead. That was easy. Hello, I'm back with another check-in. It's one o'clock now. So I'm feeling myself crash. I usually crash around afternoon. So that's why I tried to wake up early and get as much done as possible. So this morning, I'm actually very proud of myself. I did lots of social media work. I edited a video which I posted on Instagram and TikTok. And I made another TikTok. And then I posted on YouTube Shorts. And I responded to emails. And I did some house chores. So I did a lot. But I ended up taking a 30-minute nap. And that's why it's like one o'clock now. I'm still feeling very fatigued though. But I want to keep being productive to finish my schoolwork for the day. So I figured why not stand while work? I think that will help me a lot. Also, the cat is on my chair still. And I don't want to bother him anyway. So yeah, we're going to stand while working. It's so cool.