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I've kept a box under my bed for like six years. All the bad drawings. The ones where the shoulders are wrong and the hands are worse, the faces that look like strangers instead of the people I love, the whole embarrassing middle period where I was clearly copying other people and doing it badly. I told myself it was for reference, so I could see the progress. It was not for reference. It was so I could punish myself with it at 2am. Anyway my friend was over on Sunday and I don't know what got into me, I pulled the box out and made her look. Whole thing. And she went quiet for a second and I braced for the pity face and she said "these are so much braver than the finished ones." I've been carrying that around for three days. I think she's right and I hate it a little. I've spent so long trying to hide the years where I was bad at this, like they're proof I shouldn't be doing it at all. She saw the trying, not the failing. And now I'm half convinced the box isn't a punishment, it's a record of not quitting. Still not moving it out from under the bed though. One step at a time.

Dragged out the old portfolio tonight to find a reference photo and there it was, this charcoal piece from 2016. Before I knew anything. Before I'd burned through a hundred bad drawings. And here's the thing. It's good. Like, actually good. The hand is a little off and the proportions aren't right but god the FEELING in it. That rawness. I remember being so embarrassed by that piece I almost threw it away. I thought because it wasn't technically right it wasn't worth anything. Now I'm sitting here with the work I've made this month, cleaner, more confident, and I keep thinking, I want some of that back. That person didn't know what she was doing and she didn't care. She just needed to get it OUT. I don't know if you get more naive as you learn or what. But I'm going to try something tomorrow. I'm going to paint like I don't know anything. See what comes up. Scared it'll be shit. Scared it'll be the best thing I've made in years. Maybe both.

Just had the weirdest one. A collector found me through a gallery friend, saw my charcoal work on Instagram, wanted a large piece on commission. I quoted $1,400 half up front, half on delivery. We agreed. Six hours. That's all it took. Six hours of actual work and it's honestly one of the best things I've ever made. Every mark landed, nothing fought me, the whole thing just came out of me like I was taking dictation. And I sat there after they picked it up feeling like I'd robbed them. $1,400 for six hours. That's $233 an hour and my brain short-circuited on that number for two days. I've sold pieces that took me 40 hours for less than half that. The thing is I know the hours don't matter. The years of bad drawings matter. The self-teaching and the burnouts and the figuring it out alone matter. But I still couldn't shake it. I almost messaged them to say "hey that was actually fast, want me to add more?" Like I'd been caught cheating. My therapist asked what I'd have charged if it took 40 hours and I said the same, and she said "so which one is the fraud, then?" and it broke my brain a little. I don't know who priced the honest one. I just know I can't keep pricing by my own suffering and calling it integrity.

I have this thing with hands. Couldn't draw them for years, they always came out like claws or weird sausages and I'd just crop the paintings at the wrist and pretend it was a creative choice. Ten years of that. Today I was working on this big charcoal piece, two bodies reaching for each other, and I didn't even think about it. Just drew the hands and they were THERE. Like actual hands. I sat back and just stared at them for a while. The whole piece is still unfinished and honestly might be garbage by morning, I know how I get, but right now I'm just sitting with this one small thing that finally clicked. All those bad drawings nobody saw. They were going somewhere. No big point here. Just wanted to say it out loud somewhere people would get it.

two months ago i got in my head about "the algorithm" and paid someone $500 for a 90-minute zoom where she told me to: film myself painting (i hate this) use trending audio (i'm 33) post 3x a day (i will simply die) do a "bts" of my sketchbook (it's just bad drawings, that's the whole point) i tried it for a week and felt like i was performing having a personality instead of having one. my engagement went down. i wanted to quit painting. anyway i stopped following her advice and my last post did fine because i just took a picture of a painting i liked and wrote "new one, oil on canvas, 24x36" and that was it. 400 likes which isn't viral or whatever but it's real people who actually like paintings. i think i'd rather have 100 people who like my work than 10,000 who liked a video of me holding a paintbrush to trending audio while making a ~relatable~ face. the math might not math on that but my brain feels better.

I've been selling small etchings for €180 since 2021. Same size, same paper, same amount of work. Three years of the same number while my studio rent in Berlin went up twice and the price of copper plates nearly doubled. Last month I finally raised them to €240. Not a huge jump. Still probably too low for the time that goes in. But I did it. Then a former professor, someone whose opinion I actually respect, saw the new price list and said, in that careful tone, that the pricing was "ambitious." Asked if I was worried about "pricing myself out" of the market. The market being what, exactly? The market of people who think art should cost as much as a nice dinner? I didn't say what I wanted to say, which is that I know etchers in London charging £400 for a similar plate and nobody calls that ambitious. I just said I'd think about it. Now I'm sitting here wondering if I should have raised them more, or if I'm actually wrong. The math says €240 is still a bad hourly rate when you add up drawing time, plate prep, printing, editioning. But the voice of that professor is stuck in my head.

Kid working the register, maybe 19, real sweet, asked if I went to the art institute across town. I said nope, self taught. He goes "oh, so like YouTube?" and I laughed and said the internet and a lot of years of being bad at it. But I drove home kind of hot about it. Not at him. At me. Because here's the thing nobody tells you. There's no last day. No graduation where someone hands you a paper that says you know what you're doing. I've been making work for eleven years and I still open a face and think, I don't know how to do this, I've just done it a bunch of times and one of those times it was right. I have a stack of drawings from year two that would genuinely upset you. Bad proportions, dead eyes, everything floating. I kept them on purpose. When I'm convinced I've lost it I pull one out and go, ok but look at that jaw, you couldn't do that jaw back then. Anyway I'm in the middle of a big oil right now, a torso, and I've repainted the same shoulder four times. Four. It's finally starting to breathe. If you went the school route, I'm not coming for you. I'm jealous of the structure some days. But if you're self taught and you still feel like you're faking it, you're not. You're just the only one grading your own work and you're a harsh grader.

I'm so mad about this. Spent $18 on a new block of compressed charcoal from Blick and it just... crumbles. Like disintegrates. Leaves this weak gray dust that won't grab the tooth no matter how hard I press. I switched back to an old nub of Generals and suddenly my drawing has life again. I know rationally it's just a bad batch or whatever but I can't shake the feeling that the universe is personally messing with my studio time today. I had the whole afternoon blocked out, music on, ready to GO, and instead I spent 45 minutes fighting a stick of garbage while my reference photo just sat there judging me. What's the thing that derailed your whole day recently? Not looking for solutions just want to know I'm not alone in getting genuinely upset about stupid materials lol

I teach a watercolor workshop twice a year and I've noticed something I keep turning over. My students, most of them a decade or two younger, post every sketch, every failed wash, every reel of paint mixing. Their follower counts are triple mine. Meanwhile my studio sits on an Instagram account with about 1,100 followers, most of whom have been there since 2016 and probably don't even look at it anymore. The commissions still come, but they come through word of mouth, through the gallery, through someone who saw my work in a botanical garden exhibit two years ago. Not once through social media. I've tried the process videos. I've tried the timelapses. I find them slightly embarrassing to make, and the engagement was never more than a polite ripple. I'm not drawing a lesson from this. I say it because at forty-seven, I've stopped being able to tell whether I'm bad at social media or whether social media simply rewards a kind of performance I'm not interested in giving. My students deserve their audiences; they work for them. But I wonder how many of them will still be painting in twenty years, and whether the audience will still be there when the algorithm moves on to something else. I keep painting either way. The paper doesn't care about engagement.

Someone asked me to paint their grandmother's house in Malleswaram, the one being sold, about to be knocked down for yet another apartment block. They wanted it as a gift for the whole family. I was so touched by the reason I just said ₹3,000 without thinking. Then I actually did it. Reference photo was terrible, old phone pic, bad lighting, half the house hidden behind a tree. I had to go there twice to sketch it properly, spent a full Sunday morning sitting on the kerb drawing, then another two days painting at home. The house had this lovely old chettah-style window detail and I ended up redoing the whole thing because the first wash went muddy. So that's roughly 20 hours of work for ₹3,000. ₹150 an hour. Less than what I pay my domestic help. The family loved it, cried actually, and that's worth something. But I sat there thinking, why do we do this to ourselves? Because the story was good? Because saying a real number felt awkward? I wouldn't ask my plumber to work for ₹150 an hour. Still haven't figured out what I should have charged. ₹8,000? ₹12,000? I honestly don't know what a fair rate is for this kind of thing in Bangalore. What do you all charge for a detailed architectural watercolour, a full house, not just a loose sketch?

There's this face I keep coming back to. Not anyone I know, just a reference photo I found ages ago, some woman with sharp cheekbones and tired eyes. I've drawn her maybe twelve times now in pastel. Different angles, different lighting, different paper colours. Most of them are bad. But I can't stop. Yesterday I finished another one and just sat there thinking... why her? What is it about this particular face that won't let me go? Maybe I'm trying to nail something I can't articulate. Maybe it's just comfort, like rewatching the same film. Anyone else have that one subject they keep circling back to? Not in a series way, just obsessively.

I got a message from a friend on Tuesday morning, a photo actually. The old house on 4th Cross, the one with the red oxide floor and the wooden balcony with the turned railing posts. Gone. Just the compound wall and a pile of rubble and two men sitting on it having tea. I have eleven sketches of that house. Eleven. From different angles, different mornings, different light. And I still felt like I hadn't really looked at it. That's the thing that gets me. I could draw a building a hundred times and still not be sure I actually saw it, and then one day it's a pile and the sketches are all I have and some of them are wrong. The proportions off, the balcony too high, the shadow in the wrong place. When I was an architect I used to draw buildings so they could be built. Now I draw them so they can be remembered and honestly I'm not sure I'm any better at it. Different job, same feeling of missing something. Not looking for advice on this one. Just wanted to say it out loud somewhere. Tuesday was a bad day.

Went for my walk at seven as usual and the compound wall was already rubble. They'd been at it since about five, I think, because the dust was still hanging in the air and the man on the JCB was eating breakfast out of a steel tiffin box, sitting right there on the machine, perfectly calm. I've drawn that house three times over two years. Once from the road, once from inside the gate when the watchman let me in because I gave him chai, and once badly, in the rain, standing under someone's tree. All three are in a folder and now the folder is the only place the house exists. What I keep turning over is this. I have the drawings. I have the proportions, the railing detail, the way the light came through the jaali in the afternoon. And I still feel like I missed it. Like documenting a thing is not the same as holding on to it, and I've been telling myself for a while now that it is. My husband says at least I got there. He's not wrong. But knowing something is different from feeling it, na. Anyway, the JCB man offered me his chai. I didn't take it, I was already late for nothing in particular.

I quoted a collector €480 for a 60x80 interior. Sold it, framed it, delivered it. Then I kept notes like I used to and counted: 30 hours from drawing to the last glaze. Sixteen euros an hour, and that's before the pigments and the linen and the four months it sat drying in my studio. The part that sits badly is that nobody forced me. The client never balked, never haggled. I set the number, and I set it too low, and I knew it while I was writing the invoice. There's a fear in the hand that writes a price, a little flinch you can feel. It gets better with practice but it never fully leaves. What helps me when it's my own fault: I price exhibitions with a conversation first, not a number out of the air. "What's the wall, what's the size, what's it worth to you." Sometimes people name a figure higher than I would have dared. That's information. You just have to sit there and not correct them.

There's a house on Hutchins Road, the pale yellow one with the carved wooden brackets under the balcony, and the board went up last Tuesday. I'd been meaning to draw it for maybe three years. Kept saying next weekend. So I went on Wednesday morning with my book and a flask of chai, fully prepared to be shooed off. The watchman looked at me for a while, asked what I was doing, and then brought out a plastic stool. Two hours. Nobody else came. It was just me and the sound of someone inside taking the window frames out whole, because apparently the contractor's uncle wants them. I've posted maybe forty finished paintings this year. This one is a scrappy pencil study, half of it smudged because I was holding the flask in the other hand, and it's the only thing anyone has messaged me about. Four people asked which house it was. One woman sent a photo of her grandmother standing in front of the same gate in 1987. I don't fully know what to do with that. It's not exactly a marketing lesson, or if it is, it's one I don't like very much, because the thing that worked was the thing I wasn't trying to sell. But I'm going back on Saturday to draw the staircase before it goes, and this time I'll post the smudged page again. Anyway if anyone else has figured out how to make "I went and sat somewhere and drew it badly" into something that pays the electricity bill, do tell me.

I spent the whole month on one painting of my daughter reading in the armchair by the window, and the calf of that figure refused to be right. Not the whole leg, just the one muscle. I repainted it maybe six times. Each time it looked fine in the first hour and then it was wrong again the next morning. Thursday I finally stopped trying to fix the drawing and instead I looked at where the light actually fell on her calf at that hour, not where I thought it should fall. I had been painting a calf in general. She has a specific one. The whole painting snapped together after that. Not because I finally made the muscle work. Because I stopped working from memory and started working from her. It is so humbling to need forty hours to remember the one thing I tell my students on day one. Anyway. She saw it this morning and said, "Now I look like me." That was the whole month, right there.

Painted a still life tonight at the kitchen table after the kids went down. Same table we ate spaghetti at two hours earlier. I wiped it down, laid out the drop cloth, and there's still a smear of tomato sauce on the corner of my reference photo that I just decided to live with. I used to feel bad about not having a real studio space. Read all these posts about people's dedicated rooms with north light and proper easels and I'd get all wistful. But honestly the kitchen table works. The light is awful. The cat walks across my palette at least twice a session. My 8 year old stuck a drawing of a dinosaur to the easel I can't even use because there's no room for it. But it's the only uninterrupted hour I get and I'll take it. Finished a decent little pear study tonight, better than my last one. That's the whole win. Packed it up and now I'm eating leftover spaghetti over the sink like a civilized person. Who else is painting on a dining room table or a folding tray or wherever they can grab space?

Found a scan from 2014 today, first pastel portrait I ever attempted. Same subject, same reference photo I keep coming back to because I'm stubborn. Put mine from last week next to it. The old one is so bad. I remember being proud of it when I finished. I remember thinking this is it, this is what I can do. And ten years later I can see every single thing wrong with it and I still kept trying the same face over and over until it finally came close to what I saw in my head. I think the win is not the new one. The win is that I didn't stop in 2015 when I should have, or 2018, or honestly last January when I nearly quit pastel for good. Nobody told me to keep going, I had to decide it myself, weeks at a time. And it worked out in a way I couldn't see from inside the bad years. Anyway. Old me would be so confused that the face in the picture is the same and everything else is different. 🙃

So I sold a small head study last week. Toned grey paper, maybe A3, one of the ones I did in a single sitting because I was trying to loosen up. I had it priced at 450 euros and honestly I typed that number and then went and made tea so I would not have to look at it. The woman wrote back asking whether the price includes framing. And I said no, framing is separate, I can recommend the place on Gołębia. Then I sat there feeling like I had cheated her somehow. Because the paper cost maybe 6 euros and the pastels I used were already here, so in my head the material cost is almost nothing and I forget the eleven years of doing this badly before I could do it this way. But here is the part I cannot get past. A frame at that shop is 300 euros. So the frame now costs two thirds of the drawing it holds. I do not know what to do with that information. Do I raise the drawing so it looks like a proper thing next to a 300 euro frame, or do I start recommending the cheap framer and hope nobody notices the difference at the edges. I am not even sure this is a pricing question. Maybe it is a "what is a drawing worth when the thing around it is worth more" question. But it is keeping me up, and my partner says I should just be glad it sold, which I am. I am. Just also not.

For three years I was working on this cheap grey Canson pad, the one that buckles if you breathe on it. Then last week I finally went to the shop on Grodzka and bought a proper sheet, the sanded kind, 60x45, and it cost more than my monthly bus pass. Now it's been sitting on the easel for four days and I have done exactly nothing with it. I keep walking past and thinking, this is the one I should do properly. Which of course means I can't start, because if I ruin it that's a real loss and not just another bad night on cheap paper. I did the maths on the bus home. One sheet = 22 litres of milk. And I'm scared of a piece of paper. The stupid thing is I know the fix. You cut it in half. You ruin the first half on purpose. I have told other people to do exactly this. But mine is still whole and still blank and I am still calling it, in my head, "the good one." How do you all get past this? Or do you just buy more of the cheap stuff and stay comfortable?