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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

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??

So I've been working on this little still life for three weeks. Copper pot, two lemons, a dish towel. Nothing fancy, I just wanted to practice reflective surfaces. Finished it Saturday and hung it in the hallway. Sunday morning in daylight the lemons are basically neon yellow-green. Like highlighter. In my kitchen at night they looked perfect and mellow and now I'm standing in the hallway going, huh. Two of my bulbs are 2700k because that's what was in the house when we moved in, and I never thought about it once in nine years. Now I'm pricing daylight bulbs like it's a home renovation. I know the answer is probably a lamp and not new overheads. But I'm genuinely annoyed at how long I've been mixing color under a light that's lying to me. Eleven year old asked why I was standing in the hallway holding the painting up to the window and I didn't have a good answer.

honestly this is such a stupid thing to be bothered by but we were on the phone last night, she's asking how the work is going, and then she goes "so what do you actually do all day though? like hour by hour" and I just. sat there. because the answer is I spent four hours on monday watching a single wash dry and re-doing it three times because the first two went chalky on me, and then I ate lunch standing up, and then I stared at the same window (the one from my apartment, the one I keep painting) and decided the light was wrong and did nothing for the rest of the afternoon. that IS the job. and I couldn't say that to her because it sounds like nothing!! it sounds like I'm lying to her!! so I said "a lot of prep and color mixing" which is technically true and also a total dodge. the thing is she's not even being mean, she genuinely wants to understand, she's just got a whole lifetime of "work = you go somewhere and someone tells you what to do" and I quit the café eight months ago and I think she's still quietly worried, and every time I fumble the answer I'm basically confirming the worry. anyway. called her back and explained the wash thing properly and she said "oh, like waiting for paint to dry, that's actually kind of nice" and I almost cried. she gets it more than I gave her credit for.

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.

Okay, the glazing station is basically a crime scene. I have three buckets with murky water, like, a week's worth of brushes in various stages of 'drying' (read: crusty), and there's this one specific shade of blue glaze that has somehow gotten onto EVERYTHING. My apron, my hands, the shelf, probably my hair. I swear, I try to be tidy, vale? But then I get lost in mixing colors and things just... happen. Anyone else's creative space look like a Jackson Pollock painting after a mud fight?

Swept the studio floor for the first time in... I don't want to say. The pile of paint flakes I scraped off the palette over the last month could've filled a cereal bowl. Looked almost pretty tbh, all the colors mixed together like confetti. I almost kept it. Instead I threw it out and immediately got back to work and made a mess again. So the floor is already on its way back. I don't know why I pretend the cycle matters. It's never going to stop being a disaster in here. The good part is the paint flakes used to bother me. Like the mess was a sign I was doing it wrong. Now I sort of think of it as proof of life. Like if the floor's clean something's off.

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

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 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.

ok so i have this rule that i made for myself like a year ago, no painting after 10pm because i make genuinely deranged decisions with color when i'm tired and then i wake up and look at it and want to cry. but i've broken it three nights this week because i got obsessed with this one corner of my apartment where the light hits at night and it's like. i know i'm going to regret it tomorrow but i can't stop?? last night i mixed a color that was supposed to be a soft grey shadow and it came out looking like moldy avocado and i just kept going. this morning i covered it with white and started over and honestly i don't even know if i'm mad about it because something good might come out of the wreckage lol. does anyone else have a rule like this that you're constantly ignoring? or is it just me being bad at boundaries with my own work?

I spent all Sunday afternoon on a landscape, trying to get this one tree just right. I think I finally mixed a color for the bark that felt authentic, but then the branches... they just look a bit stiff, you know? It's so close to what I see in my head, but not quite. Anyone else get that 'almost there' feeling and just have to put the brush down before they ruin it completely?

Not the rust itself, the water. Had a mason jar of it on the shelf since probably 2023, lid rusted shut, and I finally cracked it open to use on the bottom edge of the big piece and it just smelled like a basement. Corked it and put it in the trash bag before I could talk myself out of it. Two years of a jar taking up shelf space because I was sure I'd need exactly that color. I did not need exactly that color. I mixed a passable one in about four minutes with burnt umber and a drop of payne's grey. Anyway the shelf has room now and I hate it.

cleaned my palette finally after like two weeks of painting over the same dried crust and found a fork i'd been using to stir a tiny batch of paint. it had teal on it. i don't remember eating with it. i don't remember cooking. i think i just lived off cereal for a week and the fork migrated. anyway the palette is clean now and i hate it. too bright. i keep glancing at it expecting to see the ghost of every color i've mixed this month. might go ruin it again out of spite.

i just dug through every drawer in this studio and discovered i own three tubes of burnt umber, all different brands, none of them more than half used. and not a single tube of black paint. not even a dried up one. i must have thrown the last one out at some point and just never replaced it. which is fine, i don't really use black straight out of the tube anyway. but it made me stop and think about what i reach for without noticing. burnt umber is basically my default for everything, shadows, underpainting, mixing down a color that's too bright. it's the first thing i squeeze out. and i didn't even know i was doing it until i saw three of them lined up like a little monument to autopilot. what's the thing you have five of without meaning to

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

there's this one shitty wooden chair i bought for $8 at a garage sale six years ago. it's not comfortable. the seat is too hard and one leg is slightly shorter so it rocks a little. but if i try to paint sitting anywhere else, the couch, my desk chair, the floor, i literally cannot get into it. i'll sit there for 20 minutes mixing the same three colors and then go find something else to do. but that stupid chair? i sit down and my brain just switches over. it's like a sleeper agent activation code or something. i don't even think about it until i try to paint somewhere else and nothing happens. idk what the psychology is there. pavlov's uncomfortable painting chair. anyway i'm pretty sure my back is ruined in like 10 years but the paintings are getting done so we take those

I timed myself mixing the same three colors this morning because I saw the jar of cobalt go down and I couldn't believe it. Twelve minutes. Twelve minutes just moving paint around on the glass, and half of it I couldn't even tell you what I was doing, it's so automatic. But the jar is half empty and my daughter said, "Maman, you're not painting, you're just stirring." She's not wrong. And also she's completely wrong. The stirring is where the painting happens, half the time. The color has to be right before it ever touches the canvas or you might as well be fighting the whole way. I didn't say any of that to her. Just told her to eat her breakfast. Worth it though. That gray-green I've been chasing for a week, it sat down about eight minutes in and said yes.

I've been working on this little still life for three days, just lemons and a blue cloth, nothing fancy, and I mixed this gorgeous warm shadow color yesterday, like a deep ochre-y purple, it was PERFECT. Came back this morning and it's dried into this weak, chalky lavender thing that has absolutely nothing to do with what I saw on my palette. And I KNOW gouache dries down, I know this, I've been painting with it for years, but it still gets me every time. I just sat there staring at it like... who are you. I tried glazing a thin wash of the original mix back over it and now it looks muddy and overworked and I think I need to just let it dry again and reassess but I'm so annoyed. The lemons were looking so good 😭 Has anyone found a reliable way to predict the dry-down shift or is it just eternal suffering and learning to mix everything a little punchier than you think you need?

ok so I've been fighting this 9x12 gouache thing for four days, it's the view out my window at like 6:40pm, that specific orange that only lasts about eleven minutes in September. and I got the color. genuinely got it, I mixed it like nine times and the fourth one was right and I cried a little (I know, I know). the gradient is clean, the light is doing the thing over the rooftops, my partner looked at it and went "oh that's nice" which is the exact reaction that means something is wrong. because it's dead. it's a nice postcard. there's no air in it. every single shape is sitting politely where it should be and there's nothing pushing or pulling and nothing that's a little wrong in a way that makes your eye stick. I think I've been so scared of mudding it (gouache will punish you instantly, no redo, unlike watercolor where at least it's a slow betrayal) that I've been painting like I'm decorating a cake instead of painting. everything is blended to the edge. no hard stops. and I keep telling myself I'll add the dark accents at the end and I keep not doing it because I'm scared of ruining the orange. has anyone broken a piece on purpose to save it, like gone in with a value that scares you and just accepted you might wreck it? I need someone to tell me to put a real dark in there or talk me off the ledge, I genuinely can't tell which one I need