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I'm halfway through a block of Fabriano Artistico cold press, 140lb, that I've used for years without complaint. But this particular block, purchased six weeks ago from a reputable supplier, is remarkably inconsistent. Sheet one took the wash beautifully, exactly what I expect. Sheet three had a mystery spot that resisted pigment entirely, as if there were silicone or grease contamination in the pulp. Sheet five is almost too absorbent, pulling colour down into the fibres faster than I can lay it in, which is not characteristic of this paper at all. I'm working on a Passiflora study that needs clean, even washes for the corona filaments, and I cannot trust what each sheet will do. I've considered whether it's humidity in my studio, but nothing else in my practice has changed. Has anyone else noticed a drop in consistency from Fabriano recently, or did I simply draw the unlucky block?

I have been painting the same Rosa canina sprig for four days, which is longer than it warrants, and this afternoon I discovered I had cut the sheet from the wrong side. The felt mark runs underneath and the sizing is subtly different. You would not see it in the finished painting, but I can feel it. The washes sit a fraction differently and I have been quietly blaming my own handling since Monday. I am going to finish it. Throwing away four days of work over a mis-cut sheet would be a poor sort of discipline, and the specimen itself is a good one. But I have written the correct side in pencil on the pad cover now, which I should have done years ago and did not because I was certain I would remember. Does anyone else keep making the same small, entirely avoidable mistake on the grounds that they are too experienced to need a note?

The courier handed it to me and it was warm. Who knows why. The box had a dent the shape of a person sitting on it, and I thought fine, the ream inside is wrapped. It was not wrapped. Cotton paper absorbs everything it touches and apparently it had been touching a box that spent two days in a warehouse that smells like diesel and damp cardboard. So the top thirty sheets now smell like a truck. Not visibly ruined, just smelling, which is worse, because you can't photograph the problem and you can't prove anything. I have a show in March. I need 40 good prints and I've been working toward them since October. So now I'm doing the thing where I hold each sheet up to the window like a doctor looking at an x-ray, deciding which ones I'm going to pretend are fine. The funny part is I make work about the multiple, about the copy, about how a print is never really the original. So the universe has a sense of humor about me being precious with paper. But there's a difference between the idea of the reproducible and the smell of my studio right now, which is a rented Mazda. I've started leaving them out with a bowl of bicarbonate next to them like it's a sick animal. Tell me if you know a better trick, or tell me I'm being dramatic. Both fine.

Okay so I'm working on the fourth version of the window piece, the one with the fire escape, and I just made the exact same mistake I made on version two, which is that I stopped to answer a text. My phone buzzed, I put the brush down, I picked my phone up for maybe ninety seconds, and by the time I got back the top wash had already gone past the point where you can lift anything out of it. Watercolor does not care that you were being polite to your mom. The whole upper corner where the light comes through is now this flat dead grey, and I know it's dead because the bottom half, which I did without stopping, is still glowing. Here's the thing I actually want to ask about, and I'm not being cute: how do you all handle the working window on a big flat wash? Because I KNOW the trick is to keep it wet, I learned that in year one of my BFA from a professor who said it like it was obvious, and yet the second something interrupts me my brain decides the paper will wait. I've tried spraying, I've tried doing the whole thing in one held breath, and neither is working. Is the answer just that you don't answer your phone during a wash, like a monk? Because if so I need to hear it from someone who isn't me. Also the grey might be salvageable if I go back in with some white gouache over the top for the glint on the railing. I'm half convinced. I'm also half convinced I'm just going to do it again tomorrow and call it a study.

so i get my Arches block out, right, the 140lb cold press, the good one, the one i ration, and i go to paint this window study i've done like nine times now, and the sizing is just... wrong. like the wash sits on top of the paper and beads up instead of sinking in. i'm sitting there tilting the board like i'm panning for gold and the whole sky i just laid down runs off the edge onto my table. turns out it's a bad batch. i googled it at 11pm like a crazy person and other people are saying the same thing about this run. $40 a block and it's basically coated in something. i've been fighting it for three days thinking i forgot how to paint. i genuinely started questioning my whole degree. my BFA. four years. defeated by a sheet of paper. and the worst part is i can't even be mad at myself which is my favorite hobby. i have to be mad at a factory. anyway i've got two sheets of Fabriano left and if the light holds i'm redoing the sky tonight. mom says return it but i bought it in like March so the receipt is a ghost. if anyone else got a bad block from that batch tell me i'm not insane

The deadline was Friday at noon and I sent the digital submission at 11:40, which for me is reckless. Twelve weeks on a single flowering branch of Magnolia grandiflora, the undersides of the leaves in that rusty felted brown that no one believes until they turn a leaf over. I repainted the terminal bud four times because the light on it was doing something I couldn't get honest, and on the fourth attempt I left one edge slightly unresolved, which I would not have allowed myself five years ago. The strange part is that the fear now isn't the painting. It's the verdict. My old supervisor used to say a paper only exists once it's been read by someone hostile, and I have carried that into this medium without meaning to. So this is the win, such as it is: the work left the studio, and I did not go back in and fiddle with the bud at the last minute. I also didn't send the usual apologetic covering note. Results in three weeks. The paper is Fabriano Artistico, hot pressed, and it took the glazes beautifully, which is its own quiet satisfaction and has nothing to do with the judges.

Lads, I have a confession. The hare print sold out before Christmas, all forty of them gone, and I'm still in the workshop every night gouging away at the same block like a lunatic. Told myself I was doing a second run. I even bought the paper, a big sheet of Fabriano I sliced down at the kitchen table on Sunday while the young fella ate his Weetabix and judged me silently. But that's a lie. I'm not running an edition. I'm just carving her over and over because I haven't figured out the next thing yet and I can't stand the quiet of a blank block sitting there. You know the way it goes. Every printmaker has the one image that pays the rent and pays the soul and they don't always line up. And when you're between ideas you reach for the thing your hands already know, and you tell yourself it's practice, and it is, sort of, but it's also hiding. My wife asked me the other night how long I was going to keep at the hare and I said grand, not long, and she gave me the look. She knows the look she's getting back. Sitting there with a fresh cup of tea going cold beside me, six hours in, and I'd swear I've made the ears slightly better each time. Which is the problem. They're fine. They were fine the first time. Anyway. I'll stop.

I spent the morning on a Helleborus niger study and threw the whole sheet in the bin at around eleven. Not the flower. The stamen, or rather the anthers, of which there are far too many, and every one of them needed to sit at the correct angle to the filament. I had them leaning perhaps ten degrees too far forward. Nobody but me would ever have noticed. I noticed, and once I have noticed a thing it cannot be un-noticed, so out it went. Three hours of glazing, gone. My husband came in for tea and asked, quite reasonably, whether I might simply have corrected the one I had. I explained that correcting it would have meant lifting colour on a dry wash and leaving a halo, and that a halo is worse than a lie. He took his tea away. The irritating part is that I know exactly why it happened. I was working too fast because I had it in my head that the flower would close by noon, and I let the schedule dictate the brush. The plant was never going to wait for me and I should have respected that from the start. Hellebore is a punishing subject anyway. The white is not white, it is a greenish grey with a faint warmth in the centre, and if you paint it as white it reads as a paper cut-out. If you paint it as grey it goes dead. You have to thread it. Tomorrow I will start again on the same sheet of Fabriano and do the anthers last, when I am fresh, and count them properly before I begin.

I pulled the last two proofs of an etching yesterday, both from the same plate, same ink, same paper, and there is a visible difference. One is a little flatter in the greys. Not a mistake exactly, just the plate giving up a bit of itself. Normally I would destroy the weaker one and keep the edition clean. But I found myself wanting to keep both, because the whole point of my work is that there is no original, and here I am quietly deciding which copy is the good one. The plate is the original. The print is the copy. Except the plate is now worn in a way the early prints are not. So the plate is also a record of everything I have done to it. I don't have a resolution for this. I just think it is funny that you can spend years arguing that authenticity is a story we tell and then get precious about one sheet of damp paper. Also I am aware this is a very comfortable problem to have, sitting in a studio in Kreuzberg with a hot plate and a stack of Fabriano. But it is genuinely the thing I keep circling. Curious if the painters here feel anything like this about the first version of a painting, or if that is a printmaker's disease.

The price of a 5-colour screenprint of mine sat at 120 euro for over three years. Not because I did the maths and it came out at 120. Because 120 was the first number I said out loud to someone at a group show in Kreuzberg and after that it felt like a fact about the work. Meanwhile each impression takes me about forty minutes of actual printing, plus the screens, plus the paper which is Fabriano and not cheap, plus the ones I ruin. If I count properly it was maybe 110 euro of my time per print before anything goes wrong. So I was charging people roughly the cost of the paper and a coffee. In January I changed it to 190. I wrote the new price in the spreadsheet, told the two galleries, and waited for the small humiliating email. Nothing happened. One person bought two instead of one. That is the part that disturbs me more than the money. I think what was actually keeping the price down was not the market. It was me deciding in advance that the work was worth less than what I was asking, and then politely making sure everyone else agreed. Which is its own kind of conceptual problem, and not the interesting one I wanted to be working on. Still haven't raised the etchings. Those are at 260 and I know they should be 340 and I have the email drafted. It's been in the drafts since February.

Drove out to Matosinhos at six this morning with a box of paper I'd coated the night before, and did a run of six photograms on the flat rocks below the fish market, using the tide pools as my trays. Two came out. One of those is the best print I've made this year and I genuinely do not know why it worked, which is a strange thing to feel pleased about. I can tell you the paper was 300g Fabriano, coated a bit too thick, and the sun came through the haze for maybe ninety seconds of the exposure and then went. That is all I have. The other four are in the bin, and I'm not sorry about it. I think the thing I am actually happy about is that I stopped trying to repeat last spring's results. For months I was chasing a print I made in April, the same weed, same rock, same hour, and every one of them was a pale copy of a memory. Today I just put the paper down and let the sea do what it does. Anyway. Six sheets, two prints, one that might be something. The rest of the day is for sleeping in the sun like a cat.

A gentleman from the local botanical trust commissioned a single watercolour plate of Magnolia grandiflora, flower and leaf and a sectioned bud, on Fabriano. I quoted £1,850 because that was roughly what the last plate of that size had taken me and I thought I had learned something. Eleven weeks. That is the honest figure, and it does not include the fortnight before I ever put paint down, which was spent at the herbarium and in a friend's garden with a torch at half past nine at night waiting for a flower to open properly. I have done the arithmetic twice now and it comes out somewhere near £14 an hour, which is less than I was paid as a postdoc in 1998. My husband, who is an economist and therefore has no mercy, pointed out that I am effectively subsidising the trust's publishing programme. The difficulty is that I do not know how to paint it faster without painting it worse, and painting it worse is not available to me. So the price has to move, not the method. I am going to quote £3,200 for the next plate of that complexity and I have not yet found the words to say it out loud to a client without apologising in the same breath. That is the part I am actually bad at.

Four sheets of Fabriano. Three of them are in the bin, and I do not say that lightly, because paper is not cheap and I am not made of it. The subject was a Digitalis purpurea I collected on a walk in late June, and the difficulty was entirely in the bells. Get the interior of a foxglove bell right and the whole drawing breathes. Get it wrong and you have a row of purple thimbles. My trouble was the shadow under the lower lip, which is not really purple at all. It is a cool, almost grey-violet, and every attempt I made with a straight purple mix went muddy and dead the moment it dried. Third sheet I tried lifting it out with a damp brush, which is the sort of thing one knows better than to do and does anyway at eight in the evening. Yesterday I mixed it instead. Permanent rose with a touch of French ultramarine and rather more cobalt than I would have guessed, laid in one pass and left alone. Left alone is the hard part. I sat with my hands under the table so I would stop fiddling with it. It is dry now and the bells have depth. There is still one anther I am not happy with. I mention this because I nearly abandoned the whole study on Tuesday, and the only thing that kept me at it was a note in my old tutor's hand in the margin of a workbook: the fourth attempt is usually the first honest one. I have found that true more often than I would like.

Not deliberately. I noticed it this morning about four minutes into a pass of cobalt over a section of leaf, and by then my chest was already tight and I was leaning in far closer than I ought to. I catch myself doing it perhaps three or four times in a working session. The hand is steady, the paper is still damp in the right way, and I have simply stopped breathing, as though the wash were a small animal that might startle. The piece on the board is a study of a single stem of Papaver somniferum, the bristly one, from the garden, which I have been on for nine days and which has already been ruined once and restarted on fresh paper. I am working on Fabriano Artistico, hot pressed, 300 gsm. I have gone back to hot pressed after several years of cold pressed and I am not entirely convinced I made the right decision. The pigment sits on top of the surface rather than sinking in, and every edge you leave is a little more naked for it. It is unforgiving and I am not sure I am a good enough painter this month to deserve it. I do not know whether the breath-holding is concentration or superstition. It is probably superstition. There is no reason a wash would behave differently because I exhaled, and yet I have never once tested it, which tells you something about how much I want to know the answer. Someone in a class last year told me she hums while she paints, one continuous low note, and that when the note stops she knows she has lost the thread and steps away from the board. I thought it was a clever trick. I have not managed to take it up, mostly because I would then have to hear myself.

I have a screenprint edition of 40 sitting here, three colors, on Fabriano Rosaspina, and I put 45 euro on each one. The math is not the problem. Paper, ink, the screens, the hours pulling them, all of that I can count. The problem is the 40. If I print 40 and sell 12, I have 28 in a flat file and I've effectively priced the 12 at 150 each, only nobody paid that and I can't say it out loud. There's a whole historical logic to this, the print as the democratic multiple, the cheap image for the many. I believe in it. I also believe the rent in Kreuzberg does not care about my beliefs. So I keep the price low to honor the idea and then I quietly resent every person who buys one, which is a strange way to run a practice. What I actually want to know is whether any of you price the edition as a whole and not the single sheet. Like, the edition is one object with 40 faces, and the price should carry the unsold ones. I've never seen anybody say this in a way I could use. Maybe because it sounds like an excuse. 45 feels either honest or cowardly and I genuinely cannot tell which. It's been three weeks.

Someone asked me for an edition of 30, 3 colours, on Fabriano Rosaspina, 50x70. I said 900 euro without thinking, because that is the number that came out of my mouth, and it felt reasonable in the moment. Then I went home and actually counted. Paper was 210. Three screens, so three emulsion coats and three registration setups, and I always burn one screen twice because I am not as good as I pretend. Ink is nothing, maybe 40. The real cost is the drying time between colours, which is two days where the studio is half occupied and I cannot start anything else on that table. Plus the edition does not come out at 30. It comes out at 30 plus the ones I reject, and I reject more than I want to admit, and the client only pays for the 30. So 900 is roughly 11 euro an hour if nothing goes wrong. It always goes a little wrong. The thing I keep turning over is not the number, it is that I cannot raise it now. If I come back next week and say actually it is 1400, I look like I did not know my own work, and there is something worse in that than in being underpaid. So I am eating it. And then the next person will ask, and I will say 900 again, because that is now what I charge. I know the correct answer is to have a price list and stand behind it. I have a price list. I just do not believe it when I say it out loud. Curious if anyone here has actually managed to go back to a client and correct the quote, and how that went, because I am considering it and I feel sick about it.

There's a piece of glass I collected from Praia do Carneiro maybe two years ago. Frosted, worn soft at the edges, the kind the Atlantic takes decades to sand down. I have kept it on the shelf with the other shore things and never once put it on paper. Too much of it, I think. The whole summer my father was ill, that glass was in my pocket. Took it out on the sand in August and thought, no, not yet. This morning I coated a sheet of Fabriano, laid the glass down, weighted the corners with two pebbles, and put it in the sun at 9:40. Nine minutes. Nine. Two years of not-doing it, and the whole thing took nine minutes of ordinary winter light. It came out like a thing that had been underwater a long time. The frosted part went a pale milky blue where the paper stayed damp. Around the edge, where the seawater dripped, that dark Prussian rim I can never quite plan for. I don't know why the waiting was so long. Maybe it needed to be a different person holding the paper down. Anyway it is on the line now, drying, and I keep going out to look at it and coming back in. Small win. But it's the one that has been following me around the house for two years, so it counts double.

I've been using Arches 140lb cold press for nearly twenty years. It was reliable. You knew what you were getting. That block of paper I opened this morning has sizing so uneven the paint is pooling in patches on the first three sheets. I'm not talking about a minor inconsistency. I'm talking about washes that lay down flat in one area and bead up like wax in another. I wrote to them a few months ago about a different batch and got a polite form letter suggesting I might be using too much water. Which, no. I know how much water I'm using. I've been doing this long enough to know the difference between a technique problem and a materials problem. I've already switched to Fabriano Artistico for my commission work. I didn't want to. I liked Arches. But I can't keep fighting the paper. If anyone else has noticed this I'd be curious, though I suspect most people just adapt and don't say anything.

I keep a small notebook just for registration marks. Not sketches, not notes on the print, just where the marks go. Edition 3 of the Carta series has its own page, with a little diagram, and a second page because the first one was wrong. Today I pulled eleven sheets and got four I would sign. Nothing dramatic happened, the plate was fine, my wrist was fine. It was the paper. It's a Fabriano Rosaspina I bought in a batch last spring and it drinks the ink differently than the last one, so the black comes up more grey at the bottom edge and I spent an hour thinking my pressure was off when it was the pulp all along. Eleven sheets to find that out. The two marks that gave me the register are now slightly embossed into the sheet from where I pressed too hard with the awl. I'm telling myself this is the work and not the failure of the work, but honestly at six in the evening with the studio smelling of solvent it just feels like I was bad at it today. The marks are correct though. The marks are always correct.

I've been on the same portrait for almost three weeks now. Not the whole portrait, the jaw. Left side, the shadow under it, where it turns toward the neck. There is a specific thing I want there, a softness, and I keep getting it and then losing it in the next stroke. Soft pastel is unforgiving in this one way that keeps humbling me. You can't glaze over a mistake and pretend. You lift it with tape, you go back in, and the paper is a little more tired each time. I'm on Fabriano Tiziano, the grey, and at this point that whole corner has been worked so hard it's gone shiny. New pastel slides off it. So now the fix is to stop, and I don't want to stop, because stopping means admitting I have to start this one again. I know the problem is that I'm painting the jaw from thinking instead of from looking. But that's the easy sentence to write. The hard part is that I can no longer see which of the five versions was the true one, I've stared so long. I put it against the mirror and it looks fine. I photograph it and it looks dead. Which do you trust? For what it's worth the ear on that side finally works. Small mercy.