Well, first of all, my studio is rather small, just one room where I actually make my pieces. In it I have three main stations, plus a storage closet where I put in-progress pieces and pieces that are drying, waiting for the kiln. First, I have the "building" area, where I keep my clay, hundreds of pounds of it, and have a work table where I actually make each piece. I have way, way too many small tools, but each one is useful in some way. Some tools I keep in a small jar, and they are the ones I use every time I build. Others, and there are many, are kept within reach because you never know when you need just the right shape to tweak a spot on a piece.
Next, beside my building tabke, is a smaller area where I keep my potter's wheel. I don't like to just throw bowls, mugs, etc., but the wheel very useful to throw, say, a dog or cat, or bird's body, a head of an animal, or sometimes just an odd shape that I need to support a complicated piece I'm making. I might add that while my studio appears messy, I am very scrupulous with recycling nearly every dust-grain of clay.
And finally, my painting area. I have a largish round table, around 4 feet in diameter, that turns. On it I have I think 8, maybe 7, 12" turntables. I put a single piece to be painted on each small turntable, so I can efficiently paint up to 8 pieces at a time just by turning the big table.
To the side, I have yet another turntable, around 2 feet in diameter, where I keep as many of my underglazes (the material I paint onto the bisque-fired pieces, which I paint onto each piece before I glaze and fire it again. The underglazes are I think the most expensive part of my business. Each pint jar of my underglazes costs around $60, and I go through a LOT of underglaze. I have to paint a minimum of 2 layers and most often three onto each piece I make, so I waste nothing in this area! And my brushes are quite expensive, too, and wear out rather fast because of the coarseness of the bare fired clay surface.
Also, I have to add that I am clean but rather disorderly in my studio ("messy-desk syndrome"), but it works well for me. I try at the end of a day of building to reorganize my worktable for the next day of work. Same with my painting area. I have "lids" that I use to cover each underglaze jar, and I'm scrupulous about being sure that I cover everything at the end of a painting session.
In addition to my studio, I have a packing/shipping room, where I store and pack for shipping each piece that I've made and sold. I also keep some boxes and packing materials in there, but the bulk of my packing materials are kept in yet another room, which is often packed to the ceiling with boxes, bubble-wrap, peanuts, etc. Very expensive stuff!! But I recycle as many packing materials as I can, too. It's good for my costs, good for the earth. Various galleries in my vicinity, in fact, call me when they have a reasonable amount of packing materials I can pick up and recycle.
Finally, I have a kiln room, where obviously I keep my two kilns, my slab-roller, more shelves for in-progress pieces, and my glaze buckets (my least favorite of all my jobs, I think). It's messy, fussy, often unpredictable. In fact, it's the one area where I'm most likely to ruin a piece -- or at least make it less than what I'm willing to accept as a "good" piece which I can/will sell. (Although, my granddaughter recently gave me a practical way to keep some of these pieces out of landfills: I can offer them, a couple of times a year, at a greatly discounted price. We shall see. I need to think about it more.)
