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ok so this happened tuesday and I'm still weirdly annoyed about it. There's this watercolorist I've followed since like 2019, I have her book, I've basically studied her washes. She reposted one of my gouache pieces to her story. I sat there refreshing like a maniac. 40 new followers in two days, which is more than I usually get in a month, and I was SO sure this was it, this was the breakthrough, I'd finally have to figure out how to do a mailing list properly. Two people emailed me. One of them asked if I could paint a portrait of their dog for $60 because "it's just a small one." The other was a company asking if I'd do a free piece in exchange for exposure. Meanwhile the thing that's actually kept me fed since I quit the café is a 3-person email list (ok slight exaggeration, it's 91 people) where I send a photo of whatever's on the easel and a paragraph about how it's going, and I sell something almost every time. It's ugly and unglamorous and I keep trying to make it prettier than it needs to be. I think I've been chasing the wrong number this whole time and I don't totally know how to stop. Followers feel like a scoreboard. They're not. Anyway if you have a mailing list, what actually goes in it? Because mine is basically a group text at this point and I'm not sure if that's the secret or if I'm just getting lucky with 91 very patient people.

I have been trying to paint a good English oak acorn since 2012 and I finally finished one that doesn't embarrass me. The trouble has never been the acorn itself. It is the cupule, the scaly cap. Every botanical artist who attempts it for real discovers that each scale is a tiny overlapping structure with its own highlight, and if you render every one faithfully it becomes a texture map, not a drawing. If you simplify, you lose the species. Quercus robur has those small, flat, appressed scales and there is no forgiving shortcut to them. The breakthrough was embarrassingly simple. I stopped painting scales and started painting light across scales. One wash for the form, then a dry brush that followed the contour instead of the individual scale edges, and let the paper do the rest. Thirteen years on the same subject is a strange thing to be proud of, but there is something to be said for the version of patience that keeps returning to the same fruit because you know you have not quite met it yet. I matted it this afternoon and it is hanging in my studio where I have to look at it. It can withstand that now.

We've been trying to get more structured with our Instagram Reels. For ages, it felt like throwing spaghetti at the wall, you know? Lots of effort, not much to show for it. But this past week, we finally had a sequence of three Reels focusing on a step-by-step process for one of our smaller products just… take off. Like, double the engagement we usually get on any given post, and a noticeable bump in traffic to that product page too. It’s not a huge viral moment, but for us, it feels like a breakthrough after so much trial and error. Makes all the late evenings worth it, mostly! 🙂

I've been carving this one hare since February. Not a new hare, the same hare, the one I keep coming back to like a dog to a gate. Every time I pull a proof the eye is the thing that ruins it. Too round and it looks like a sheep. Too small and the whole head goes dead, like there's nothing home behind it. Anyway. Tuesday night, half eleven, kids in bed, Herself asleep, I'm in the shed with the radio on low and I take one more sliver off the corner of the pupil with a 1mm gouge. Barely anything. Could have been a bit of dust for all the size of it. Pulled the proof and stood there looking at it for a good minute. There he was. Looking back at me. Fourteen proofs to get a hare to look at you. I know that sounds like nothing. But it's the first time in about five months I've looked at my own work and not wanted to put it through the window. The rest of the block is still rough as a ditch, I'll be at it another fortnight, and I don't care. Anyone else had one of those where it's a stupid small thing that flips the whole piece? Not the big dramatic breakthrough, just a gouge stroke the width of a hair.