okay so the deal lately is i don't actually start painting until like 11pm and then i'm up until 2 and i keep telling my partner i'll fix it and i don't.

the thing is, my apartment faces a light well, so between like 1 and 4 in the afternoon there's this stripe of sun that hits the windowsill and the wall behind it and it is genuinely the most beautiful thing in my life, and i've painted it maybe nine times, and i CANNOT paint it during the actual stripe because i'm too busy watching it and panicking about wasting it. so i paint it at night from memory and from bad phone photos and honestly? the night ones are better. they're looser. i'm not trying to get the exact angle of the shadow, i'm trying to get the feeling of having seen it, which is a different job and apparently my brain can only do it when it's dark out and everyone's asleep.

the problem is my hands shake by 1am from no food and i've ruined two decent washes this week, and my mom keeps calling me at 8am for our normal chat and i keep answering like a zombie and she can hear it.

anyway i'm not gonna change it. 😭 i've started eating dinner at 10:30 like a weirdo and keeping a glass of water on the floor next to the palette because i kept dipping my brush in my tea. the tea thing happened three times. three.

if you're a night painter, what do you eat and when, because i think i'm running on vibes and half a banana at this point