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My wedging table has been standing there for four months holding a bag of plaster, three empty bottles and my keys. I do all the wedging on the floor now, on a canvas sheet, knees on the tiles. Started because I needed the table for drying pieces and never gave it back. Now I can't do it any other way. On the floor I use my whole body for the spiral and I can feel the air pockets leaving, like little pops under the palm. Standing at a table I was mostly using arms and the clay stayed stiff in the middle. Floor it comes out even. Downside is the knees and that I have to sweep before I start or I'm wedging in whatever came off my shoes. Also my neighbour below has asked twice what the thumping is. Not saying is better for everyone, my back is already filing complaints. But is anyone else working lower than they should be? I want to know if I'm the only one crouching on the ground like a goblin at 11pm

The old tube had been in the box since maybe 2019, a Cremnitz I bought in Paris, and I finished it Thursday afternoon on the collarbone of a figure I've been fighting with for three weeks. So I went to the shop on rue Sainte-Catherine and bought what they had, a flake white, different maker. Same pigment on paper. Nothing like it in the hand. The old one was short. It held a ridge. You could take it up with a palette knife and it stayed where you put it, and my whole way of getting the light on a shoulder depends on that, the paint standing just enough to catch the raking light from the window. This new one is stringy, it wants to run, and I have been thinning it more than I should just to make it behave, which means I am now glazing where I meant to be building. The shoulder is wrong. Not ruined, wrong. I know the difference and it does not help. I spent an hour this morning trying to figure out if it is the batch or if it is me. I suspect both. There is something in the body of a paint that gets into how you think, and when it changes you have to change with it, or you fight it and lose a month. C'est ça. Twenty years and a new tube can still take the ground out from under a picture. I have half a mind to drive to the supplier in Villeurbanne and open every box on the shelf until I find one that feels right, which the man there will hate, and which I will probably do anyway. Anyone else had a material change quietly wreck a passage you were happy with? Or is it just me being difficult about paint again.

I knew it was gonna be hard to be an animator, constant struggle and always looking for something, did i think it would be THIS hard? No, its like I am being tested, I love what i do. but i feel so lost collage does not do much to help get you ready, your thrown in without any kind of help. Im slowly realizing that as much as I love animation I am gravitating towards illustration and creative design. feels like I am loosing time... Its terrifying

The courier handed it to me and it was warm. Who knows why. The box had a dent the shape of a person sitting on it, and I thought fine, the ream inside is wrapped. It was not wrapped. Cotton paper absorbs everything it touches and apparently it had been touching a box that spent two days in a warehouse that smells like diesel and damp cardboard. So the top thirty sheets now smell like a truck. Not visibly ruined, just smelling, which is worse, because you can't photograph the problem and you can't prove anything. I have a show in March. I need 40 good prints and I've been working toward them since October. So now I'm doing the thing where I hold each sheet up to the window like a doctor looking at an x-ray, deciding which ones I'm going to pretend are fine. The funny part is I make work about the multiple, about the copy, about how a print is never really the original. So the universe has a sense of humor about me being precious with paper. But there's a difference between the idea of the reproducible and the smell of my studio right now, which is a rented Mazda. I've started leaving them out with a bowl of bicarbonate next to them like it's a sick animal. Tell me if you know a better trick, or tell me I'm being dramatic. Both fine.

I have a portrait commission, a woman and her two daughters in the salon of their apartment near Bellecour, and it has become the most interesting fight of my month. The older daughter has a hand on the back of the chair, half turned away, and the morning light comes across her from the tall window on the left. I left the raw umber and lead white of that hand loose. A few strokes, the structure showing, the warm ground coming through. It is the best thing in the painting. Honest light does that, it does not need the whole thing described. The mother loves it. The grandmother, who is paying, called it "unfinished" and asked me to smooth the edges and give the girl her fingers properly. So now every Tuesday we talk. And I find I cannot entirely dismiss her. Because she is not wrong that a portrait for the family wall is a different animal than a picture in my studio. It will hang over a sofa where children will run past it. It is not meant to be looked at, it is meant to be lived with. But the moment I nail down those fingers the whole thing goes dead. I have seen it happen, I did it once to prove her wrong and scraped it back within the hour. I have not told her that. I am letting her think I am considering it, which is not entirely a lie, I am considering it the way you consider stepping off a curb into traffic. Voilà. That is the whole of it. The painting is due in March and I have no idea which of us is going to win.

Had a market stall at the weekend and the crowd-pleaser wasn't the big linen-backed heron print I was proud of. It was the small rough one of the drowned village, the one I carved off an old photo of my granda's aunt's house that's under the water now in Connemara. Three people bought it and every single one of them stood there while I told them the story. The fella who actually pulled cash out forked over for the smaller, rougher one once he heard the house had a name and a wake in it before the flood. So I've started putting a four-line story under every print on the site instead of "giclee print, acid free, signed." Not the poem, not the essay, just the bones of it. The hare one is now "she sat in the field behind the house the winter I stopped drinking and I thought we were the same animal." Early days but the page views are up and somebody actually messaged asking about the woman in the story. It's not a strategy, it's just me finally telling people why I carved the bloody thing instead of acting like the image should do all the work. Reckon the marketing crowd would call it storytelling. I call it being arsed to talk to people, which is the one thing I'm actually good at. Anyone else ever sold the story and not the picture? Or am I just talking to myself here.

I nearly didn't put it up. Bad light, the smalti looked grey instead of the deep red it actually is, and you could see my slippers in the corner of the shot. I posted it anyway because I had nothing else ready and the algorithm is a hungry animal. Two days later a woman in Zurich wrote to me. She wanted a panel two metres wide for a stairwell. Paid the deposit the same week, no haggling, no "can you do it cheaper if we skip the gold." I asked her later what made her write. She said the slippers. She said it looked like a real person's floor, not a showroom. Meanwhile the professionally shot photos I paid a photographer 400 euro for, the ones with the grey backdrop and the careful angles, they got the likes. Nothing else. Likes and nothing. I still don't fully understand what I'm doing out here. I post less now and half of it is badly lit. But I've stopped pretending the work happens in a white room, because it doesn't, it happens in my kitchen with one cat sitting on the tesserae I just sorted.

Its quite amazing to go back to old pieces and see how much you've changed especially when learning animation, I've learned so much about the process and creation of it, it blows my mind

Nine pulls. That's what it took this week and I want to say that out loud because I've been showing people the print for two months and letting them think it came off the block like that. It's a hare, big one, crouched in dead winter rushes, and the whole thing lives or dies on one tiny wedge of white left in the eye. Cut it a hair too wide and the animal looks thick. Too narrow and it's a rabbit that's seen a ghost. I'd carved it, proofed it, gone back in with the chisel, proofed again, and on the eighth go I knew I'd taken too much off and there was no putting it back. Linocut doesn't do second chances. You can't weld the stuff back on, whatever your man on YouTube says. So I sat with the block for a day and a half doing nothing, which for me is the hardest part of the whole trade. Kids in and out of the studio, small fella asked why the hare had no eyes yet, told him it was thinking about it. Went for a walk in the rain at Blackrock and came home with the answer, which is nearly always the case and I never learn it. Cut the rushes in deeper instead, so the eye sits in shadow. Gave it the look. Ninth pull off the press and there it was, the one I'd been chasing since November, and I just sat down on the floor of the studio with the paper still in my hand like an eejit. Not a big whooping moment. Just quiet. The dog came over and sat on my foot. Anyway it's hanging on the wall now drying and I can't stop going in to look at it. Twelve in the edition. If you're at the market Saturday I'll have them there, and no, I'm not telling you which pull is which. The bit I keep turning over is that the eighth one wasn't wasted. If I hadn't ruined it I'd never have gone looking for the answer. But I'm not going to pretend I was grand about it at the time, because I wasn't, I was a right grumpy article for two days and my wife will confirm it.

A few weeks back I posted the small pieces I keep on hand for the online shop, they went fast. Then a message: "these are lovely, why don't you make them bigger?" Polite, interested. I told them the truth: the small ones are 30 cm by 30, three weeks of work. The big wall pieces I do are two meters, and they take five times as long because every tile gets cut and set by hand, not scaled up like a photograph. The bigger version isn't the same thing enlarged. It's a different animal, and it costs accordingly. Silence. Then: "can you do me one at 60 cm for the same price?" That was the whole conversation. The person thought the price was per square centimeter of artwork, like buying carpet. Not per hour of kneeling on a floor with a hammer and nippers. I get it, nobody knows what anything costs if they've never had to make it. But it did make me wonder how many people think commission pricing is just quantity times a rate, instead of time times skill times the fact that I only have one spine. Just sent the reply that says no, and that I'd be glad to quote what a 60 cm piece actually costs. Curious to see if they come back.

Came into the studio this morning with a photo on his phone. Golden retriever, nice enough dog. Said he'd been looking for someone who "really gets animals" and my work had "a feeling to it." Then before I could say anything: "But I'm not paying gallery prices. You're in your studio, it's not like it costs you anything to paint." I said the paint costs something. The canvas costs something. The thirty years of learning how to use them cost something, but I left that part out. He said he'd pay 200 euros and I could keep the picture of the dog afterwards for my portfolio. I said no and he acted like I'd insulted his grandmother. Genau. The portfolio argument. As if the privilege of painting his dog was its own reward.

was just debugging a client's landing page and it's like... the ugliest thing i've ever seen. basic html, like, zero styling, just text and a button. and it's converting like crazy. meanwhile the beautifully designed ones with fancy animations and great typography are just... crickets. lol. i guess people just want the info and a clear path to buy, not a design award winner. took me years of design school and freelance hell to learn that lol.

Not deliberately. I noticed it this morning about four minutes into a pass of cobalt over a section of leaf, and by then my chest was already tight and I was leaning in far closer than I ought to. I catch myself doing it perhaps three or four times in a working session. The hand is steady, the paper is still damp in the right way, and I have simply stopped breathing, as though the wash were a small animal that might startle. The piece on the board is a study of a single stem of Papaver somniferum, the bristly one, from the garden, which I have been on for nine days and which has already been ruined once and restarted on fresh paper. I am working on Fabriano Artistico, hot pressed, 300 gsm. I have gone back to hot pressed after several years of cold pressed and I am not entirely convinced I made the right decision. The pigment sits on top of the surface rather than sinking in, and every edge you leave is a little more naked for it. It is unforgiving and I am not sure I am a good enough painter this month to deserve it. I do not know whether the breath-holding is concentration or superstition. It is probably superstition. There is no reason a wash would behave differently because I exhaled, and yet I have never once tested it, which tells you something about how much I want to know the answer. Someone in a class last year told me she hums while she paints, one continuous low note, and that when the note stops she knows she has lost the thread and steps away from the board. I thought it was a clever trick. I have not managed to take it up, mostly because I would then have to hear myself.

went in for one tube of titanium white because i'm out, again, forever. walked out with white plus a $14 filbert i absolutely did not need, and the cashier goes "treat yourself" in this tone like she'd seen my bank app. she's right and i hate it. i have like six dead brushes in a jar i keep meaning to throw out, all splayed at the tip from me scrubbing at a dry edge like an animal. i know you're supposed to use the flat of it, i know. but when the paint starts tacking up i forget everything i know and start stabbing. anyway the new brush is nice. too nice. i'm scared to touch it, which means it'll sit there pristine for a month and then i'll break it in one bad decision on a saturday. the white was $22 by the way. for white. i'm gonna go put it on a canvas and immediately ruin it

I have a grey squirrel tail in a jam jar in the freezer, waiting for me to find the courage to paint it. It came off the road at the end of the lane, and my husband has been remarkably patient about the whole business, though he did ask whether it might live somewhere other than beside the peas. The difficulty is the fur. Fur is the one subject where botanical training lets me down, because a petal has an edge you can commit to and fur does not, or rather it does but the edge is made of a thousand separate decisions. I have done three drawings on tracing paper and none of them convince me. I keep treating it as a silhouette instead of a structure. I suspect the answer is to stop drawing the tail as a shape and start drawing the hairs as individual strokes, in order, from the tip backward, the way you would build a seed head. It will take an appalling length of time and I am not entirely sure it will work. There is a real possibility this squirrel ends up back in the hedge with nothing to show for it. Anyone here paint animal specimens as well as plants. I would like to be told I am overthinking the fur, or else told plainly that I am not.

Genuine question, because I think I've been doing it wrong for years. First time I tried, maybe 2009, I put on a decent jacket, took a folder of photos, and walked into a gallery on rue Auguste Comte with no appointment. The woman at the desk looked at me like I'd brought a dead animal into the room. I got maybe ninety seconds. Never heard anything back, obviously. Since then it's email only for me. Short message, three or four images, dimensions, price if they ask. Boring but it has actually worked twice. So which is it for you? Email or walk in? And if you walk in, how do you do it without it going badly? I suspect there are people here who have made the in-person thing work and I'd like to know how.

So I ran out of gesso mid-priming a canvas tonight and instead of just going to bed like a normal person I read about making your own with rabbit skin glue and whiting. Which obviously I'm not doing because the thought of rendering animal glue in my kitchen makes me a little queasy AND my 8 year old would absolutely try to eat it. But I did mix some acrylic medium with plaster of Paris to see what happens and now there's a weird little test square drying on cardboard that I'll report back on like it matters. It probably won't be anything, but honestly the kitchen-table science is half the fun of this hobby. I've ruined two good wooden spoons and my husband has stopped asking questions. Anyone else ever actually bothered with homemade grounds or do we all just buy the tub?

Working on a heron for the next edition, the wing feathers are driving me half mad. I've carved this bird before, sure I have, dozens of times, but this block is a different size and suddenly every feather I cut reads as a leaf. A leaf! Same five lines, same flow, but somewhere between the sketch and the lino it's turned botanical and I can't for the life of me see where it goes wrong. The barb lines are too parallel maybe, or they're ending in the wrong direction entirely. I proofed it three times today and each one I'm squinting at going no, that's ash, that's a sycamore. The whole wing is carved and I'm this close to gouging the lot of it out and starting again from the shoulder. There's a version of me that knows the answer, I know there is, but he's not in the room right now. Anyone else ever carved one thing in six different materials and only one of them kept its animal shape?

swept the studio today for the first time in weeks and honestly it's a documentary. there's a dried puddle of matte medium where I tried to decoupage something at 11pm and gave up. a pile of charcoal dust that only goes in one spot because I keep sharpening over the same corner like an animal. and one single screw that I have no memory of ever dropping but it's been there so long it's rusted into the wood. the floor is basically archaeology. you could date my bad moods by the paint splatters. thick and muddy = tuesday. thin and watery = I was crying or hungover, hard to tell. anyway the screw is still there. I put a pencil next to it. maybe I'll deal with it eventually. probably not.

Had a commission enquiry this morning that I'm still turning over in my head. An American couple, very nice, very enthusiastic, they wanted me to paint their golden retriever as "a Renaissance saint, you know, like with the gold halo and the little clouds." They'd already picked the frame from a catalogue. I said I don't paint animals, I don't do commissions from photographs, and I don't do pastiche. Which came out blunter than I meant, because I was still on my first coffee. But also, what do you even say to that? They want a decorative object, not a painting. The dog is lovely I'm sure. But I spent ten years learning to see value relationships and edge quality and they want me to put a halo on a retriever. I felt bad after. Not guilty, just tired. The gap between what people think painting is and what it actually is feels wider every year.