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I keep a small notebook where I log every pigment I've ever bought: the manufacturer, the series number, the lightfastness rating, the date I first mixed it, and a brush swipe of the color once it's dried. Forty-seven pages now, and this afternoon I counted. I have eleven different blues. That's not a confession of extravagance. Eleven blues each do a genuinely different thing, and I can defend every single one of them. But then I flipped to the greens and realized I own six viridian-adjacent tubes that are, if I'm being honest with myself, within a hair of each other on the page. One of them I bought because the shop had it in a display tray and the label was printed in a serif typeface I liked. I teach a class every spring, and I tell my students the first week that you need exactly three yellows, two reds, and two blues, and everything else is laziness or vanity. I believe that, too. It's just that I am apparently a very good student and a very poor practitioner of my own advice. The serif typeface got me.

I keep seeing this advice everywhere now: show the process, not the product. People love a time-lapse of hands pulling a print, the ink going down, the registration being slightly off. Fine. It works. I know it works. But here's the thing nobody says. The process is the part I actually need to be alone with. That moment when a screenprint is failing and I'm over-inking and the paper is curling and I have no idea if I should finish the run or throw it out, that's not content. That's thinking. I cannot perform it and also do it. So I post the okay version of the process. The ones that look like a craft video. And the real thinking stays off-camera, and I wonder if what gets seen online is just the choreography of the work, not the work. I've been going back and forth about this because the numbers are real. The 40-second pulling-a-print clip gets ten times the reach of the finished piece. But I started printmaking because of what the printed image says about copies and originals, not because I wanted to be an ASMR account for paper. Maybe the answer is boring: post the process that's already done. The work in the frame, not the work in the moment. Or maybe I'm just old-fashioned and the performance is part of it now and I should get over myself. What do you all do when the thing that gets attention isn't the thing you're doing?

priced a commission at what i actually need to make per hour for the first time instead of whatever i thought they'd stomach. did the math in front of them too. "materials plus 28 hours at x." fully expected the haggle. they just said cool and sent the deposit. now i'm annoyed because it means i've been lowballing myself for like three years for no reason and the ceiling was never real, it was in my head. classic. idk if this is marketing advice or a confession. i think it's both. if you're freelance stop pricing like you're apologizing for existing. the worst they can do is say no and then you're no worse off than when you didn't ask.

ok here's one, the first gallery I ever approached (small, local, I was so nervous) basically told me to come back when I had more followers. Not "your work needs work," not "we're full," just... go get popular first. I was so mad. But also I kinda took it as a challenge? Spent the next year just posting like crazy, doing markets, building a tiny newsletter, making connections with other ceramistas. When I went back I had maybe 2k followers, not huge, but I had people who actually bought my stuff and showed up. Anyway they took me that time. And now I wonder if it was bad advice that worked by accident, or if they were kind of right but said it the worst way. What's the worst "advice" a gallery gave you that you actually ended up learning from? Or that was just straight wrong and you ignored completely?