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I'm so mad about this. Spent $18 on a new block of compressed charcoal from Blick and it just... crumbles. Like disintegrates. Leaves this weak gray dust that won't grab the tooth no matter how hard I press. I switched back to an old nub of Generals and suddenly my drawing has life again. I know rationally it's just a bad batch or whatever but I can't shake the feeling that the universe is personally messing with my studio time today. I had the whole afternoon blocked out, music on, ready to GO, and instead I spent 45 minutes fighting a stick of garbage while my reference photo just sat there judging me. What's the thing that derailed your whole day recently? Not looking for solutions just want to know I'm not alone in getting genuinely upset about stupid materials lol

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 had this painting facing the wall since last spring. A half figure, seated, hands in her lap. The face went fine, the light through the window went fine, and then I got to the hands and froze, because hands are where a figure painter either knows the structure or doesn't, and I knew I was bluffing. Eighteen months. I'd turn it around some evenings, look at the four grey digits sitting there like something from a mannequin factory, turn it back. Today I wiped the whole hand down with a rag and turps and started again. Two hours, no drawing on top, just building the knuckle of the index and the tendon across the back of the hand, from life, my own left hand on the arm of the chair. And it's there. Not finished, but there. The paint told me immediately what was wrong before: I'd painted the fingers as tubes. Fingers are not tubes. The knuckle is a box with a rounded top and the light breaks on it in three planes. Writing it here because I need it said out loud. Eighteen months of avoidance for two hours of work. If you have a canvas turned to the wall, that thing you keep telling yourself you'll get to when you're better, turn it around this week.

Since I was a small boy I am drawing the fish from the left border, the one that carries the boat in the Saptami story. My mother taught me the kachni line for the scales, one breath, no lifting the brush. Now I sit down with a fresh sheet of Sajji paper and my hand stops at the tail. It comes out stiff. The line is correct but the fish has no life, no swimming. I thought it was age, my eyes, but yesterday my granddaughter watched me and said, "Dada, why you are drawing so slowly?" And I had no answer for her. I am wondering if it is the show I did last month in Patna, where they wanted my fish bigger and my colours brighter for the city wall. Or maybe when you paint for money only, something closes inside. Has anyone else felt the hand forget a thing it has done since childhood? Not the skill, that is there, but the sureness. How do you get back the sureness?

Working on a seated figure, roughly 90 by 70, and I've repainted the left knee three times now. First two passes were wrong because I wasn't seeing it. This third one is right. Proportions check, the foreshortening reads, the shadow side sits where it should. It's the best-observed knee I've painted in a long time and it is completely dead. I know what happened. I painted the knee as a thing to be solved instead of a thing sitting under cloth in a room. Every plane is accounted for and none of them are breathing. I've been circling it for two days, adding half-tones, taking them out, which is not painting, it's polishing. What I think I have to do is scrape it and come back in with a much bigger brush and a lot less information. Which is terrifying because the drawing is good and I'll lose it. But the drawing is exactly what's killing it. It's a diagram now. For the people who work from life: when you've painted something accurately and it has no life in it, do you destroy it or do you try to paint your way out from the inside? I've done both and I genuinely don't know which one is honest here.

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.

There's this old bungalow on Nandi Durga Road, one of those Art Deco ones with the curved verandah and the beautiful terrible paint job, salmon pink over original white, peeling everywhere. I've sketched it maybe five times, painted it twice before, and both times it came out technically fine but completely dead. No life in it. Like a photograph but worse. Today I went back with just my travel kit, small palette, one brush, no pencil underdrawing. Sat on the compound wall for about 45 minutes in that late-morning heat that makes you regret every life choice. And something just… unlocked. I let the watercolour bleed into the sketchy ink lines. Didn't try to fix the wonky bits. Left the verandah half-raw. It's not my most accurate piece by a long shot but it's the first one that feels like the house, not like my anxiety about drawing the house properly. Anyway I'm still riding that high. Chai and Marie biscuits kind of celebration tonight. 🙏

I spent six hours on a plate of a tulip last week, drew it from a specimen, got the venation right, the petal overlap, the sheen. Then yesterday I was rinsing brushes and glanced at it and saw the thing has six stamens per flower. Tulips have six, so that part was fine. The problem is the leaves. I painted the leaves as if they clasp the stem neatly at ground level, which is what everyone draws, and it's wrong. A tulip's leaves wrap high up the stem, one cupping the flower itself. I have painted dozens of tulips in my life and never once got this right because the convention is so strong that you stop seeing the plant. Nobody has said anything. That's the part that bothers me. I'd honestly rather someone had caught it. It means the people looking at it are looking at tulips-from-memory, not at the actual flower, and that's the whole point of what this discipline is for. If we all keep reproducing the same comfortable mistake, we might as well be painting from our heads and saving ourselves the greenhouse fees.

I will start. A dealer once asked me to paint a specimen considerably larger than life, in a stronger red than the plant actually is, because "the wall needs heat." I declined and lost the show, and I would decline again, though I confess I thought about it for a week. So: what has a gallery or curator asked you to alter? Size, palette, framing, subject, a background that isn't there in nature. Did you hold your ground or give in, and how did it turn out either way? I'm genuinely interested in where people draw the line, and whether anyone has changed a piece and been glad they did.

so a friend looked at three of my paintings side by side yesterday and goes "why do they all have the same hands" and now i can't unsee it. not the same pose, the same literal construction. same two finger shapes, same knuckle placement, same way the thumb sits. i've been drawing the same hand for years and thought i was just consistent. tried to fix it today by doing studies from life photos and every single one came out looking like the same hand wearing a different sleeve. it's like my brain has one hand file and refuses to overwrite it. anyone else have the one body part they just... can't vary? i'm not sure if i should fight it or lean in and make it a thing. it's honestly a little freeing to know my one move is hands lol

For eleven years I charged 3,200 euros for a portrait, half-length, one figure, hands extra if they wanted hands. Eleven years, same number. It stopped being a price and became a fact of nature, like the weather in Lyon in February. Last autumn I did the calculation properly for the first time. Drying time with a slow-drying medium, the sittings, three of which the client cancels, the photographs, the drawings on paper before a brush touches the panel, the palette, the varnish, the six weeks of thinking about it while doing something else. At 3,200 I was making less per hour than the man who repairs my frames, and he does not have to be charming for two hours at a time. So I quoted 4,000 to a woman in Villeurbanne. Good project, an interior with her mother's armchair in it that I actually wanted to paint. She wrote back that it was above what she had in mind and thanked me politely. I felt sick for two days. Then I felt fine, and then better than fine. Because I realised the old number was not a price, it was a fear with a number attached to it, and I had been paying that fear in hours of my life. The next one, a man in the sixth arrondissement, did not blink at 4,000. I spent the extra 800 on a better panel and a lot of cadmium I did not strictly need. I am not telling anyone to double their prices. I am telling you that the number you are scared to say out loud is probably the correct one and the fear is just the fear.

Painted a still life tonight at the kitchen table after the kids went down. Same table we ate spaghetti at two hours earlier. I wiped it down, laid out the drop cloth, and there's still a smear of tomato sauce on the corner of my reference photo that I just decided to live with. I used to feel bad about not having a real studio space. Read all these posts about people's dedicated rooms with north light and proper easels and I'd get all wistful. But honestly the kitchen table works. The light is awful. The cat walks across my palette at least twice a session. My 8 year old stuck a drawing of a dinosaur to the easel I can't even use because there's no room for it. But it's the only uninterrupted hour I get and I'll take it. Finished a decent little pear study tonight, better than my last one. That's the whole win. Packed it up and now I'm eating leftover spaghetti over the sink like a civilized person. Who else is painting on a dining room table or a folding tray or wherever they can grab space?

I did it this morning. Third time I've repainted this interior, same corner of my studio, same grey November light through the window, and it just would not settle. The drawing was off, the values were muddy, I kept overmixing and killing the colour. So I took the palette knife and scraped the whole thing back to a thin brown smear on the canvas. There's this moment after you scrape. The painting's gone, but the canvas has a history now, ghosts of all the wrong decisions. The surface is smoother, there's a stain to work into instead of a white void. And suddenly I can see what was wrong the whole time. The floor plane was tilted. Of course. I don't know if other painters feel this, but scraping down is almost better than a good day of painting. It's a reset without being a blank slate. You keep the mistakes as a foundation. Very few things in life work like that.

My daughter came into the studio the other day, looked at the still life I'm working on, and asked why I don't just take a photo and paint from that. Not even mocking, just genuinely curious. She's sixteen and the camera is a reflex, like breathing. I tried to explain that the eye doesn't see like a lens. The lens flattens everything to the same plane of focus, it fixes the light at one instant, it gives you a truth that isn't the truth you actually saw. When I look at a table with a dish and a cloth, my eye moves. It lands on the edge of the bowl, rests on the shadow under the rim, comes back to the highlights. There's a kind of negotiation happening that a photograph never has. The photograph already decided. I don't think she was convinced. She kept looking at my canvas like it was the slower version for people who hadn't heard about the shortcut. And maybe part of me was annoyed, but another part thought she has a point about speed, we just don't want the same thing from it. I did end up using a photo for the initial drawing of the pears, because they were about to bruise and rot. But then I threw the photo aside and painted the rest from the arrangement as it aged. The pears changed as I worked. They kept their own time. That's the whole thing, I think. A painting should have time in it. A photograph has a fraction of a second.

She's a friend, kind of, we were close in our early twenties and then drifted, she messaged me out of nowhere saying she'd seen my last show and wanted something for above her couch. 30x40, big, which for what I do is a real piece of my life. Two weeks of work minimum, and that's if it goes well, and it never goes well in the middle. I said six hundred. She said "perfect" so fast I felt my stomach drop. PERFECT. Like I'd quoted her for a haircut. Here's the math I only did after I hung up. Charcoal paper that size is 90 bucks a sheet and I'll ruin two before one works. Fixative, newsprint, the two days of just drawing hands until they stop being wrong. Rides to the studio, 40 min each way, and I do not have a car right now. So realistically it's 120 hours and about 250 in materials for 600 dollars. Which is... I don't know. Four dollars an hour? Cool. Cool cool cool. And the worst part is I know exactly why I did it. Because she saw the show. Because she said the word "commission" and I got scared she'd say no and the no would mean the work isn't worth it. Which is the same thing I've done since I was 24. My partner said raise it to 900 and just tell her, she'll get it, she's not going to walk over a hundred bucks. And I know that's true and I still can't make my thumb move to type it. Anyway I'm starting it Monday. 😭

There's a still life on my easel I've repainted the same fold of cloth on six times since February. Terracotta pot, two pears going brown, a white bowl with a chip in the rim. Nothing worth anything to anyone. A woman came Thursday to see the big interior I've been struggling with. She looked at it for maybe ninety seconds, polite, and then turned around and pointed at the small study of the pot and asked if it was for sale. I said yes before I'd decided anything. She paid what I asked without blinking, which told me I asked too little, and I don't care. She came back Saturday with her husband to collect it and told me she'd been looking for a painting of a kitchen for eleven years. Eleven years. The whole time I was teaching figure drawing to people who didn't want to learn it, painting almost nothing, this woman was walking around looking for my pot. I didn't sleep well that night. Not from the money. From something else, harder to name. Ten years of telling myself the work was fine sitting in the studio, and then one stranger's hand hovering over the surface, not quite touching, and I understood I'd been lying to myself a little. Anyway. She's hanging it in her kitchen where the pot will get afternoon light, which is where it belonged all along.

I have this thing where I can't email a gallery to save my life. I rewrite everything ten times and then never send it. But walking in? I did that once, with a small pastel portfolio, and I'm pretty sure the woman at the desk thought I was selling something. She was polite but clearly confused about why a stranger was holding pastel drawings at her counter. Nothing came of it. I left so red I couldn't look at my own work for a week. I still don't know if that's the brave way or the unprofessional way. So tell me honestly, has anyone actually landed something by walking in cold? Or is email really the only door that opens?

Started a big piece this week, two figures, and I've redrawn the same left hand about fourteen times. Charcoal, oil wash, charcoal again. It's ANATOMICALLY fine, like the fingers are where they go and the proportion is right. But it's dead. It's a diagram. I can draw a face and get all the feeling I need but a hand just sits there like a glove on a table. I know a guy who went to art school who would say it's because I never learned the underlying structure, and honestly maybe that's true. But I don't want a technically perfect hand. I want the one that looks like it's mid-sentence. The one that's about to reach for something. Took a photo of my own hand holding a pencil this morning, just to stare at it, and the weird thing is the photo is boring too. The hand is boring. It's what the hand is DOING that has the life in it. Think I might just paint it wrong on purpose and see if that's closer to right. Worst case I burn it, I've done that before. 😤

ok so the water heater in my building died on Tuesday and I'm painting with kettle water now and I swear it's changed my whole setup?? I have this tiny electric kettle that takes like four minutes to boil and I've started boiling it first thing when I walk in, before I even take my coat off, and then I just stand there waiting for it like an idiot and honestly those four minutes have turned into my actual warmup. I used to just run the tap room temp and go. Now I'm waiting and looking at the paper and thinking about the drawing before I even touch a brush and my first washes this week have been so much more decisive?? which is stupid, it should not take a dead water heater to make me slow down and think for three minutes. but also it's a real problem because the kettle only holds a liter and a half and I'm doing a big 22x30 sheet of the window (the one with the fire escape, I've painted it like nine times now) and I keep having to stop mid wash to go boil more and the paper starts drying at the edges and I get those hard lines I don't want and then I panic and try to lift them and gouge the surface. did that yesterday, tore a hole the size of a dime in the sky. almost cried. actually did a little. anyway. does anyone else have a setup that's held together by one stupid appliance? because I'm now weirdly attached to the kettle and considering buying a second one so I can have backup hot water and I need someone to tell me if that's insane or if this is just what studio life is