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For two years I filmed from the clean corner. One square meter of clean bench, nice light from the window, everything else out of frame. Neat little reels of a finished vessel turning on a banding wheel. Perfectly fine, perfectly invisible, about 400 views each and then nothing. In February I broke my phone tripod, so I propped the phone on a bucket of dry clay scraps and just filmed where I work, which is a disaster. Dust, a coffee cup from three days before, my grandmother's old knife I use for everything, half a head that failed in the glaze looking at the camera like it's disappointed in me. That video did 60k. Not a tutorial, not a before/after. Just me wedging clay and swearing in Valencian at a piece that kept cracking. Since then I film the mess and I stop deleting the boring parts. Saves went from maybe 20 a post to 60, 70. But here's the part that annoys me: comments went down. People save the messy ones and don't say anything. So I have no idea if it's working, I just know my DMs are fuller and my shop had 14 orders in March vs 4 in the whole autumn. I think what changed is there's no performance in it. Like people can smell the tidy version. But I also can't shake the feeling I just got lucky with the algorithm on one dumb video and now I'm chasing it by deliberately leaving my studio dirty, which is a very strange thing to be strategic about. Anyway if you film your work, do you clean first? I genuinely don't know anymore.

ok so I have this porcelain palette, the big rectangle one, and I got it when I went full time in March as a "you're a real artist now" gift to myself. told myself I'd clean it every single session. it is now December-ish and there is a layer of dried paint in there that has its own topography. like I can see the ghost of every painting I've made this year in the mixing wells. there's a specific grey-brown in the corner from that commission that went badly, I know exactly which one. and here's the thing, I KNOW you're supposed to work clean, my old professor would have a stroke, but I've started dipping into the old dried stuff with a wet brush and getting these colors I could never mix on purpose. like accidental neutrals. this dusty mauve that only exists because I was lazy in October. I've used it in three paintings since. my partner keeps offering to scrub it for me as a nice gesture and I keep saying no and I can't fully explain why without sounding insane. anyway I just spent 40 minutes mixing a green for a leaf and got it in two tries off the mud so. posting this instead of admitting anything to my professor. does anyone else hoard their palette like this or am I the only gremlin here

I have this old hog-bristle flat, maybe a number 12, that I've had since my student days. The ferrule is cracked. The handle is worn down to the bare wood at the grip. And I never fully clean it. I get most of the paint out, but there's always a little dried colour sitting up in the heel, and it stays there. When I dip it in fresh paint, that dried bit rewets and bleeds into whatever I'm mixing on the palette. A ghost of something from two years ago, or ten years ago. I know it's bad practice. I know it changes the colour in ways I can't control. But I've started to think of it as a kind of memory in the brush. Something I didn't intend that still shows up. And sometimes that little impurity is exactly what the surface needed. I have other brushes I treat like surgical instruments. Clean them the moment I stop. But this one I just let be. It has its own life now.

i have this flat tupperware thing i use as a stay-wet palette and it has not been fully cleaned since... february. maybe january. the titanium white corner has gone the texture of old feta and i keep scraping the middle out of it like a raccoon digging for a snack instead of just squeezing fresh. the thing is the dried stuff is actually useful. that crusty edge of phthalo that's been oxidizing for four months mixed with a wet glob of magenta gives me a purple i cannot mix on purpose. i've tried. i get mud, i get a bruise, i get nothing. the crust gets it right every time. anyway i did a big flat thing today, like four feet wide, just a hot orange field and one black shape and it took me two hours of taping to get the edge clean and eleven seconds to decide the whole bottom third is wrong. no notes on that, just saying it out loud. anyone else hoarding dried paint like it's a sourdough starter or is that just me being unwell

the glass palette i've used for like six years has this permanent stain in the corner that no amount of scraper will ever get out. it's just... there. i've stopped trying. sometimes i mix paint on top of it and forget and then i'm mad when a bit of god knows what shows up in a painting. anyway i finally cleaned it today because i ran out of clean surface and i'm choosing to believe the ritual of it is medicinal rather than obsessive. the scrape scrape scrape sound is fine actually. i think it's the closest thing to meditation i do.

People think the cleaning is over when the water runs clear. For me that is the first cleaning, the one you do because you have to, and it takes four minutes. The second one is the next morning, before I touch anything else, sitting on the stool with a jar of Marseille soap and shaping each brush back into its point with my fingers. It is not really about the brushes. It is the only part of the day where I am not trying to make something. Twenty minutes of small repetitive motion, olive oil soap, the smell of it, and by the end my hands have stopped being nervous about the painting. If I skip it and go straight to the easel, I paint badly. Not always, but enough that I stopped testing it. A filbert with a bent ferrule is a dead thing, by the way. I say that with love to the people who keep them for sentiment. Throw it out. Now it is nearly midnight and I have nine brushes in the jar waiting for tomorrow, which is a good number. Ten means I was doing something with too many colours and should think about why.

just admitted to someone that i've never actually cleaned a palette knife, i just scrape the dried paint off with another palette knife and then eventually buy a new one. they looked at me like i'd confessed to a crime. i know it's not efficient. i know the dried bits contaminate color. i don't care. there's something weirdly satisfying about the scrape sound and i've gotten to a point with some colors where i can tell exactly which layer of dried paint i'm digging into by the pitch of it. that's not a skill i asked for but here we are. also my "clean" palette is just a bigger pile of dry paint I chip off with my fingernail. i'm 33 and i paint like a feral beast and i am fine with that.

OK so this is going to sound gross but hear me out. There's a mug on my desk that has held the same rinse water for like three weeks now. Not for cleaning brushes, that's a different jar. This one I just dip into when I need to knock a wash back a half step. It's this specific grey-brown that I cannot mix on purpose. I've tried. Burnt umber plus a little payne's grey plus way too much water and it's always too clean, too deliberate. The mug water has something in it. Years of something. My partner came in yesterday, looked at it, and asked if I was aware it has a film on top. I said yes. They said "that's a living thing" and left. Fair honestly lol. The thing that gets me is I spent four years being taught to keep a clean palette, clean water, discipline, all of it, and the single most reliable color in my whole studio right now is basically mud in a mug from Target. I feel like if my old professor saw it he'd take my degree back. But also I'm not dumping it. Not until this series is done. Anyway it's 11pm and I'm on my fourth pass of the window, the light after 4pm in November is a completely different problem than the light in October and I keep chasing it two weeks too late. I have like six versions taped to the wall and none of them are it. But the mug water is doing its job. what's the grossest thing in your studio that you'd defend with your life

Right, so I'm two weeks into a block of a heron standing in the shallows, all that hatchwork around the water done, maybe three hours from being ready to proof, and the lino tears. Clean down the middle, right through the bird's chest. Not a crack or a chip. A catastrophic divorce. I stood there holding the two halves for a good minute. Then I laughed, because what else are you going to do. The dog looked up at me to see if I was alright and decided I wasn't worth the effort, went back to sleep. Two weeks. And the stuff I was using was perfectly good lino too, not cheap grey stuff, it just decided it was done with me. The funny thing is, I kept both halves. I'm fairly sure there's a way to mount them and pull them as two pieces, but honestly I might just frame the block itself the way it broke, it's sort of brutal and lovely. Or use the heron's head half for a smaller print. Give it a chance to redeem itself. Anyway. If anyone's got a method for rescuing a torn block, I'm all ears, but I'll warn you I've already talked myself into it being art. The missus says I'm a hoarder with a printing press. She's not wrong.

There's a proper black magic to the first pull of an edition. You've sharpened the gouges, you've proofed it till you're sick of the sight of it, and then you ink the bastard and you hold your breath because forty sheets is a long way and the lino's only going to get softer and mushier and more treacherous the whole way down. Anyway. Forty prints off the whale mooring block today, every last one clean. Not a dry spot, not a slip, not a bit of the fine line work packing up. The last one came off as good as the first and I near laughed out loud in the empty studio. The dog looked at me like I'd lost the run of myself entirely. There's a lot of the job you can't control, sure. Paper that decides to cockle on you, ink that goes off, a Tuesday. But that one hour, that run of forty, that was mine. Nobody else's. Felt like the whole craft thing was worth a damn today.

Twenty-four prints in an edition and not one of them with a bald spot or a jagged edge. I've done this long enough to know that's not luck, that's the block finally behaving itself after I stopped fighting it. Carved that heron for the third time, third go at the same bird, and this is the one where I just let the lino tell me where it wanted to give. Sounds feckin' mystical writing it out but that's genuinely what it is. First forty prints all had this one spot on the wing where the ink was shy. Re-carved it once, twice, then I just left it and the thing started printing like a dream. Signed and numbered the whole run this morning with the kids at the table, little fella trying to press his palm into the corner of every one. Had to tell him no about forty times and he still got one. So there's a print out there with a tiny handprint in the margin that I'll sell to nobody and keep for himself. Grand. Anyway. Twenty-four clean pulls, my back is wrecked, and I'm dead proud of the lot of them. The bird finally earned his keep.

I let them go for about three weeks. Three weeks of painting, rinsing, pretending that was enough. Then today I sat down with the turpentine and the soap and actually did it right, brush by brush, and I kept finding pigment that had been living in the ferrule since before Christmas. The whole afternoon gone. It's the most productive hour I'll spend this week and it produced nothing at all. I don't know why I resist it. I know exactly what it costs me. A dirty brush is a different tool, the color comes out muddy, you fight it and blame yourself. And still every single time I convince myself that one more rinse is fine. The good part: the big flat I use for glazing came up clean and it's like getting a new brush. I'm almost tempted to leave them all perfect and not paint tomorrow. Almost.

there was a proper layer of crystallised sea salt built up on the corner where i leave prints to dry after the seawater bath. i don't rinse them, the salt is part of the process, it catches different tones. but the table had gotten bad. crusty. white deposits on everything. so i scrubbed it down this morning and now the wood looks too clean. like a stranger's workspace. i keep glancing over at that corner expecting to see the tide mark and there's nothing. i think i need to go get it messy again on purpose. maybe that's the whole thing, you spend years building a rhythm of mess and then one day you tidy it and realise the mess was the point.

Third wash this morning and the mug just gets thicker. Rust-colored ring around the inside, old pigment that never fully came off, a hairline crack in the handle I keep meaning to fix and never do. Every other mug in the house is fine. I keep reaching for the broken one. I don't know when it turned into a rule. Maybe when I realized I'd rather lose an hour coaxing a brush clean than buy a new one. Same with the palette I never scrub down fully, just layer over. There's something under there I don't want to dig up. Today I'm wrecking a piece that's been too tidy for three weeks. Ripping it up, gluing it down wrong on purpose. Feels better already. Anyone else got a broken thing they won't replace? Not a sentimental object, an actual tool. One you could swap for ten bucks and won't.

Okay so I have this one ceramic mixing tray, no divisions, just a flat white rectangle, and I have not fully cleaned it since maybe March. It's got this crusted ring of dried gouache around the edges, layers of it, and somewhere under all that there's a stain of a green I mixed once in April that I have never been able to hit again. Cerulean + a touch of burnt sienna + something I've forgotten. It's just a ghost of a green now, sitting there mocking me. And here's the thing, my old teacher would lose her mind. We were taught to scrape down to bare white after every session, palette knife, damp sponge, the whole ritual. And I did it for years, like clockwork, felt virtuous about it. Then I went full time and something in me just stopped. Now I mix into the dirty areas on purpose because the residue does something, it warms everything a quarter step, keeps me from hitting that chalky dead zone you get when you start fresh every time. Is that insane? I honestly can't tell if it's a genuine technique or if I've just gotten lazy and invented a philosophy to cover it. The window I keep painting (the one with the fire escape) is on like attempt nine and the last three have all been ruined by the paper going grey and I think it's the rinse water, not the paper, I was so sure it was the paper. I bought a whole new block for nothing. Anyway. Does anyone else keep a gross palette on purpose or am I the only one lying to myself here

Not as a joke. There is a filbert, a size 8, rosemary and hog, that I have used on almost everything since 2021. The ferrule is dented from a fall on the studio floor and the handle is worn pale where my thumb sits. It has never been washed with soap. I wipe it on the rag, work it into a little linseed on the palette, shape it, and it goes back in the jar. People in my classes ask how often I clean my brushes and I know the answer they want. The answer is: this one has not touched water in four years, and it still holds a point better than anything I bought last spring. The hairs have gone soft and slightly hooked at the end and that hook is exactly what I need for the edge of a jaw. I am not recommending this. I lost a good sable to neglect once and I am still annoyed about it. But there is something in a tool that has been through enough of your own work that it stops being a tool and becomes part of your hand. I bought a replacement last year, same brand, same size, and I cannot make myself break it in. It sits in the jar like a new pair of shoes. Anyway. The painting it is on right now is a woman at a window, morning light from the left, and I have been fighting one passage on her forearm for six days.

I've been working on a study of Fritillaria meleagris, the snake's head fritillary, and I keep running into the same problem with one particular passage. The grid pattern on the tepals requires a very controlled lift to get those pale chequered marks out of a darker wash, and my usual standby burnt sienna from Winsor & Newton is staining the paper in a way I can't work around. It's a lovely pigment for many things but it simply will not lift cleanly once it's dried for more than about thirty seconds. I've tried different papers, different dilution levels, even switching to a synthetic sienna from another brand, and the behaviour is the same. I know there are artists who pre-wet the area and work into a damp surface to avoid the problem, but that sacrifices the crispness of the edge I need. I wonder if some of you have found a particular brand or formulation of burnt sienna that lifts more cooperatively, or if you simply avoid it for this kind of work and use something else entirely. I am not ready to give up the colour, it is exactly the right earthy rust for this species, but I might have to adjust my method.

i realized today that my "studio organization system" is just. piles. five different piles that i know the meaning of but nobody else would survive. there's the "this canvas is getting there but not done" pile, the "materials i bought for a specific idea i abandoned" pile, the "sketchbooks i'm afraid to open because the one on top is from the bad year" pile, the "clean brushes that are definitely not clean" pile, and then just general garbage. it works until it doesn't. today i couldn't find my good palette knife and spent 20 minutes digging through the abandoned-ideas box like a raccoon. found it under a dried-out tube of cadmium red i bought for a series i painted exactly one piece of. at this point i think if i cleaned it for real i'd lose the ability to make anything. the entropy is part of the process. or that's what i tell myself lol

Got a piece of basalt I've been working for weeks. Nice stone, dense, good color. Had the form mostly there. One more pass with the point chisel to clean up the belly and a crack ran clean through it. Not a clean break either. The kind that leaves a fault line you can't grind out because you'd lose half the piece. Thing is I saw the vein three days ago and told myself it would hold. Knew better. Just didn't want to start over on a new block. Nothing to do with the stone. That's on me. You push when you should stop and set up. Twenty-five year old me would have caught it. Sixty-one year old me got impatient.

I keep my palette clean maybe the first hour of a painting. After that it's just layers of dried paint I mix into, scrape off, add more on top. Someone told me last week I should clean it between sessions and I looked at them like they'd suggested I set my hair on fire. I know painters who treat their palette like an altar. Wipe it down, lay fresh piles, everything in its place. I've tried. I last about twenty minutes before I start working wet into wet and the whole thing turns into a crusty ruin again. There's something about the chaos that helps me find colour faster, I think. I don't have to decide, I just pull from whatever's there and adjust. Today I've got a smear of burnt sienna that's been there since Tuesday, a pool of medium I accidentally spilled, and what might be ultramarine or might be cobalt, I can't tell anymore because it's mixed with the grey from yesterday's shadows. It's fine. The painting is coming along. Maybe I'll scrape it clean when this one's done. Maybe not.