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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.

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.

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 😭

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.

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.

There's this face I keep coming back to. Not anyone I know, just a reference photo I found ages ago, some woman with sharp cheekbones and tired eyes. I've drawn her maybe twelve times now in pastel. Different angles, different lighting, different paper colours. Most of them are bad. But I can't stop. Yesterday I finished another one and just sat there thinking... why her? What is it about this particular face that won't let me go? Maybe I'm trying to nail something I can't articulate. Maybe it's just comfort, like rewatching the same film. Anyone else have that one subject they keep circling back to? Not in a series way, just obsessively.

I had a conversation last year with a gallery who was interested in my prints but wanted me to "brighten the palette" and make them "more decorative" because that's what sells in that neighborhood. I walked away, but I still wonder if I was too rigid. Maybe they were just being realistic about their market. What's the line for you? The thing a gallery asked you to change about your work that made you say no, or the thing you actually said yes to and regretted, or didn't regret? I'm curious where people fold and where they hold.

Started a charcoal portrait around midnight. Just a friend's face, nothing dramatic. Three hours later I'm sitting on the floor with tears running down my face because something clicked in the way the light hit her jaw and I don't know if it's actually good or if I was just tired and overwhelmed and the art hit the right bruise. Has anyone else had that? Where your own work makes you emotional and you genuinely cannot tell if it's because you cracked something real or because you're projecting hard onto it? I want to show someone but I'm scared they'll look at it and be like "it's fine" and I'll realize the tears were just me being a mess.

Found a scan from 2014 today, first pastel portrait I ever attempted. Same subject, same reference photo I keep coming back to because I'm stubborn. Put mine from last week next to it. The old one is so bad. I remember being proud of it when I finished. I remember thinking this is it, this is what I can do. And ten years later I can see every single thing wrong with it and I still kept trying the same face over and over until it finally came close to what I saw in my head. I think the win is not the new one. The win is that I didn't stop in 2015 when I should have, or 2018, or honestly last January when I nearly quit pastel for good. Nobody told me to keep going, I had to decide it myself, weeks at a time. And it worked out in a way I couldn't see from inside the bad years. Anyway. Old me would be so confused that the face in the picture is the same and everything else is different. 🙃

i've drawn the same face maybe fifteen times in the last month. same tilt of the head, same heavy eyelid, same mouth just slightly open. i didn't plan it. i keep catching myself reaching for the same reference photo i saved months ago and didn't think twice about. i don't even know who she is. some actress maybe? a stock photo? i can't find the original anymore. my partner says it's like i'm trying to get one thing right before i can move on. maybe that's it. maybe i just need to get her exactly right once and then i can let her go. anyone else have a face that follows them around?

Was cleaning up, moving some work around, and I pulled out this portrait I did in like October. Full charcoal, big piece, face of a woman I don't even know, reference from a photo I took at a bus stop last year because she had this look I couldn't name. Just something in her eyes. Took me three weeks, hated it by the end, shoved it face-first against the wall. Pulled it out today and it's ... good. Like actually good. I forgot I could do that. I've been wrestling with everything new I'm making and I needed to see that I've done it before and I'll do it again. Went and cried for a minute in the corner with a paint rag. Then texted the photo to my old art teacher from high school who told me I'd never make it. Petty? Absolutely. Worth it? You bet.

There's this old bungalow off Millers Road, the kind with the deep verandah and those green wooden shutters that still shut properly. It's coming down next week for another apartment block. I knew that before I sat down to sketch it, and I still spent two hours on it this morning, then came home and started a watercolour from the sketch because the sketch alone wasn't enough. I keep telling myself it's just practice. Perspective, foliage, that particular way bougainvillea sits against a lime-washed wall. But it's not practice, is it. It's the same reason I took photos of my grandmother's house before they sold it and I've never looked at them a second time but I can't bring myself to delete them either. The funny part is the occupant came out and watched me for a while. Old gentleman, probably lived there fifty years. He didn't say anything, just nodded at the end and went back inside. I don't know if he was pleased or annoyed or just tired. Maybe all three. I'll finish the painting this week. It feels important that it exists before the house doesn't.

There's this portrait I did maybe four months ago, a woman in profile, soft grey paper, pink and ochre pastel. The jaw is wrong, the ear sits too high, I gave up halfway and just let it sit there unfinished. I should have thrown it away so many times but I pinned it up instead, right where I see it first when I sit down to work. At first it just made me angry. Like, look at this, you can't even get a jaw right. But somewhere along the way it turned into a kind of permission slip. If I can start the day seeing that thing and still pick up a pastel anyway, then nothing else I do that day can be that bad. It's like a baseline for failure that makes everything else feel less scary. My partner thinks it's morbid. Maybe it is. But I've done more work in these last few months than in the whole year before, and I think the ugly little pin-up is part of it. Does anyone else keep something broken around to remind yourself it's fine to fail?

I had a new student in my botanical watercolor class yesterday. She's a pleasant enough woman, retired, looking for a hobby. We were going through the basics of setting up a composition from a live specimen, a simple cyclamen leaf, and she asked, quite earnestly, if she could just take a photograph of it and trace the outline instead. I explained that tracing would defeat the purpose of learning to see, which is rather the whole point of the exercise. She seemed unconvinced. She said it would save time and look neater. I suggested she give it a proper try first, and if she still wanted to trace at the end of class, I would help her. She did not want to trace by the end of class. But the amount of energy I had to spend not saying "you are paying me to teach you to draw, not to show you how to avoid learning to draw" was considerable. I understand that people want shortcuts. I do. Watercolor is difficult and it takes years to develop any real control. But the shortcuts don't actually get you where you want to go. They just leave you dependent on the shortcut. I suppose I am old-fashioned about this. Learning to see, really see, is the skill. Everything else is technique layered on top of that foundation.