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I've been using Arches 140lb cold press for nearly twenty years. It was reliable. You knew what you were getting. That block of paper I opened this morning has sizing so uneven the paint is pooling in patches on the first three sheets. I'm not talking about a minor inconsistency. I'm talking about washes that lay down flat in one area and bead up like wax in another. I wrote to them a few months ago about a different batch and got a polite form letter suggesting I might be using too much water. Which, no. I know how much water I'm using. I've been doing this long enough to know the difference between a technique problem and a materials problem. I've already switched to Fabriano Artistico for my commission work. I didn't want to. I liked Arches. But I can't keep fighting the paper. If anyone else has noticed this I'd be curious, though I suspect most people just adapt and don't say anything.

I was reading the recent posts here about handwritten notes and old-fashioned outreach, and it made me think about something I haven't told many people. Five years ago, I wrote a letter to a gallery owner in Connecticut whose program I had admired for years. Not an email. A letter. On Arches hot press, with a small watercolour study of a trillium I'd painted that spring tucked inside. I told her honestly that I wasn't sure if she was accepting new artists but that I respected what she was doing and wanted to introduce myself properly. She wrote back. She said the letter sat on her desk for three weeks before she called, because she kept looking at the trillium and trying to decide if it was worth the risk of meeting me. She took me on. That gallery remains the steadiest source of my serious sales. Not Instagram. Not my website. A letter. I don't think the lesson is that we should all be sending letters. I think the lesson is that the real connections happen when you do something that costs you something real -- time, skill, the vulnerability of putting a small original painting in an envelope and hoping it lands with the right person. It is harder to ignore than a form submission. I still send a letter occasionally when a connection matters to me. I have never once regretted it. I have regretted the polished emails I overthought and never sent.

I buy the Arches oil paper in the big pad, the 350gsm. Been using it about four years, always the same. Today I wet a sheet for a thin wash layer and the water just sat on top in beads. It's like they oversized it. I let it dry, tried again, same thing. Had to scrub the surface with a stiff brush to get any tooth back. Anyone else hit this batch? Or is this just what happens when a brand gets big enough to stop caring. I know I should probably just size my own paper and stop complaining. But I liked the convenience and I'm annoyed about it.

so i get my Arches block out, right, the 140lb cold press, the good one, the one i ration, and i go to paint this window study i've done like nine times now, and the sizing is just... wrong. like the wash sits on top of the paper and beads up instead of sinking in. i'm sitting there tilting the board like i'm panning for gold and the whole sky i just laid down runs off the edge onto my table. turns out it's a bad batch. i googled it at 11pm like a crazy person and other people are saying the same thing about this run. $40 a block and it's basically coated in something. i've been fighting it for three days thinking i forgot how to paint. i genuinely started questioning my whole degree. my BFA. four years. defeated by a sheet of paper. and the worst part is i can't even be mad at myself which is my favorite hobby. i have to be mad at a factory. anyway i've got two sheets of Fabriano left and if the light holds i'm redoing the sky tonight. mom says return it but i bought it in like March so the receipt is a ghost. if anyone else got a bad block from that batch tell me i'm not insane

Someone asked me at the Feira da Vandoma last month what a cyanotype costs, and I heard myself say "it depends on the paper," which is true and also a way of not answering. Here is the real thing. A 30x40 print on Arches, seawater-developed, sun for however long it takes that day, I ask 120. It could be three hours of work or it could be four days of waiting for the right light and starting over. I don't count. If I counted I would have to charge something nobody in that market is going to pay, and I am not sure I would want to charge it either. So the price is a kind of average of the good days and the ruined ones. It works out. It is also the reason I have never said a number out loud here, and why I felt a small shame writing 120 just now. What I keep circling is this. The friends who ask me to make them something, "just a small one for the hallway," I say yes and then it is not small and it is not free and I have spent a fortnight on it, and I cannot find the door out of that conversation. Not asking anyone to solve it. I think I just wanted to write the number down somewhere.

I taped off the horizon line on a 22x30 Arches sheet this morning and I'm now on my third strip of masking tape because the first two lifted wet paper and took a chunk of the sky with them, and the third one is somehow STILL not level. I've checked it against a ruler, held it up to the window, walked across the room and squinted, and it's leaning maybe a quarter inch to the right and I cannot unsee it. This is the whole painting. It's a beach thing, big wash, not complicated, and the one thing that has to be dead straight is the one thing I cannot get dead straight. My partner came in and said "looks straight to me" which is the single least helpful sentence in the English language, love you babe. Meanwhile the wash underneath is actually nice?? like the color is doing the thing I wanted, that soft grey-lavender where the sea meets the sky, and I'm going to ruin it with a tape line. I know I'm going to ruin it. I've already accepted it. I think part of me is stalling because once I peel that tape there's no undoing it, and I've got a little market table in three weeks and this was supposed to be one of the four pieces I'm bringing. Anyway if anyone has a trick for taping a straight edge on soaked paper that doesn't involve me buying a T-square I'm listening. Or I could just paint a boat over it, that's also an option I'm considering

Ok so back in maybe March my mom's friend Carol asked if I'd do a little watercolor of her parents' old farmhouse, the one they sold in like 2004, and I said sure thinking it'd take me a weekend. It took eleven days. Not because it was hard exactly but because I kept redoing the roof shingles and then the tree line behind it and then the sky, which I painted four separate times and none of them were right and one of them was genuinely bad. I charged her $150. I don't even know why, she didn't ask for a discount, I just heard myself say it out loud on the phone and then couldn't walk it back. Eleven days. My Arches paper alone is like $6 a sheet and I went through five because of the sky situation. And the thing is she cried when I gave it to her, like actually cried at her kitchen table, so part of me is like, ok, that's worth something, that's not nothing. But I also sat in my car afterward doing the math on my phone and felt sick. I'm not even asking what I should have charged, I know what I should have charged. I think I'm asking how you stop doing this. Because I have another one of these coming, my aunt already asked, and I can feel myself about to say a number that's too low just to make the silence stop.

I'm not joking, there's a 22x30 Arches block drying flat on the kitchen floor right now and I've built my entire day around not stepping on it. I wanted this soft wet-in-wet sky for a bigger piece, and I got greedy and flooded it, and instead of beautiful soft edges it did that thing where the pigment backruns and you get the cauliflower bloom in the middle of what was supposed to be a clear wash. Three years of formal training and I still do this when I'm impatient. Anyway, this is my eighth month full time and I keep noticing how much of my day is just... waiting. Waiting for a wash to dry, waiting for the light to come back to the window, waiting to see if the thing I just did ruined everything or made it. I don't know if anyone warned me about that part. The painting itself takes like an hour. The rest is standing around trying not to touch it. Also my partner asked why I was crouching on the floor staring at it like a weirdo and I said "checking for blooms" and they said "you made those flowers yourself?" and now I'm in love with them even more, so that's the story of my Tuesday.

A boutique hotel in Lisbon, they are doing the corridors in the old building near the river. Fourteen cyanotypes, all one size, all of the same stretch of coast so they hang as a sequence. Nice project, actually. I like the idea of a person walking to their room past fourteen pieces of the same shoreline in different weather. I sat down with the paper and the chemistry and worked out it is about 46 hours of work, plus the Arches, plus the ferric ammonium citrate and the potassium ferricyanide, plus replacing two sheets I will ruin, because I always ruin two. I quoted 2,100. Then I did it again a week later and I do not know why I did that to myself. Works out at maybe 22 an hour before I take anything out for the studio, the electricity, the glass, the fact that I have been doing this for fifteen years and I am still pricing like someone who is grateful to be asked. The thing that makes it worse is I know I would have said yes at 1,400 if they had pushed. That number is sitting in my head now like a stone in a shoe. They have not replied yet. I half hope they say no so I can quote it again properly.

Fourteen sheets of Arches, the good cold press, ordered in June and waited on for five weeks. I came home from the beach at half past six and the box was standing upright against the gate, in the rain, like it had been asked to wait there politely. The cardboard was so soft it opened with two fingers. The paper inside is not ruined exactly. That is the maddening part. It is a little wavy at the edges and the sizing has that feel to it now, slightly dull under the thumb, and I will spend the next month wondering if the blues are going to come out right or if I am going to be blaming a courier in January for something that was my own fault with an exposure. I did not shout at anyone. I unwrapped it, laid it flat under books, made tea, and then sat looking at the stack for a while feeling something I would rather not name in public. My partner said well, at least it is only paper. He is a good man and he meant it kindly and I have not spoken to him since. Anyway. If anyone knows whether damp paper can be brought back with a long press and patience, I am listening. If not, I am going to keep pressing it and pretending.

So I'm three hours into a wash on the big window piece (the 22x30 Arches, cold press, which I have decided is both my best friend and my enemy) and I've already ruined it once and restarted. So that's a grand total of maybe five hours of "work" and I have basically nothing to show for it and I'm trying really hard to be okay with that. Here's the thing nobody tells you when you go full time. I thought going pro meant I'd suddenly be able to sit down and produce for eight hours straight like a functioning adult. Instead I sit down, do forty minutes of real painting, then get up and reorganize my brushes and make tea and stare at the same corner of the paper for twenty minutes because I'm scared to put the next stroke down. The actual painting is maybe three hours of a seven hour day if I'm honest. The rest is dread and tea. But the dread is kind of where the painting happens?? Like, this morning I caught myself looking at the window light on the sill, that flat 11am grey we get here, and I stopped mid-panic because oh. That's the color. That's the grey I've been mixing wrong for two weeks. And I only noticed it because I'd been sitting there avoiding the paper for half an hour. So maybe the eight hours IS happening, it's just not the eight hours I thought it would be. My old painting teacher used to say the looking is the work and I always rolled my eyes at that and now I'm paying for it haha Anyway the wash is drying and I'm going to walk to get coffee and then probably ruin it again. Would love to know if anyone else here is secretly working a three hour day and pretending it's eight, because the guilt is real 😭

Small experiment the last three weeks. Along with the finished piece, I post a shot of the blank sheet, taped to my board, pencil grid barely visible, chai cup in the corner. No caption, no before/after, just the empty paper. Engagement is roughly double the finished paintings. Same people who scroll past a finished sketch of a Malleswaram house will stop and stare at a damp sheet of Arches. I have no idea what to do with this. On one hand it's lovely, people are curious about process. On the other, I spent eleven years learning to see and people want to look at the tape. My sister said it's because everyone can imagine themselves starting something, and nobody can imagine themselves finishing it. That stung a bit because I think she's right. So now I'm sitting here wondering whether I keep doing it, because it works, or stop, because it feels like I'm selling the idea of painting rather than the painting. Anyone else had a thing that performs well but sits oddly with them?

Not exaggerating. It's 11:40 and I've been standing at the sink with my size 8 round doing the little swirl in the palm of my hand, and I know it's clean, I know it, and I keep going. I think it's because starting is the part I'm scared of today. I have a sheet taped down (Arches, cold press, the good one, which is exactly the problem) and the sketch is done and I just have to commit to the first wash and I can't. My teacher in school used to say you can always tell a nervous painter by how clean their brushes are. Which, rude. But also. Fair. Anyway the actual reason I'm posting this at 11:40 instead of painting: I put on a playlist I made in like 2019 and it's working, sort of. Half a song in and I've got my hand hovering. So maybe the trick isn't the brush, it's tricking myself into being 22 again and not caring. If you're also currently not painting right now, hi. What's the thing you're avoiding today. Mine is a window with too much morning light in it and I keep pretending I don't know it's going to be hard.

Was at the market in Galway on Saturday, the one by the Spanish Arch, and a woman bought one of the hares off me for 60 euro. Handy, she was delighted, I was delighted, she went off with it under her arm. Then I got home, kids in bed, and I did the sums on that particular block because I'd been putting it off. Lino board, ink, the good paper, that's about 11 euro a print when I'm doing a run. Fine. But that block itself, from the first sketch to the last proof, was the guts of two weeks of evenings. Not two weeks of solid days, I'm not pretending that, but two weeks of the hours I actually have after the small lad is down and the older one has stopped asking me questions about dinosaurs. So call it 25 hours. 60 minus 11 is 49. 49 into 25 hours is just under two euro an hour, and that's before I count the fact that I carved the thing four times over because the first three were wrong. The mad part is I'd sell it again tomorrow at 60 because it's the market and people have a tenner in their hand and there's a ceiling on what a stranger will part with at a stall. What I'm realising is the 60 isn't the problem. The problem is I'm putting the two-week blocks on the market table at all, and keeping the ones I actually need to charge properly for on the shelf in the studio where only people who've already decided they want one will ever see them.

OK so. There was a tiny group show at this coffee shop/gallery hybrid in the neighborhood, like 9 of us, mostly because a friend runs the place and had a cancellation. I almost didn't hang anything because the deadline was three days out and I was mid-way through a commission and honestly I felt like the work wasn't ready. I hung two pieces. One was the window one, the corner with the bad afternoon light that I've painted probably eleven times now, this time at like 4pm when it goes that gross-yellow before it turns gold. 11x14, Arches cold press, mostly burnt sienna and a little quin gold. A woman came back to it three times during the opening. Third time she asked if it was for sale. I said yes and quoted her a number and immediately regretted the number and then she just said ok. She paid with venmo, in the middle of the show, holding a plastic cup of the bad pinot. I went out to the parking garage after and sat in my car and sobbed for a solid four minutes. Not like a graceful tear situation. Full face crying. I think because eight months ago I was wiping down a milk steamer at 6am wondering if this was a huge mistake, and today somebody handed me actual money for a specific Tuesday afternoon in my apartment. That's all it is. It's just a Tuesday I had. Anyway I'm not posting this to be like look at me, I'm posting it because I've seen a bunch of you post wins in here that are the "scary email" kind and the "it didn't break" kind and I think I needed to see that before I could let this count as one. So. It counts.

I keep my brushes in the freezer. The wide hake ones, the ones I use to lay the sensitiser. Not for any reason I can defend. It started one August when the studio was thirty-four degrees and the coating was drying before it reached the paper, and someone told me cold brushes hold the emulsion longer. So I put them in the freezer overnight and the next morning the coating went down like water on glass. Now it is February and they are still in there, between the frozen peas and a bag of coffee I forgot about. My partner opened it last night looking for ice and just looked at me. I said nothing. There is nothing to say. The brushes live in the freezer now. Today I coated six sheets of Arches, hung them to dry in the dark, and the light through the window was the flat grey that means rain by four. I used to fight days like this. Now I just coat fewer sheets and let the sky decide. The brushes will be cold when I take them out and that is the whole of my method.

I kept a careful record this week because I suspected something was off. Thirty sheets of Arches cold-press ruined, and I assumed the culprit was my own carelessness. Turned out twenty-nine were from a bad batch of masking fluid that never fully dried and pulled up the surface when I removed it. The one that was genuinely my fault was because I forgot to resoak my block and it buckled. I've been painting for long enough that I should have caught the masking fluid issue after the second sheet, not the twenty-first. That is the part that sits poorly with me. I checked the bottle, the shelf life, the temperature. All fine. It simply failed silently, and I trusted it. I've started wetting a test scrap before every session now. It costs me two minutes and saves me a great deal of self-recrimination. If you use masking fluid, I would recommend the habit. The supplier refunded the batch, but they do not refund the hours.

Went to restock on Arches paper today, expensive enough that I have to talk myself into it every time, and the guy ringing me up sees the blocks and goes "oh wow, you're brave, I could never do watercolor, too stressful, I don't have the patience." And I just stood there with my debit card out like 🙂 ok. Because what do you even say to that? It's not the first time I've heard it and it's always framed like I'm doing something weird and self-punishing instead of just... painting. Like it's some extreme sport. I don't go to the oil painting aisle and tell people they're brave for waiting three days for paint to dry. I know he meant it kindly. I know. But I'm so tired of watercolor being treated like the masochist's hobby when it's literally just the medium I fell in love with. Nobody tells a guitarist they're brave for playing acoustic. Anyway I bought the paper and went home and painted the same window I've painted forty times and it still came out wrong so maybe he had a point honestly

I've been using the same Schmincke Cadmium Yellow for nearly a decade. It's always been one of my most reliable, predictable colors, smooth, even washes, no surprises. And this week, painting a Ranunculus specimen, it started granulating. Settling into the paper texture in a way it simply never has. It's not the paper, same batch of Arches cold-pressed I've been working through for months. It's not the water, I haven't changed my setup. It's the paint. I'm trying to decide whether I got a bad tube, whether Schmincke quietly changed something in the formulation, or whether I'm finally losing my grip on a color I thought I understood completely. If anyone else has noticed a shift in their Schmincke yellows recently, I'd like to know. Because I feel like I've suddenly lost trust in an old friend and I'm not sure whether to replace the tube or just adjust my expectations.

I spent this morning wrestling with a blank sheet of Arches 300lb cold press. It’s for a series of Helleborus orientalis studies, and honestly, the paper itself feels like an accusation. It’s so… expectant. You can’t just splash about; every mark has to be considered, deliberate. I find myself sketching out the composition in pencil at least three times before I even think about touching a brush. It’s a discipline, of course, and one I value, but some mornings it feels less like a discipline and more like a quiet form of self-sabotage.