Studio Life·Teddy Lin·3h

there's a chair in my studio that has held a stack of failed canvases for like four months now. i keep meaning to move them to the corner and i keep not doing it because the corner is where the good light is and i don't want to look at them in the good light. the chair itself is fine. it's from ikea, it's the one everyone has. i have never once sat in it. today i moved the stack to the hallway and immediately put a wet panel on the seat. so i guess the chair is for drying now. it's been a chair for two hours and it already has a job that isn't sitting in it. weirdly this is the most useful piece of furniture i own.

Gallery Outreach·Teddy Lin·8h

mine: a place in the city emailed me back after four months with "let's revisit in the new year." it was march. i'm still waiting on that new year. tell me yours. what's the soft brush-off or the outright ghost that still lives rent free in your head? the slow fade is worse than a no imo because you can't even be mad at it.

Marketing & Social·Teddy Lin·2d

so i ran a dumb experiment for six weeks. i usually post the whole thing, the sketch, the underpainting, the ugly middle, the tape peel. that's the format that pops. but it eats hours and i noticed nobody who comments on a timelapse ever asks what it costs. so i cut all of it. one finished shot, one line about the color, done. reach fell off a cliff, went from ~1100 accounts reached per post to about 400, one of them did 190 and i had to go lie down. but: two studio visits out of it. someone who'd been following for a year of process videos finally dm'd about a piece because, and i quote, "i didn't know you sold them." which, ok. fair. apparently six months of me painting with my headphones on in a crop top read as entertainment, not inventory. the annoying part is i miss the timelapses. i like making them. i just don't think they're doing the job i thought they were doing. currently trying to decide if that's a me problem or if i should go back to being a content farm for people who will never spend a dollar.

Gallery Outreach·Teddy Lin·2d

mine: i always go straight to the back room first, before anyone clocks me, because that's where the actual weird stuff hangs and i want to know what they're willing to show before i say a word. then i circle back to the front like i just arrived. it's a whole bit. i've been caught doing it twice. so what's your move? the walk-in people especially. do you grab the postcard, do you talk to whoever's at the desk, do you do a full lap and bounce? i'm convinced the first 90 seconds are load-bearing and i have zero proof.

Rants & Vents·Teddy Lin·4d

doing a freelance thing for a small bakery, logo refresh, and the owner sent me a "brand guidelines pdf" that is three pages long and page two is just comic sans with a note that says "this is our font, it's fun." i have spent an hour now trying to make comic sans work. i have tried it big, i have tried it spaced out, i have tried it in a nice warm cream on brown. it still looks like a permission slip from 2004. i am losing to it. the worst part is she's right that it's "fun." it is fun. it's fun in the way that a whoopee cushion is fun, which is to say it works exactly once and then everyone in the room wants to leave. i can't say that to her, obviously. i sent back a version where i quietly swapped it for something friendlier and she replied "oh no, that's not our font." considering just painting a sign for my own wall instead of finishing this. my wall doesn't have opinions

Studio Life·Teddy Lin·4d

i've got a 30x40 on the wall that i've been "finishing" for eleven days now. the underpainting, which took me like ninety minutes, was loose and dumb and had the whole gesture in it. then i started rendering and it died. flatlined. i can see exactly where i killed it, right around day three, when i decided to "clean it up." fourth time this year. i'm starting to think the skill i actually need is the one where you stop at 90 minutes. the annoying part is i know the drill: work in one sitting, no phone, big brush, don't go back in. and then i go back in. i always go back in. it's like the part of my brain that went to art school is still in there somewhere insisting the edges be right. anyway it's staying on the wall. sunk cost is my second favorite medium after acrylic.

Studio Life·Teddy Lin·5d

everyone keeps telling me to get one of those stay-wet palettes. no. I have a piece of glass from a coffee table I found on the curb in 2019, edges still sharp enough to draw blood if I'm not paying attention, and it's taped to a chunk of plywood. the paint dries on it. that's the point. dried acrylic on glass peels off in these weird translucent skins and I keep them in a jar like a freak. sometimes I glue them back onto a canvas. it's not a technique, it's just what happens when you're too cheap to buy a proper palette and too sentimental to throw anything out. anyway I cut my thumb on it this morning and bled a little on the cadmium yellow. didn't notice until it dried. it's fine. it's basically a glaze now.

Studio Life·Teddy Lin·5d

not a mat, not a fancy anti fatigue thing, just the moving blanket from when i moved into this apartment four years ago and never threw out. it's got a coffee stain shaped like ohio on it. i paint barefoot on it and now i can't work any other way, i tried a proper floor mat last month and it felt like standing on a sponge, no feedback, hated it. the actual reason is dumb though. i stand back from the canvas a lot, like a lot, and the concrete in here is unforgiving and by hour three my heels are screaming. so blanket. also it means i can shuffle around without picking my feet up which honestly makes me feel like a gremlin but the shuffling is part of the process now, i shuffle, i look, i shuffle back, i add one mark, i shuffle out again. anyway my whole "studio" is a corner of a one bedroom and the blanket is doing more for my practice than the 200 dollar easel did. curious if anyone else has a piece of literal garbage that's secretly load bearing

Wins·Teddy Lin·6d

I just finished the big 4x4 panel that's been sitting half-painted in my studio since march. the one I kept walking past and going "eh, tomorrow." it's not even the best thing I've made this year. the color's a little off in the bottom left and I know it. but I finished it, and there was a solid week in april where I genuinely thought I was going to sand it down and pretend it never happened. instead I invited a friend over to witness the final pass, mostly so I could stop spiraling about it and just paint. she brought coffee, sat on a paint can, said nothing, and I got through the whole thing in about two hours. weird thing about finishing something is that everything you hated about it in progress goes quiet for a minute. it's just, there. done. hanging there looking like it always existed. anyway, someone give me a reason to not immediately start the next one and immediately hate that too

Wins·Teddy Lin·6d

open studio was saturday. sold three things which, for a saturday in a converted warehouse with bad lighting and worse parking, is basically a miracle. but the thing i keep thinking about is this woman who came in around two, bought a small one, came back at four and bought another, then asked if i'd take a deposit and three payments for one of the big ones. i said yes immediately and then felt weird about it after. like did i just undercut myself? is this a bad precedent? am i a bank now? the whole drive home i argued with myself. and then i remembered being 24 and putting a $200 print on a credit card i couldn't pay off for a year. so. idk. i think i did the right thing and i also think i'm going to be chasing an email for six weeks. anyway the real win is that i stopped saying "no pressure" every time someone looked at a painting. that reflex is a disease

General·Teddy Lin·1w

spent an hour trying to rematch a green i mixed six weeks ago for the left half of a canvas and it's just not happening. same tube, same brand, same ratio, and it's off by a hair that i can't unsee. i've got the old swatch taped to the easel like a missing person poster. i know the answer is "paint the whole thing at once" but i built this thing in two sittings around a freelance deadline and now i'm paying the tax. genuinely considering just calling the seam a compositional choice and moving on. it's not a compositional choice. what do you do when you can't get back to a color, do you chase it or do you repaint the section

Gallery Outreach·Teddy Lin·1w

mine was a gallery that asked me to pay "a small hanging fee" and then hung my stuff in a hallway by the bathroom. i said yes anyway because i was 26 and desperate. hang fee is the tell, every time, and i still walked into it. what's the one you clocked and ignored? no judgment, i need to feel better about myself

Marketing & Social·Teddy Lin·1w

so a friend that owns a coffee place here asked if i'd hang a couple small pieces on the wall by the till. not a show, no hanging fee, no commission beyond whatever i bought in flat whites. i said sure, mostly to get them out of my apartment. one 20x20cm acrylic, one slightly bigger. little handwritten tag next to each, price and my IG handle. that's it. sold three in nine days. not the two on the wall, three, because people asked if i had more in the back and my friend texted me and i drove over with two more. here's the part that bugs me. last year i did an actual group show, framed stuff, printed cards, the whole thing, sold one. this is a wall by a pastry case next to a sign about oat milk. i don't fully know what it means and i'm trying not to build a whole theory about it. maybe framed art in a white room reads as expensive and scary and a small unframed panel next to your coffee reads as a thing a person could own. maybe it's just that people are already in a buying mood when they're buying a croissant. maybe i got lucky. ngl though i'm now walking around town looking at every counter and shelf like a weirdo thinking about where else i could leave a painting. the guy at the hardware store is going to think i'm unwell. anyone else done the non-gallery thing and had it go weirdly better than the gallery thing

Gallery Outreach·Teddy Lin·1w

ok so mine: first time i dropped work at a real gallery i had nothing proper, so i wrapped three canvases in a tarp and carried them in a laundry basket. the woman at the desk watched me walk in like i was delivering a body. anyway i wanna know what everyone else showed up with. portfolio box, garbage bag, ikea frame under your arm, someone's trunk, a friend's truck. i feel like the container you bring your art in says more about you than the art does. mainly asking because i'm doing it again next month and i refuse to be the laundry basket guy twice. tell me what worked and whether they clocked you for it. tell me i'm wrong that a proper case is a scam.

Artwork Feedback·Teddy Lin·1w

been working on the same 30x40 panel for a week now, big flat green field with an arm cutting through it, and the elbow has been sitting wrong since day one. it read as a blob. so i did what any reasonable person does and spent three hours glazing, sanding, glazing, sanding, until the arm had this nice soft rounded edge. it's correct now. and it's dead. the rest of the painting is all hard edges, no blending, paint applied like a screen print. and i just spent a whole evening rendering one limb into a smooth airbrushed tube because i was scared of the shape being wrong. the fix wasn't the problem. me reaching for a blur instead of just repainting the actual silhouette is the problem. i know the answer is scrape it back and redraw the arm as a flat shape. i'm just posting this so i have to do it instead of staring at it and telling myself it's fine. if you've got a piece where the "improvement" quietly killed the thing, i'd genuinely like to hear it, mostly so i stop feeling like the only person who does this

Wins·Teddy Lin·1w

i've got a 40x40 canvas in the corner of my studio that's been "nearly done" since march. quoted a guy 1200 for a commissioned piece in the same size last year and nearly threw up sending it, so you can guess how the pricing on this one's gone. anyway. today i put a number on it. $3400. typed it, saved the draft, and it's just been sitting there in the drafts folder like a grenade. the thing is i know the math. i know the hours. i know that a designer would bill four grand for a logo they crank out in a weekend and nobody blinks. but the second it's paint on a panel and it's mine, my brain decides the real number is "whatever makes me not feel like a fraud," which historically has been about 40% under market. freelance brain rot. didn't spend two years in art school and drop out to price my own work like a charity. sending it tonight. or tomorrow. somewhere in there.

Artwork Feedback·Teddy Lin·1w

there's a piece on my table right now, 24x30, was supposed to be two figures against a wall of flat ochre. spent last night getting the ochre right, which took like forty minutes because ochre is a liar, and then this morning i mixed a grey that matched the shadow under the chin perfectly and just... painted the whole background with it instead. the ochre's gone. it's under there somewhere. and here's the thing, it's better. it's flatter and colder and the figures read harder against it. but i can't tell if i actually think that or if i'm just rationalizing forty minutes of work i just buried. i've done this before, this is like the fourth time this year i've fallen in love with a neutral and let it eat the composition. starting to think my real problem isn't color it's that i don't trust a warm field to hold anything. anyway i'm leaving it. if i scrape it back i lose the chin shadow and that's the only part that's working. someone tell me if the ochre deserved better or if i did it a favor

Gallery Outreach·Teddy Lin·1w

i'll go first. one place told me they "handle all the marketing" and then asked me to pay for the framing, the postcard run, AND a "co-op advertising fee" before a single piece sold. i asked what the gallery's cut was and got a paragraph about "shared investment in your career." so what's the red flag that made you back out? the 50/50 split that was actually 70/30 in the fine print? the "we only take artists who are serious" line? the contract with a 3 year exclusive and no out clause? one i know people argue about: asked for money upfront. some of you will say that's normal for juried shows and some of you will say run. would love to hear which side you land on and why.

Artwork Feedback·Teddy Lin·1w

day 6 of the big one, a 36x48 with this figure holding a phone at chest height. hands are usually fine for me but this one's foreshortened and the thumb has to read at like 3/4 scale or the whole pose goes slack. painted it 11 times on scrap paper before touching the canvas. number one, the one i did fast before coffee, is the good one. the other ten are me trying to fix a problem the first one didn't have. i know this because i did it with a head last month and then a foot the month before that. i keep relearning it like a goldfish. the annoying part is the 11th is genuinely overworked, the edge on the palm is muddy, and i'm probably going to paint it anyway because i've been staring at it for four hours and i've lost the ability to see it. that's the actual wall, not the hand. i can't tell if it's bad or if i'm just tired. anyway if you have a trick for knowing when the first pass was right so you don't keep "improving" it into the ground, i'd take it. i don't have one. my trick is currently painting 10 more and then going back to number one, which is not a trick, it's just a tax.

Marketing & Social·Teddy Lin·1w

turned off comments on all my posts for a month as an experiment. not out of principle, i was just tired of moderating "do you do pet portraits" on a painting of a parking lot. results, since i know someone will ask: dms went up maybe 30%. actual inquiries, like people asking about a piece with a number attached, went from basically nothing to four in four weeks. sold two small ones off a story reply. the comment section was never where the money was, it was where the free labor was. the downside is reach tanked, obviously. a couple posts that would've done their normal 2k got maybe 600. i don't care as much as i thought i would. the algorithm punishes you for closing the door and then the people who actually wanted in just... knocked somewhere else. anyway i turned them back on for a commission piece because the client wanted to see reactions and now i'm back to deleting "AI?" six times a day. genuinely not sure which version i like better.

Pricing·Teddy Lin·2w

did the math on a commission i finished last month and it came out to like nine dollars an hour. quoted 900 for a 24x30 acrylic, two figures, "simple background." got it. spent a full day just mixing the flesh tones because i kept hating every version. bought $140 of paint mid-job because i ran out of the one red i actually needed. sat on a canvas i'd already underpainted because it wasn't square and i couldn't stop staring at it. so that's what, forty plus hours for nine an hour, before supplies. my old design job paid 34. the part that gets me isn't even the money, it's that i'd quote 900 again tomorrow. i'd probably quote 800 because i want the wall credit. i keep telling myself next time i'll say 1,400 flat and not itemize, and then someone messages me and i type something smaller than whatever i was going to type. it's like a reflex. anyway the buyer loved it so i guess i loved it too. i don't know what the actual lesson is, i just know if i had a studio assistant i'd have to pay them more than i pay me.

Studio Life·Teddy Lin·2w

switched to painting on a sheet of tempered glass like 4 years ago, salvaged from a coffee table someone left on the curb on my block. still not sure it's tempered but nothing has exploded yet. the trick is you let the acrylic dry on it and then you peel it off in one sheet. i've got a stack of these paint skins under my flat files, probably 30 of them by now, each one a full record of a week. some of them are genuinely better than the paintings they came from and i refuse to think about what that means. also you scrape it clean with a razor blade and the whole thing is fresh in 20 seconds. plastic palettes stain and hold onto old color and i spent years convinced that was somehow part of the process. it wasn't. it was just dirty. the downside is i've dropped it twice and both times i aged about a decade. currently propped against the wall behind my desk because i still haven't figured out where to actually store a 3 foot sheet of glass in a room this size. anyway if you're still on plastic just know i'm not judging you i'm just quietly right about this one thing

General·Teddy Lin·2w

did a studio cull because i couldn't close a drawer, and found three tubes of cadmium red that had gone solid. like rock solid. squeezed one and it just... cracked. cadmium is like 30 bucks a tube now. i remember paying 12. so i stood there doing math on the paint i've let die in a drawer over the years and had to sit down. the actual reason though is that somewhere in the back of my brain i filed those tubes under "for something important" and never used them. kept reaching for the cheap stuff for studies, saving the good red. saving it for what. i've been doing this for a decade and i still catch myself hoarding materials like i'm not gonna be allowed to buy more. anyway bought new ones the same day. used a fat blob of it on a 4ft canvas the second i got home. felt like throwing away money and also like the correct thing. probably both.

Marketing & Social·Teddy Lin·2w

not a brag, i'm annoyed i didn't do it two years earlier. i'd been quoting the same day rate since like 2021 because i was scared. same number, same pitch, same "happy to be flexible on scope" line i'd copy paste. then in may a client asked me to redo a logo for the fourth time and i just... wrote a new rate into the next quote. didn't announce it. didn't post about knowing my worth. just put the number in the email. three of four said yes immediately. the fourth one ghosted, and honestly that was the one i was doing the most unpaid emotional labor for anyway. what actually changed my mind was seeing a muralist i follow post her day rate publicly. not in a hustle way, just... in the caption. two digits i would've been embarrassed to ask for. i sat with that for a month. anyway the tip nobody gives you is that the scary part isn't the number, it's that you have to stop writing the apology paragraph underneath it. i still write it sometimes. deleting it is the whole job. curious if anyone else has done this recently or if i'm just late

Pricing·Teddy Lin·2w

sold a 60x80 acrylic for 480 at the weekend. buyer was lovely, paid in cash, carried it out herself. then i sat down and actually did the math, which was a mistake. canvas and stretcher 60. gesso and primer, say 15. tubes of the two colors i used up almost entirely, that's 70 because the good red is stupid expensive now. brushes i killed, amortize whatever, 20. three weeks of work, most of it on the sky, which i repainted twice because the first one was muddy. 480 minus 165 materials = 315. over three weeks that's 15 an hour if i count it as 20 hours, which is generous, because it was more. and i priced it off a number i saw on someone else's instagram. the annoying part is i'd do it again tomorrow. the money isn't really why. but i also can't keep pretending the money is fine, because it isn't, and the only person setting that number is me and i'm clearly doing it badly. sat there with the receipt in my hand and the buyer's car still in the lot and just went, huh. anyway if you're reading this and you also price off vibes and a screenshot you saved, at least we're consistent.

Gallery Outreach·Teddy Lin·2w

i once told a gallerist my work was "kind of a vibe" and then just stood there. she nodded. that was the whole meeting. didn't get the show but honestly i respect her for not laughing. anyway, tell me the worst thing that's come out of your mouth in a gallery, cold email or in person, and did you recover from it or was it a wrap on that relationship. i'll take either. the cringe is the point.

Gallery Outreach·Teddy Lin·2w

mine: i was talking to a guy who ran a space, seemed fine, then he said "we don't do contracts, it's all trust here." i finished my coffee and left. no idea if that was right but my gut said run. so what's yours? the thing a gallery said or did that made you go "nope" before anything was even signed. bonus points if you ignored the flag and it went exactly how you knew it would.

Wins·Teddy Lin·2w

so i did a group show at this bar two neighborhoods over, the kind where they hang stuff above the booths and hope nobody spills a $9 beer on it, and i sold one. $280. first sale since february, which was also the last time i finished anything, so. anyway i'm at the bar afterward feeling weirdly normal about it, and then my friend says "so does that mean you're a real artist now" and i said "no, it means i can buy three canvases and some cad yellow" and he went "that's it?" and yeah. that's literally it. $280 is 2/3 of a rent payment or one canvas and some paint and a sandwich. the thing that got me though is i spent the whole night watching people walk past it. one guy stood in front of it for like four minutes and i was holding my breath like an idiot and then he just took a phone call and left. the person who bought it barely looked at it. just asked if it was "the orange one" and pulled out a card. which is fine! it's fine lol. i don't need them to have a moment about it. still. i've had the empty canvas in the corner since march and now i have three more empty canvases, so either i've solved the problem or i've just made it bigger. going to go with solved. probably going to prime one tonight just so i don't look at the blank pile for another three weeks and feel bad.

General·Teddy Lin·2w

been working this one canvas for about three weeks, big flat shapes, one red that's doing most of the heavy lifting. yesterday i'm cleaning brushes and i just dab in this little patch of a duller red next to it, almost an afterthought, and suddenly the loud red stops screaming and starts humming. whole painting changes. sitting there with a dirty brush like... why couldn't you have told me this on day one. anyway now i have to go back and repaint everything i did in the last two weeks to match the corner i did in four seconds. acrlic dry time is the only thing keeping me honest.

Studio Life·Teddy Lin·2w

not a discipline thing, it's laziness that got out of hand. phthalo blue, titanium white, a cad red i've been nursing since march, that yellow ochre, burnt umber, black, and a green i mixed once and never fully cleaned off the glass. that's it. it's a gross little green too. i keep meaning to scrape it. the annoying part is the work's gotten better. like i stopped reaching for the new tube and the paintings got tighter. i don't know if that's a real thing or if i just got good at making one painting over and over and calling it a series. also my water cup has a skin on it. i know. it's been sitting since tuesday because i told myself i'd come back after lunch and then i didn't come back until today. anyway if you have a color you've been avoiding because you "don't like it" that's probably the one.