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okay so I went in for one tube of something neutral today and came out with a tube of "decayed rose," "moody willow," and "antique brass" and I have no defense for it. the colors are gorgeous and I'll use them all but I know exactly why I bought them, it's the NAMES. I want to feel like a poet while I'm mixing my palette. I want to say "I started this piece with a wash of decayed rose" and sound devastating. I'm not even ashamed honestly except slightly because I do this every single time and my partner just looks at the receipt and goes "which one is for the window painting" and it's never the one I bought. the worst part is yesterday I painted with a technically perfect color called "indian yellow" (which I hate the name of btw, colonial vibes, we should rename it) and it was fine but I didn't feel anything. meanwhile "decayed rose" is just a muted pink I could have mixed in five seconds. the marketing got me good. I'm a trained professional and I fell for color name poetry. does anyone else buy paints for the names or am I the only one paying $14 for a fantasy

So I quoted a piece last week, 16x20, four figures, real time on it, and the person goes "that feels steep for watercolor, no?" and I just sat there typing and deleting for like ten minutes. Because here's the thing, that's the exact sentence watercolor gets. Gouache never gets it. Oil never gets it. But watercolor is "just" the medium that comes in a little pan for kids. Which is insane because watercolor is the least forgiving thing I do. There is no covering up. No scraping back to a happy accident. You make one wrong wash at hour nine and you're starting the whole sheet over. I have a stack of failures in my closet that would make you cry. I didn't say any of that, obviously. I wrote something very polite about materials and process and how many hours it takes and how the paper alone is like $40 a sheet before I even touch it. And you know what, they said yes?? They just wanted to understand it. Which I guess is the actual lesson and I hate that the lesson is "explain yourself more." But also I'm kind of tired of explaining myself more. Does anyone else get the "feels steep" thing and how do you answer it without turning into a lecture. Because I keep doing the lecture and then apologizing for the lecture and then giving a discount, haha. The discount is the real problem. I know the discount is the real problem. 🙃

I bought a new box of my usual compressed charcoal sticks yesterday, same brand I've used since I started, the cheap fat ones that feel like drawing with a burned stick, and they're DIFFERENT. They changed something. The black isn't as deep, the texture is grainier, it doesn't lay down the same way at all. I could tell in three strokes. I genuinely don't know if I'm being precious and it's fine and I just need to adjust, or if they actually ruined it and I need to find a new brand after half a decade. Has anyone else dealt with this? Did you just power through and get used to it or did you switch? I feel like my hand memorized a specific resistance and now it's gone and I'm having a disproportionate emotional reaction to a stick of burnt wood but here we are.

So I finally did it. Added 150zł to my base price for a head-and-shoulders pastel portrait. 150. That's like... 35 euro. And I've been sitting here all evening convincing myself I'll never get another commission again. Thing is, I was still charging what I charged when I was visibly worse. I look at my old posts and I cringe. But the fear that people were only tolerating the price because they felt sorry for me, that's hard to shake. Like the new price will make them look at my work properly and go "oh, no, not for that." I know it's not rational. I know my materials cost alone has gone up. I just didn't expect to feel this weird about it. Did anyone else feel like a fraud the first time they raised their rates? Does it go away?

I have this piece, it's a landscape with a lot of tiny tesserae, and it's technically perfect, the lines are clean, the colors are all there. But it just... doesn't breathe. It feels flat, like a photograph. I've tried adding more texture with some rougher stones, even some broken glass, but it's not lifting it. Maybe it's the composition, or maybe I need to think about the 'andamento' differently. Any ideas on how to bring life into a mosaic that feels like it's just lying there?

weird thing i noticed about myself. i can paint alone in my flat for six hours and feel like im wasting my life. but the second someone walks past the window and slows down to look, suddenly im an Artist with a capital A, posture fixed, very serious about the brush. is it just me or is the whole thing a bit of a performance and we just don't admit it

So a gallery in my city reached out. They saw my work online. Want me in a group show this spring. This is literally the thing I've been wanting for years and instead of being excited I've spent the last week spiraling. I keep thinking about how I've never been in a studio program, never had a crit, never had anyone teach me how to hang a show or talk to a collector. I don't have a CV. I don't have an artist statement that doesn't sound like a journal entry. And now I'm supposed to show up next to people who did all that the right way. I painted through the anxiety last night and honestly the piece that came out might be the best thing I've made all year. So maybe the fraud feeling is the point? Like if you're not scared you're not pushing it far enough? Anyone else get the thing they wanted and immediately want to run from it? Or maybe I'm just overthinking this.

I put 900 zł on a 10x14 pastel portrait last month. First time I ever said a number out loud without adding "but we can work something out" after it. My hands were shaking a bit, which is embarrassing to type. For context, pastel is fast compared to oils but it is not fast. Toned paper, the layering, the fixing between passes, the part where I sit with it two days and decide the jaw is wrong and start the whole lower half again. Eleven, twelve hours if it goes well. Then I did the actual math and it came to about 75 zł an hour, before paper and the fixative that costs more than I want to admit because I buy the good one. And here is the thing I keep turning over. I did not raise it because I suddenly decided I am worth it. I raised it because I had four commissions stacked in one week and I was not sleeping, and I thought if I say the real number maybe two people go away and I can breathe. Nobody went away. All four said yes, quickly, no haggling. One asked if she could pay extra for a bigger size. So now I am sitting here slightly annoyed at myself, which is a strange feeling to have about your own pricing. All those months of undercharging and calling it being realistic. I have another one to quote tomorrow and I have already written 1,300 zł on the scrap paper, and I keep looking at it like it is a typo. If anyone has gone through the jump from "please like me" pricing to the other thing, I would genuinely like to hear how the first few went, because the number itself was the easy part. Saying it without flinching is the rest of it.

This one old man in a market, reference photo I took last summer and kept coming back to. Drew him maybe seven times this month, every attempt slightly better and still wrong. The eyes kept coming out too open, too kind. He's not kind, you can see it in the real photo. He's worn. Yesterday I stopped trying so hard. Smudged the whole left side of the face down with my finger without thinking and then worked back from the mess. And it just. Was him. Not my version of him, him. I almost didn't post it because I still don't trust that feeling when something clicks. Like it's a fluke and tomorrow I won't remember how I got there. But I liked it. That's the win, I think, that I liked it before I started picking it apart.

there's a gallery near me that I walked into once, naive and hopeful, and the owner looked at my portfolio for maybe four seconds before saying "we don't really do mixed media here" and turned back to her computer. no follow-up, no "maybe try elsewhere," just dismissed. I still think about it when I email anyone new. what's the moment a gallery made you feel like a nobody? the one that sticks with you. and did it ever turn out they were wrong?

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.

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?

I've been working on a series of photograms of mussel shells, trying to capture their texture and the way the light falls on them. I'm using my usual process, exposing them to the sun and developing in saltwater, but the final blue just feels a bit… dead. It's not getting that deep, luminous quality I usually get. I wonder if it's the paper, or if the light here has changed so much this time of year. Has anyone else experienced this? Any thoughts on how to bring back that vibrancy?

Did a portrait for a friend's parents' anniversary. They're lovely people, I've known them since I was a kid, so I said 300 zloty and waved off the rest. It took me eleven sittings' worth of work across two weeks and I kept redoing the mother's eyes until I got them right. The friend was happy, the parents were happy, nobody complained once. And I still spent the whole time feeling like I owed them an apology for taking their money at all. 300 zloty for that much work is brutal if you do the arithmetic, which I did, standing in my kitchen at midnight like an idiot. The weird part is my friend's husband actually does photography and charges proper money for it. Nobody thinks twice about his rates. But I hand someone a portrait I sweated over and I want to refund them for being inconvenienced.

We've been trying to get more structured with our Instagram Reels. For ages, it felt like throwing spaghetti at the wall, you know? Lots of effort, not much to show for it. But this past week, we finally had a sequence of three Reels focusing on a step-by-step process for one of our smaller products just… take off. Like, double the engagement we usually get on any given post, and a noticeable bump in traffic to that product page too. It’s not a huge viral moment, but for us, it feels like a breakthrough after so much trial and error. Makes all the late evenings worth it, mostly! 🙂

The back of a sheet of Canson Mi-Teintes is the honeycomb side, and for two years I would not touch it. It felt like the wrong side of the paper, the side for students. Then I ran out of the good side and started a face on the back out of pure frustration, and honestly the tooth grabs the pastel in a way I like more. Softer edges, the smudge stays where I put it instead of drifting. Now I buy the paper and immediately flip it. My partner asked why I pay for two usable sides and only ever use one, which is a fair question and I did not have an answer. There is a half-finished portrait of my neighbour on the honeycomb side right now, and I have already redone her mouth three times, which is normal for me, but on this paper the mistakes come off cleaner so it feels less like a disaster each time. I know some of you will say the honeycomb side eats your pastels faster. It does. I accept this. If anyone has figured out how to keep it from going muddy when you build up too many layers, I would like to hear it, because layer six is where mine always turns to dust and sadness.

I scorched a whole stack of pieces this week. Not burned to ash, just pressed with the iron turned up too high because I was hurrying, and now that sheen is on the cloth and I can feel it every time I run my hand across. The pattern's still there. The color's still there. But the life went out of it, and I can't unfeel it. My grandmother would've made me rip it all out and start over. She had a rule about never rushing the pressing. I broke it and I know better. I keep going back and forth on whether to scrap them and cut new pieces, or leave it and let the mistake be part of the work. Honest to goodness I don't know which is the bigger lesson. Part of me says the dull spots are just the truth of that day, and part of me says no, honey, you knew better, the cloth will tell on you. Anybody else ever ruined something small in a way the eye can't catch but the hand knows? What did you do with it?

ngl i bought this expensive palette knife bc it looked cool and the reviews said it was good for thick paint application. it arrived today and it's basically a tiny metal spatula. like, i could probably flip a pancake with it. it works fine for slapping on acrylic but i'm also kind of offended? lol. anyone else ever feel like their fancy art tools are just... regular tools in disguise?

so i killed my instagram in february. 11k followers, three years of posting almost daily. the reach had gone to shit anyway, i was getting maybe 200 views on a reel that took me an afternoon, and i kept catching myself making work that would photograph well instead of work i wanted to make. that's the part that got me. i made a piece in january specifically because i knew the process video would do numbers. it did. i hated the piece. anyway i deleted it. no announcement, nothing, just gone. what i did instead: went back to emailing. actual emails to about 40 people, buyers from the last two years plus a few gallerists and one curator who'd been nice to me once. no newsletter platform, no funnel, just me at the kitchen table with the names in a spreadsheet. one email every four or five weeks with a photo of whatever's on the wall and one line about what i'm doing. sold four pieces since february. which is more than i sold in the previous eight months of posting. i don't fully understand it. maybe it's that email feels like a person and the feed feels like a shop. maybe i just got better at asking. either way i'm not going back and i feel slightly stupid for the three years i spent chasing views that never turned into anything. the thing i can't decide is whether this only works because i already had the followers to begin with. like if i were starting from zero tomorrow would i have to do the whole dance again. i think probably yes and i don't like that answer

Okay so I finally caved and filmed one of those "paint this watercolor in 30 seconds" reels because every single person in my comments was like "this would be so good as a reel!!!" and the algorithm had basically stopped showing my work to anyone. 4.2k views. My actual finished paintings get like 30-40 likes on a good day. And I just feel weird about it. Like, great, that many people watched paint dry in fast motion. But did a single one of them buy anything? Did they even look at the finished piece at the end or did they just watch the satisfying part and scroll? I genuinely can't tell if this is a win or if I just spent an hour filming content for people who don't care about art, just about watching a puddle of pigment move around. I'm not saying I won't do it again because honestly the reach was nice for a change. But I can't shake the feeling that I'm optimizing for the wrong audience. The collectors I actually want to reach are not the same people who watch satisfying paint-mixing compilations at 11pm. Or maybe they are?? I have no idea. Someone tell me it's not just me feeling this.