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i know there's a "right" way to wedge. i've watched the videos. but my body just wants to do this violent ram's head slam every time and i swear the clay remembers the aggression. my left wrist has started clicking in a way that's definitely not normal. tried soft wedging yesterday like a normal person and the clay felt dead. like i'd been polite to it and it didn't trust me. had to go back and really put my weight into it before it started feeling alive again. my teacher from the course would be so disappointed. but also she had perfect wrists at 55 so maybe she was onto something. idk. anyone else have a bad habit you KNOW you should fix but it works so you don't?

Started painting again this morning after three days of not touching anything, work stuff piled up, you know how it goes. And I sat down with my palette and realised I was reaching for the same brush I always reach for first. This old Winsor & Newton series 7, size 6 round. The ferrule is slightly loose now, I should probably fix it, but I just can't use anything else for the first wash. I've bought fancier ones. Tried a silver brush black velvet that everyone raves about. It's good, it's fine. But this one has been through every bad painting and every good one. It holds water just right even if it's a little beat up. It's not even my most expensive brush. It's just mine. My husband says I'm superstitious. Maybe. But there's something about having a tool that's broken in with your own bad habits. You know exactly how it's going to behave, even when it misbehaves. Does anyone else have that one thing, brush, pen, pencil, whatever, that you keep going back to even though you have nicer ones? Or am I just being sentimental over a loose ferrule 😅

ok this is going to sound ridiculous but i'm sitting here cleaning my brushes after finishing a piece and i got genuinely emotional over my old escoda. i've had this one brush since my second year of undergrad, it's a size 10 travel brush, the handle is all chewed up because i was a nervous student who bit her brushes (gross i know but i was 19 and stressed), the ferrule is slightly loose, and i've rewarped the bristles like three times with my mouth after bad cleaning habits. but it still holds a point better than any new brush i own. i literally cannot paint without it. i dropped it once in 2018 and my heart stopped for a second. i know brushes are technically replaceable and there's this whole "don't get attached to tools" mentality in art but like. NO. i AM attached. this thing has been through every single painting i've ever been proud of. it was in my hand when i painted my dad's portrait the year he died. it came with me to every shitty shared studio i've ever had. it's survived three moves and a minor flood. my partner bought me a fancy new escoda for christmas and i keep it in the wrapper because i'm scared to use it. i don't want to replace my old one. it's not the same. anyone else have that one tool that's basically a part of them at this point

I carved a granite bench a few years back for a public garden. Had to source the stone from a quarry two states away, rented a flatbed to haul it, worked it on and off for two months because there were other jobs in between. Sold it for $1,200. That's maybe a dollar an hour if you count research, travel, the rental, the chisels I dulled, and the sanding pads. I knew it at the time and I still said yes. I told myself it was a "public installation" and that was worth something. But the garden closed three years later and I heard the bench got hauled away with the trash. I don't know what the right number was. Double maybe. But what I do know is I priced the materials and my time separately and left out everything else. The knowledge, the years of figuring out how to carve granite without splitting it, the fact that I knew which quarry to call. That all went for free. I still do it. Not as bad, but I still leave money on the table somewhere. Hard habit to break when you started out thinking you should be grateful anyone paid you at all.

i gesso'd over a piece three weeks ago because one corner was wrong and it was faster to just start fresh, and then yesterday i left a whole canvas with a muddled background because i was too tired to care and walked away. that one's actually going somewhere. there's no logic to it, the one i let slide is worse than the ones i killed. i think i've built the whole habit of "fixing" mistakes by erasing them and it's made me bad at sitting with an ugly pass. everything has to be clean by the end of the day or i feel like i failed. but the best stuff i've made the last year all had a rough couple of days in the middle where i genuinely hated it. anyway the muddled one is dry now and the corner is fine. i just had to not look at it for 48 hours. the work is so much better when i'm not standing over it breathing down its neck.

Someone in a crit last week said my collage work has "a consistent gesture" which I think was a polite way of saying every torn edge I make curls the same way. I checked three old pieces this morning. Yeah. Every single one, the paper rolls toward the same side. I tear with my right hand, pull down and left, every time, for years. It's like finding out you have a signature you never signed. Not sure if this is a thing to fix or just lean into. It's not a bad look honestly, the curl catches light. But now that I've seen it I can't stop seeing it, and knowing it's muscle memory kind of grosses me out. Anyone else ever find a habit this dumb baked into years of work?

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.

I have this habit where every new piece I want to talk myself out of the idea first. I pick it apart, find where it's weak, and if it survives me it's worth pulling a proof. It keeps me honest but it also means I spend half the working day arguing with my own thought. Today I did the opposite. I woke up, had an image in my head before coffee, and I just scratched it into a plate. No framework. No question behind it. It was almost embarrassing, like showing up somewhere underdressed. And you know what the proof looks like? Dead. It looks exactly like something I didn't think about. Which is its own kind of lesson, I suppose, but not the one I wanted to learn. I'm trying to figure out if there's a middle ground between overthinking every mark and just making it badly. Because right now the two speeds are: seminar, or garbage. There's a space in between where you trust the hand but the head is still in the room. I don't know how to get there. Maybe it's just volume. Maybe I have to make fifty bad ones. Anyway, the plate is still on the table. I haven't decided if I'm going to print it or scrub it. Part of me wants to keep it exactly as it is, as evidence.

i have a drawer in my studio, just a cheap ikea thing, that's full of plates that didn't work. bitten too deep, not deep enough, a drypoint that caught something i didn't mean but also didn't hate enough to keep. i can't throw them out. they're not good, most of them, but they're the only record i have of the thinking that didn't land. i was talking to a painter friend in berlin last week and she said she scrapes everything over, her whole practice is covering. that's the opposite of what i do. i keep the evidence. maybe it's the printmaker in me, this need for the object to survive even when it fails. or maybe i'm just sentimental about my own bad decisions. anyway i pulled one out today from three years ago. a copper plate with a portrait of a woman who doesn't exist. the face is completely fine but the hand is this grotesque claw because i misjudged the acid. i remember being so furious. now i kind of like the claw. it's the most alive part of the image. i don't know if this is a confession or a habit worth defending. but i wonder, what do you keep that you probably shouldn't?