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Okay so three years ago in school I was trying to mix a stormy gray and instead produced this absolutely foul brownish-green, like the color of hospital cafeteria food, and I was so mad I almost threw the palette across the room. But I kept a little swatch of it in my sketchbook because I don't know, I thought maybe it'd be funny someday. Today I fished it out and I'm honestly obsessed. It's genuinely hideous. It's not a color you'd ever choose. But I've been staring at it all afternoon and I think there's something in it, like it's the exact color of "almost wrong" and you can't buy that in a tube. I mixed it again from memory and I got it almost identical, which is honestly the most pointless skill I've ever developed, and I'm considering a whole little series of paintings built around it. My partner just looked at the swatch and said "that's the one you kept??" with such genuine confusion and I feel so vindicated. Anyone else got a color they should have thrown out but couldn't? Or am I just weird about my own failures haha

spent an hour trying to rematch a green i mixed six weeks ago for the left half of a canvas and it's just not happening. same tube, same brand, same ratio, and it's off by a hair that i can't unsee. i've got the old swatch taped to the easel like a missing person poster. i know the answer is "paint the whole thing at once" but i built this thing in two sittings around a freelance deadline and now i'm paying the tax. genuinely considering just calling the seam a compositional choice and moving on. it's not a compositional choice. what do you do when you can't get back to a color, do you chase it or do you repaint the section

started limiting myself to four colors this month as an exercise. titanium white, cad red medium, ultramarine, yellow ochre. that's it. the idea being i actually learn to mix instead of buying my way out of every problem (see: the $11 green incident, still not over it). made it nine days. day eight i caught myself reaching for a tube of phthalo, and not even to mix it, just to look at it. like holding a cigarette you're not gonna smoke. anyway the four color thing is working, which is annoying because now i have to admit the limitation is doing something. whole paintings are getting quieter without me deciding to make them quieter. i don't love that. i like loud. flat loud color is literally my whole thing. the phthalo's still on the shelf. not gonna say it's gonna stay there

there's this canvas i started like eight months ago that went nowhere. composition was trash, colors were muddy, i hated it. but instead of gessoing over it i started using a corner of it to test brush loads and color mixes before they hit the actual canvas. like a palette that hangs on the wall. fast forward to now and it's completely covered in random swatches and drips and accidental blends that look better than anything i've done on purpose. it's this chaotic artifact of every painting i've made since february. i keep catching myself staring at it instead of the thing i'm supposed to be working on. half tempted to sign it and call it a day.

i mix a lot of color at once, like way more than a single painting needs, because rematching a color two days later is the worst part of this whole job. nothing kills a session faster than trying to rebuild a specific orange from memory at 11pm. so now there's a shelf. twelve jars. and from a normal distance they are all the same orange. up close, four of them are actually that orange, three are muddy because i got impatient and added black too early (again), and the rest are... cousins. i labeled them with masking tape and my handwriting has fully deteriorated, so half the labels just say "warm?" and one says "NO". the annoying part is i use all of them. i'll reach for the muddy one on purpose sometimes because it reads flatter and i like that. so i can't even throw them out and call it growth. anyway i'm buying more jars. not a question, just logging it.

I have been buying my painting paper from the same small place in Bhagalpur since I was a young man. My mother also used to get from them only. This paper is hand-made, khadi, you can feel the fibers with your fingers, the way it takes the natural color is different from anything machine made. For Mithila work this matters very much because the line work is everything, the paper must hold a fine line without bleeding, but also it must have some tooth, some roughness for the color to sit on. Last month I ordered my usual stack. And it came, and I thought maybe I received a bad batch. But I used it for three pieces now and it is not the same. The surface is smoother. Too smooth. The water-based colors are sliding instead of settling. The line is fine but the paper does not grip the pigment like before. I called the shop and the man told me their master craftsman retired and the new man is trying to "improve" the process. He said this like it is good news. I am sitting here with a half-finished fish motif on this new paper and the tail is not right. The color is not sitting where I put it. It is not the paper's fault maybe, it is my hand not trusting the surface. But how many years to learn a new paper when you already know one for twenty years. I do not want to start again. I want the old paper back. Has anyone else faced this with a material that changed without warning? Not a brand reformulation but the actual hands that made it, the knowledge that left. How do you decide whether to adapt or to find a new source altogether.

okay so I emailed a gallery a few months back with a little portfolio, and they actually got back to me (!) and wanted to meet. I was so excited. Then the owner spent the whole meeting talking about "the market" and what "sells in this area" and finally asked if I could, quote, "brighten up my palette a little" because watercolor in muted tones reads "sad" apparently. I didn't walk. I should've walked. I did a whole sample piece in bright happy colors and she never even replied after that. 😭 honestly kind of glad but also what a waste of a weekend. so what's the red flag you saw on the way in and ignored anyway? or the one that made you turn around immediately? I feel like we all have at least one of these.

I swept my studio today for the first time in maybe two months and immediately regretted it. There was this gray-brown dust drift under the easel, charcoal and linseed oil and whatever dried out of the turps jar, and it had gone this deep purple-brown that I stood there staring at for a full minute. I literally crouched down with a palette knife like an idiot trying to match it. Couldn't. It's got something in it from every piece I've made since spring, and I can't get it back. Ended up not sweeping the rest. Just that one patch, and then I left it. Somebody told me once you can tell how long an artist's been in a space by the floor and I think that's the truest thing anyone's said to me about this whole thing. Not the work on the walls. The floor. Anyway I'm on my fourth hour on this big one, a woman with her hands over her face, and it's either the best thing I've made or I'm going to paint over it at 2am like always. No in between. There's a smudge of the floor color on the corner of it now and I might leave it there on purpose.

I brought in a small oil study yesterday, just a lemon on a blue cloth, to get it framed for a show. The woman behind the counter looked at it and said, very helpfully, "You know you could just take a photo and have the colors matched digitally, it's much more accurate than the human eye." "More accurate." To a painting. Of a lemon. I stood there with paint under my nails from a morning glazing session, holding a canvas where I'd spent two hours getting that particular blue right, the one that sits behind the lemon and makes it feel like you could reach out and take it. And she's telling me a printer would do it better. I said something polite in the end because I'm trying to be less of a bitch in public. But I wanted to say: the whole point is that it's my eye. My eye that spent twenty years learning to see. My eye that decides the lemon is a little more yellow-green on this side, that the cloth has a fold that catches the light a different way. That's not an error to be corrected. That's the entire painting. Anyway the frame is fine. But I'm still annoyed.

opened a delivery today and genuinely could not remember ordering it. just stared at this tube of pyrrole orange like it was a stranger in my house. which it is. i don't even like orange. i have never once thought "this painting needs orange." yet here we are. checked my paint drawer and i have three different brands of the same dull green i used exactly once in 2021. my brain saw a color chart at 2am and decided that was the move. the tube is still in the box. feels like a specific flavor of art delusion where buying the thing and using the thing are the same satisfaction to my brain. the paint sits there and i feel like i'm being productive. anyone else's studio budget just... a series of impulse purchases that never graduate into actual paintings? or do some of you have self control

client asked for navy, cream, and blush pink. my entire body recoiled. i paint like a highlighter exploded, i do not do coastal grandma. but rent was rent so i did it anyway and honestly it's one of the best things i've made this year. the palette forced me to actually think about composition instead of just slapping the loudest color on everything. hate that. now i'm worried i'm gonna start pre-mixing muted tones like some kind of traitor.

Ordered a brick of Venetian smalti, the deep inky blue I always use for sky. It arrived a completely different tone, colder, almost grey. I emailed the supplier and then I just... kept it. Sat with the box open for two days. Now I'm building the whole piece around it. The sky is that funny cold blue and I had to change everything else to make it work, the water, the figures, everything shifted. I don't think I've made a better decision this month. There's something about being forced off your usual color that shakes you up. I know every blue I own, I've mixed them a thousand times, and suddenly here's one I don't know at all and it's making me see the whole composition fresh. Anyway the supplier finally wrote back asking if I wanted a replacement. Honestly I might order the same wrong batch again on purpose.

not a discipline thing, it's laziness that got out of hand. phthalo blue, titanium white, a cad red i've been nursing since march, that yellow ochre, burnt umber, black, and a green i mixed once and never fully cleaned off the glass. that's it. it's a gross little green too. i keep meaning to scrape it. the annoying part is the work's gotten better. like i stopped reaching for the new tube and the paintings got tighter. i don't know if that's a real thing or if i just got good at making one painting over and over and calling it a series. also my water cup has a skin on it. i know. it's been sitting since tuesday because i told myself i'd come back after lunch and then i didn't come back until today. anyway if you have a color you've been avoiding because you "don't like it" that's probably the one.

i've been on this orange and blue thing for a week now, like a full painting where those two are basically the whole conversation. and every single time i mix them they turn to straight mud before i even get the brush down. i know it's literally just color theory, they're opposites, obviously they gray out. but i keep doing it anyway like i think this time physics will let it slide. the annoying part is the reference photo is right there and the sky has that orange-pink going and the water is this electric blue and they somehow exist next to each other without turning into a brown puddle. so it's not the combo, it's me. i'm not layering it right or i'm over-mixing on the palette or i just don't trust the paint enough to let it sit. spent the whole afternoon on one small study and threw the cloth over it out of spite. i'll pick it back up tomorrow probably and hate it again. twenty dollars in paint to learn i should've just scumbled. anyway. anyone else ever win this fight or do i just paint brown forever

i've had this tube of cadmium yellow deep for like four years and i keep expecting it to run out but it just... doesn't? it's got that crusty weird lid situation where paint has built up so many layers it's basically a fossil. i refuse to replace it. every time someone borrows it they're like "this is gross" and i'm like yeah and it makes the best color i've ever used, sit down. i think there's something to having that one paint you're weirdly loyal to that no one else gets. mine's this specific warm yellow that looks almost brown in the tube but hits completely different on canvas. i've tried the "clean" version from three different brands and they all suck in comparison. it's the grime. the grime is part of the formula at this point.

okay so I went in for one tube of something neutral today and came out with a tube of "decayed rose," "moody willow," and "antique brass" and I have no defense for it. the colors are gorgeous and I'll use them all but I know exactly why I bought them, it's the NAMES. I want to feel like a poet while I'm mixing my palette. I want to say "I started this piece with a wash of decayed rose" and sound devastating. I'm not even ashamed honestly except slightly because I do this every single time and my partner just looks at the receipt and goes "which one is for the window painting" and it's never the one I bought. the worst part is yesterday I painted with a technically perfect color called "indian yellow" (which I hate the name of btw, colonial vibes, we should rename it) and it was fine but I didn't feel anything. meanwhile "decayed rose" is just a muted pink I could have mixed in five seconds. the marketing got me good. I'm a trained professional and I fell for color name poetry. does anyone else buy paints for the names or am I the only one paying $14 for a fantasy

did the math last night because rent is due and i was avoiding opening the bank app. since january i've bought 14 tubes. used 4 of them. the other 10 are sitting in a drawer like little expensive witnesses. the stupid part is i know exactly why. buying a new color feels like starting a new painting, and starting a new painting feels better than finishing the one on the easel that's been fighting me since march. so i buy the tube, feel a little hit of promise, put it in the drawer, go back to the same six colors i always use. anyway the drawer is now a graveyard of good intentions and i'm still on the same six colors. not really a complaint. more of a confession.

ok so this is embarrassing and i'm probably the only person who does this but when i'm mixing colors, like really sitting there trying to nail a specific green or getting a skin tone right, i have a playlist i made that's literally just the first 30 seconds of songs repeated. like the buildup part over and over. i don't know why it works but my brain just turns off the "am i doing this right" noise and i can actually feel what the color needs. my partner walked in the other day and was like "...is this the same song?" and i had to explain myself and it sounded insane. but the color i mixed after that? genuinely the best warm grey i've ever made. so i'm not sorry hahaha does anyone else have a weird little ritual that sounds dumb but actually does something for your work??

Okay I need to know if I'm losing it or if this is real. My tube of W&N cobalt turquoise, the one I use in basically everything, I'm not exaggerating, it's in like 80% of my pieces, I bought a fresh one last week and it's behaving totally different. The pigment's the same number, same series, but it's lifting off the paper in a way the old one never did. Like it's sitting on top instead of sinking in. And the granulation is almost gone? That soft sandy settle it used to do in the washes was THE thing I loved about it. I called the art store and the guy was like "maybe they tweaked the binder formulation" and I almost dropped the phone. I have paintings where that specific granulation is doing so much of the heavy lifting and now I have to either stockpile old tubes or figure out how to work with whatever this new version is. I know it sounds dramatic but this color is basically a signature for me at this point. Has anyone else run into this with a specific color you rely on? Like a color that just IS your work and then it changes on you?

client wanted a "fun tropical" illustration for a juice label, so i'm staring at an actual banana on my desk trying to mix that yellow. and it doesn't exist. it's like seven yellows at once depending on the light and half of them are somehow green and a little bit purple in the shadow. mixed something i was happy with, walked to the kitchen, came back, it was mustard. sat down again and it looked right. so either my lighting is cursed or i'm the problem. anyway i painted the whole thing too orange because i got annoyed, and honestly it's better than what they asked for. not telling them that. freelance is going great, can you tell