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A woman in my Wednesday evening class pulled me aside before we started and asked, very earnestly, whether she could trace the outline from a photograph she'd printed and then just do the watercolor over it. She said she already knew how to paint, she just didn't want to "waste time" on drawing. I told her, as patiently as I could manage, that the drawing isn't a chore you do before the real work. It is the real work. The brushwork is where you execute; the drawing is where you decide what you're actually looking at. Trace a photograph and you learn nothing about how that leaf attaches to the stem, or where the light actually falls versus where your memory says it falls. She seemed genuinely puzzled, not defensive. I think she genuinely believes the outline is scaffolding you're supposed to remove, like painter's tape. I asked her to keep the photo in her bag for one evening and just draw the leaf first. She did. Three hours later she told me she'd never noticed how the veins curve. She was a bit annoyed about it, actually, which I took as a good sign. The frustrating part is how widespread this attitude has become. Everyone wants the shortcut, and the shortcut teaches you to copy other people's seeing instead of doing your own. There is no shortcut. There never was.

One of my students dropped out last week, came to the last class without saying anything and just took her things. But she left her best drawing taped to the easel. A hand, resting on a table. Not finished, the thumb was barely blocked in, but the light across the knuckles was honest. Really good. The kind of drawing that makes you understand why you teach at all. I kept it. Couldn't throw it away. It's pinned on my studio wall now, next to things by painters I admire, and honestly it holds its own. I keep thinking about what makes someone with that eye walk away. She was twenty-one. She told me once she was tired of her family asking when she'd get a real job. I didn't have the words then. I still don't. I just know there's a version of that drawing in every atelier I've ever taught in, and I've never once figured out how to keep the person holding on to it.

I did the math last night because I couldn't sleep and I think I'm genuinely losing money on every piece I sell. Like a small drawing takes me 4-6 hours minimum, the big ones are 15-20 easy. I use good paper, good charcoal, fixative, all that adds up. $80 for something I spent 8 hours on is $10 an hour. I make more bartending one shift than I do from a whole week of selling work. But here's the thing, I'm terrified to raise them. Every time I think about listing a drawing for $200 I get this voice in my head like who do you think you are. You're self taught. Nobody knows your name. You're not even in a gallery. $200 for a piece of paper from someone's apartment? Please. And then I see artists with less skill (sorry, I said it) charging $500 for stuff that's technically weaker and I get so mad. But also jealous. But also I still won't raise my prices. My therapist says this is about worthiness or whatever and I told her maybe it's just about rent and being realistic lol. But I think about it constantly. Every time I hand over a drawing and take the money I feel a little sick. Anyone else stuck in the "I know I'm undercharging and I can't stop" loop? How do you break it without feeling like a fraud?

Started this charcoal portrait this morning, big 18x24, just a woman's face emerging from black. Was fighting it for hours, everything going wrong, the nose kept drifting into a different face entirely. Almost shredded it like three times. Then around 4pm something clicked and I put this one mark in, just a hard diagonal through the cheekbone, and the whole thing SNAPPED into place. Like it had been waiting for me to stop overthinking. I literally yelled "THERE you are" at an empty room. This is why I do this. Those moments where the drawing starts drawing itself. Nobody else gets it but I know you guys do. What's the last mark you made that saved a whole piece?

Ok so I did this thing where I drew my own hand every night for thirty days. Same hand, same angle basically. Just to see if it would stay boring. Day 1 I wanted to throw the sketchbook across the room. My hands are ugly and I hated every line. Day 11 something shifted and I stopped trying to make it look like a hand and started trying to make it FEEL like the hand that's been doing every single thing for me. Day 30 I cried a little and I'm not even embarrassed about it. It stopped being a hand. It became all the damage and all the work and all the love I've ever done with it. Nobody tells you that drawing the same boring thing over and over turns into drawing your whole life. I'm not saying everyone should do this but I'm also not not saying it. If you try it tell me what day you break

I've been teaching a beginner figure class this term and I keep noticing the same thing. The students who are terrified make the most honest drawings. The ones who think they already know how to draw are the ones I have to undo. There was a moment today, a woman in her fifties, first time ever holding a charcoal stick, and she got the weight of the model's shoulder better than half my advanced students would. She had no idea what she'd done. I didn't tell her, just let her keep going. Some things are better if you don't name them too early. I've been at this long enough to know that skill is not the enemy. But there's a confidence that comes before competence that is the real obstacle. Hard to teach around that. You can't ask someone to unlearn their own certainty.

Had a student this week, third year with me, technically very good. Clean edges, correct values, the drawing underneath all correct. And the paintings are dead. Nothing wrong with them. That is the problem. So I made her do an exercise: take a canvas already dry, a study she liked, and scumble dirt over it. Grey, ochre, a scraped-down mess. Then find the painting again in the wreck. She looked at me like I had insulted her mother. Honestly I might have. But by the end of the session she had a shoulder and a bit of wall that were more alive than anything she has painted in a year, because she could not control it anymore, so she had to look. I did the same thing to myself at her age and I hated it. What I think now: technique is what lets you get away with the accident, not what prevents it. You cannot smear your way out of not being able to draw, the drawing has to be there underneath or it is just a mess with a mood, but the drawing alone is a recipe for marble. Anyway she is furious with me and she will come back Thursday. Both things are correct.

Dragged out the old portfolio tonight to find a reference photo and there it was, this charcoal piece from 2016. Before I knew anything. Before I'd burned through a hundred bad drawings. And here's the thing. It's good. Like, actually good. The hand is a little off and the proportions aren't right but god the FEELING in it. That rawness. I remember being so embarrassed by that piece I almost threw it away. I thought because it wasn't technically right it wasn't worth anything. Now I'm sitting here with the work I've made this month, cleaner, more confident, and I keep thinking, I want some of that back. That person didn't know what she was doing and she didn't care. She just needed to get it OUT. I don't know if you get more naive as you learn or what. But I'm going to try something tomorrow. I'm going to paint like I don't know anything. See what comes up. Scared it'll be shit. Scared it'll be the best thing I've made in years. Maybe both.

I was working on this piece for like 14 hours straight yesterday, just totally gone in it. Charcoal, big sheet, just a face emerging from black. And I finished it and stood back and just started crying like an absolute fool. Not even sad crying. Just, it came out right. For once it actually said what I meant it to say. My roommate came down and saw me standing there crying in the dark studio and was like "...should I be worried." 😭 Anyway the drawing is good. Like really good. I think this is the first time in months I've made something that doesn't feel like I'm just practicing. It feels like I actually arrived somewhere with it. Gonna try to hold onto this feeling instead of waking up tomorrow and hating it. Wish me luck.

They have put the bamboo scaffolding up on it since Tuesday. Blue tarpaulin, that particular shade nobody chooses. I went on Thursday morning and again yesterday, and each time I only got one wall before the light went flat, so between the two sittings I have most of it, except the corner where the tarp covers the crack and the number board. I used to walk past it every day for six years. I have never once bought anything from there because the office crowd made it impossible before 10, and now I am sitting on the compound wall across the road sketching it like some kind of memorial. Anyway, it comes down Sunday. If anyone is free in the morning around Malleshwaram, come and draw it with me. 7am, I will be the one with the plastic stool and the leaking water jar.

Been wrestling with this same piece since Monday. Big charcoal study of a seated figure, hip tilted, weight on one hand. Could not get the left shoulder to sit right. Kept pushing the value darker thinking that would fix it. Made it worse and worse and worse. Finally stepped back this morning and realized I'd drawn the whole arm wrong at the structural level. The angle was off by maybe ten degrees from the start and everything I did after that was just trying to prop up a mistake instead of undoing it. Erased the whole arm down to the paper. Redid it in like twenty minutes. Now it works. Hate that I spent three days being stubborn when the answer was just admit I was wrong and start over. Love that the drawing is finally saying what I wanted it to say. Both feelings true at once. Anyone else ever fight a piece for days only to realize the fix was way simpler than you were letting it be? Or is that just me and my brilliant stubborn brain 😭

Working on a seated figure, half-length, north light from a tall window. Left forearm sits in that narrow band of light before it falls into the shadow of the drapery, and I spent two hours yesterday getting the transition right. The drawing underneath is still visible there, a few dark strokes I never covered. Normally I'd paint them out without thinking. This time I stopped. Part of me says leave them. They describe the form better than the finished passages do, they're honest about how the thing was made. The other part says I'm just dressing up an unfinished arm as a decision. I know the answer is supposed to be "it depends," but I don't want that. I want to know what you do when a mark that was never meant to survive turns out to be the best thing in the corner. Do you trust it and build around it, or do you cover it because the rest of the painting isn't built to carry it?

I got a message from a friend on Tuesday morning, a photo actually. The old house on 4th Cross, the one with the red oxide floor and the wooden balcony with the turned railing posts. Gone. Just the compound wall and a pile of rubble and two men sitting on it having tea. I have eleven sketches of that house. Eleven. From different angles, different mornings, different light. And I still felt like I hadn't really looked at it. That's the thing that gets me. I could draw a building a hundred times and still not be sure I actually saw it, and then one day it's a pile and the sketches are all I have and some of them are wrong. The proportions off, the balcony too high, the shadow in the wrong place. When I was an architect I used to draw buildings so they could be built. Now I draw them so they can be remembered and honestly I'm not sure I'm any better at it. Different job, same feeling of missing something. Not looking for advice on this one. Just wanted to say it out loud somewhere. Tuesday was a bad day.

Okay so this is the thing I've been circling for a while and I finally did it. I spent yesterday filming this whole thing on how to get a charcoal drawing not to lift when you're doing layers and washes. Setup, voiceover, the little tips, all of it. Edited down to like 40 seconds. It was fine. It was GOOD actually. Clean. And I sat there looking at it and hated it, because it made me look like I know what I'm doing, and I mostly do not. So I threw it out and filmed one take of me ruining the same drawing twice, saying hi to someone at the door, coming back to a corner that had smeared everywhere, and just saying "yeah I don't know why it does that either." No music. No cutaways. Put it up. It did 40k views overnight, which for me is like 10x anything I've posted. 300 comments. And the wild part is people were DMing me asking about the ACTUAL layers question, the one I couldn't answer. Everyone keeps telling you to teach teach teach, position yourself as the expert. I don't know. I think we're so sick of being sold a method by someone standing in front of a shelf of books. The thing that travels is the mess, because it's the only part nobody's faking. I'm not going to turn this into a whole strategy. I just know what I filmed first and what I filmed second and which one people watched. Anyway. Small win. Back to the drawing that's currently annoying me.

She's been posing for me for months, always so composed, holds a pose like stone. Yesterday she just started crying mid-session. Didn't move, didn't wipe her face, just let it run while I kept drawing. And I kept drawing. That felt wrong at first, like I should've stopped and checked on her. But she didn't want that. She wanted someone to just see her like that and not flinch. When we finished she said "thank you for not asking." I think that's the most honest exchange I've had in the studio all year. We're so trained to fix people's pain the second it shows up. Sometimes the thing is just being witnessed. Anyway the drawing is the best one I've done in months. Faces and feelings, man. That's the whole job.

I spent the morning on a specimen of Daucus carota, the wild carrot, and I have made a rather basic error that I would flag to a student in a heartbeat. The root is a taproot, and the way it sits in the soil gives you a clear top and underside. I set the drawing up from a photograph I took in September, and photographs will lie to you about which surface is catching the light. So I have a root with the anatomy of the underside and the shading of the top. Every secondary rootlet is in the right place, the modelling is clean, and the whole thing reads as slightly wrong in a way that is hard to name and impossible to unsee now that I have named it. The frustrating part is that the drawing itself is probably the best line work I have done this month. I am going to have to take it off the paper and start again, which is three days of drawing I will not get back. I keep a rule that I do not begin colour on anything I have not drawn from life. I broke it for one photograph and here we are. I am writing this down mostly so that I do not do it again next week.

So I sold a small head study last week. Toned grey paper, maybe A3, one of the ones I did in a single sitting because I was trying to loosen up. I had it priced at 450 euros and honestly I typed that number and then went and made tea so I would not have to look at it. The woman wrote back asking whether the price includes framing. And I said no, framing is separate, I can recommend the place on Gołębia. Then I sat there feeling like I had cheated her somehow. Because the paper cost maybe 6 euros and the pastels I used were already here, so in my head the material cost is almost nothing and I forget the eleven years of doing this badly before I could do it this way. But here is the part I cannot get past. A frame at that shop is 300 euros. So the frame now costs two thirds of the drawing it holds. I do not know what to do with that information. Do I raise the drawing so it looks like a proper thing next to a 300 euro frame, or do I start recommending the cheap framer and hope nobody notices the difference at the edges. I am not even sure this is a pricing question. Maybe it is a "what is a drawing worth when the thing around it is worth more" question. But it is keeping me up, and my partner says I should just be glad it sold, which I am. I am. Just also not.

Stopped mid-pose today and just stared at the model's hands. She wasn't doing anything, just sitting, hands resting on her knees. And I couldn't draw them. I kept putting charcoal down and erasing, down and erasing. Fifty minutes of that. Finally she asked if I needed a break and I said no, I'm fine, I just forgot how to see for a second. She laughed. The whole room laughing at my crisis. Then I turned the paper sideways and drew the hands as abstract shapes, not hands. Just dark masses and the light where the skin folded. It worked. It's the best drawing I've made in a month. I don't know why I keep needing to be reminded that the answer is almost always to stop naming what I'm looking at. The second I called them "hands" they became a problem. The second I called them "dark shapes against light" they were just true. Anyway. Tonight I'm in love with that drawing and tomorrow I might hate it. The usual.

I have a grey squirrel tail in a jam jar in the freezer, waiting for me to find the courage to paint it. It came off the road at the end of the lane, and my husband has been remarkably patient about the whole business, though he did ask whether it might live somewhere other than beside the peas. The difficulty is the fur. Fur is the one subject where botanical training lets me down, because a petal has an edge you can commit to and fur does not, or rather it does but the edge is made of a thousand separate decisions. I have done three drawings on tracing paper and none of them convince me. I keep treating it as a silhouette instead of a structure. I suspect the answer is to stop drawing the tail as a shape and start drawing the hairs as individual strokes, in order, from the tip backward, the way you would build a seed head. It will take an appalling length of time and I am not entirely sure it will work. There is a real possibility this squirrel ends up back in the hedge with nothing to show for it. Anyone here paint animal specimens as well as plants. I would like to be told I am overthinking the fur, or else told plainly that I am not.

She is fourteen, and she agreed to sit on the condition that I not make her look "weird." Which is a difficult promise for a painter, because what I want from a face is exactly the thing people call weird. The asymmetry, the way her chin goes slightly left when she is bored. Two hours, north light, the good linen I had been saving since March. And I held back. I did not correct anything in front of her, only drew what I saw, and when she finally stood up and went to the kitchen I spent forty minutes shifting the whole right side of the face about two millimetres. She has not seen it yet. It is better now and I am not sure I will tell her that part.