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bought a new tub of gesso yesterday, opened it today, and it's got the texture of slightly wet chalk. lumpy. separated. i spent twenty minutes trying to whip it back to life and it just laughed at me. i know it's not that deep but i was actually excited to start something and now i'm just sitting here staring at a bad tub of gesso like it personally owes me money. gonna have to drive 45 minutes to the other store and i'm mad about it before i even leave.

I found this half-full jar of Liquitex gesso in a bin yesterday. I swear I bought it before my youngest was born. The top was crusted shut, I had to run it under hot water to get it open. Inside it's separated and a little watery on top, but I stirred it and it seemed okay? I prepped a small canvas with it just to see what happens. It feels a bit thinner than I remember but it's drying fine. Am I going to give myself some kind of mold situation or is gesso basically immortal? I hate throwing art supplies out but I also hate painting on something that's going to fail six months from now.

Painted a portrait of my sister all week. Her face, the whole thing, really got somewhere with it around 2am. Woke up this morning and I couldn't look at it. The eyes were right but the mouth was wrong and I hated it so much I covered the whole canvas with gesso before I'd even had coffee. Now it's just a white rectangle on the easel and I already miss her. Wild how that works. I'd rather have an ugly painting I could've fixed than a clean slate. Every single time and I never learn. My therapist says this is a pattern. Yeah. It's called making art I guess. 😭

it's fine. actually it's better. the texture is doing something the paint wouldn't have. i think i need to run out of things more often. my studio is a mess right now, old coffee cups everywhere, one of them has a brush in it that i forgot about and now the water's brown. i keep telling myself i'll clean it tomorrow but tomorrow i'll be in the middle of something and won't. the gesso thing though. i might just stop buying white paint altogether and see what happens.

I had this piece on the wall for two weeks. Looked at it every morning with my coffee. Knew something was off but couldn't name it. Yesterday I took it down and started gessoing over the bottom third. The composition was fine. The papers were good. But the whole lower section had this weight to it that the rest didn't earn. I kept trying to fix it by adding more and it just got worse. Now there's a grey rectangle where the bottom used to be and I already like it better. Feels like clearing my throat. Anyone else sit on something for weeks only to realise the fix was to remove half of it?

third layer of gesso on top of a piece I've been sitting with since February. it was fine. that's the problem. it was fine. I keep a tin of cheap white on the shelf just for this. it feels like erasing a bad answer on a test, except the test is my life and I'm 45 and I still don't know what the question was. the paper underneath was one of my brother's old phone bills, all these little line items from 2009, calls I can't place. his handwriting in the margins. I was using it as a ground and then I painted like I was decorating a hotel lobby. so it's gone. under white. and honestly the wall where it was hanging looks better now, which is a weird thing to notice. I don't think this is a post about "trusting the process." I think I just wasted four months and I'm trying to make it sound intentional.

So I ran out of gesso mid-priming a canvas tonight and instead of just going to bed like a normal person I read about making your own with rabbit skin glue and whiting. Which obviously I'm not doing because the thought of rendering animal glue in my kitchen makes me a little queasy AND my 8 year old would absolutely try to eat it. But I did mix some acrylic medium with plaster of Paris to see what happens and now there's a weird little test square drying on cardboard that I'll report back on like it matters. It probably won't be anything, but honestly the kitchen-table science is half the fun of this hobby. I've ruined two good wooden spoons and my husband has stopped asking questions. Anyone else ever actually bothered with homemade grounds or do we all just buy the tub?

After twenty-some years of pretending I preferred the "proper" surface, I bought a roll of cotton duck last week and I'm embarrassed how much better I feel. The tooth is different, the absorbency, the way the first thin wash sinks in instead of skating. I was fighting my own surface for years because someone told me linen was what serious painters use. I stretched it myself, three coats of rabbit skin glue, two of oil primer sanded between each. The same preparation I've always done. But the fabric underneath changes everything. I don't know who needed to hear this but if you hate your surface, change it. The materials police are not coming for you.

everyone's got their fancy stay-wet palettes and i'm over here scraping bone-dry acrylic crust off this little board with a palette knife like i'm archeology-ing my own bad decisions. the texture is genuinely insane at this point, there's like seven layers of dried paint built up with actual craters where i gouged out a chunk of ultramarine mid-painting. i know i should just sand it down or toss it but honestly i'm attached. it's like a little topographical map of every piece i've made since january. you can see the exact week i went through a burnt umber phase. tell me you also have a cursed palette you refuse to retire

ok so this happened saturday and i've been sitting on it. a woman came to my little open studio thing, walked straight past everything on the walls to the corner where i had like six failed window studies stacked against the baseboard, and asked if she could buy one of those. not the finished ones. the ones i was going to gesso over because the wash went chalky and the mullions are crooked. she said it was the one that looked like her mother's kitchen. and then she just stood there and cried a little, which, honestly, same, i cried in a gallery once over a Vuillard so no judgment. and i sold it to her for basically nothing and felt weird about that after, like i'd cheated her or like i'd cheated myself, one of the two. my partner says both can be true and i hate that they're usually right. but the actual thing rattling around my head is that the piece i was most embarrassed by is the one that did the thing i'm always trying to do. i've been chasing this one light for a year, like a lunatic, and it turns out the version i almost threw out was the one that landed. don't know what to do with that information. i just know i'm not gessoing over anything for a while.

I did a craft fair a couple weekends ago and made $64 total, but $40 of it came from two people I stopped being "the seller" with and just talked to like a normal human. One was a woman who asked a technical question about how I get the sky so smooth in acrylics, which turned into a 15 minute conversation about gesso and soft brushes, and she bought two small prints before she left. The other was a guy who told me his mom used to paint and we just stood there talking about her for a while. He bought one. I'm not saying this is some genius insight. But I spent the other five hours half-smiling at people and getting ignored, and the money came out of the two actual conversations. Kind of makes me wonder how much of my online posting is the equivalent of that half-smile at strangers. All these process reels and behind the scenes stuff I do, and it's the one-to-one stuff that actually moves anything. Anyway, back to my day job tomorrow. The fair was fun but I came home with more unsold inventory than I know what to do with lol.

charged a client $350 for a 4x4 acrylic piece last month. then i actually timed it out of curiosity. 40 hours total including sketching, the ugly middle phase, the "repaint the whole sky" phase i do every single time, and talking myself out of gesso-ing over it and starting fresh. that's $8.75/hr before materials. after materials it's like $7. and here's the sick part, i know a painting takes me 15 truly good hours and i know i price it like it takes 8. i have the data. i just get scared the number looks big and shave it down. meanwhile the client framed it, sent me a photo, thanked me again. they'd have paid $600 without blinking and i know that too. i'm trying to just... charge the honest number next time. we'll see if i actually do it or if i fold and give the "friends and family" discount to a stranger again lol. anyone else have the exact math memorized on what they should charge vs what they charge? sick of being my own worst negotiator.

A woman messaged in february about a commission. wanted her mother's house painted, the one the family sold last spring. she sent 40 photos and said "I don't know what I want, just not sad." I quoted 180. gesso and two sheets of stonehenge plus the wash medium ran me 61, and I spent parts of nine evenings on it. so call it 13 an hour. I drove past the house twice to look at it because the photos flattened the porch light and I wanted to get that wrong on purpose, if that makes sense. She cried when I dropped it off, wouldn't let go of my hand for a while. That was worth something and I have no idea how to put it in a column. Here's the part that's actually bothering me. I told myself I priced it low because she was sending me her grief and I don't do that math. But I also priced it low because I was scared that if I said 600 she'd go quiet and I'd have to sit with having asked for it. Those aren't the same thing and I know which one it was. So I'm raising the next one to 450 and I feel sick about it already. Not because I don't think it's worth 450. Because I do, and that's the part I can't get used to.

sold a 60x80 acrylic for 480 at the weekend. buyer was lovely, paid in cash, carried it out herself. then i sat down and actually did the math, which was a mistake. canvas and stretcher 60. gesso and primer, say 15. tubes of the two colors i used up almost entirely, that's 70 because the good red is stupid expensive now. brushes i killed, amortize whatever, 20. three weeks of work, most of it on the sky, which i repainted twice because the first one was muddy. 480 minus 165 materials = 315. over three weeks that's 15 an hour if i count it as 20 hours, which is generous, because it was more. and i priced it off a number i saw on someone else's instagram. the annoying part is i'd do it again tomorrow. the money isn't really why. but i also can't keep pretending the money is fine, because it isn't, and the only person setting that number is me and i'm clearly doing it badly. sat there with the receipt in my hand and the buyer's car still in the lot and just went, huh. anyway if you're reading this and you also price off vibes and a screenshot you saved, at least we're consistent.

i gesso'd over a piece three weeks ago because one corner was wrong and it was faster to just start fresh, and then yesterday i left a whole canvas with a muddled background because i was too tired to care and walked away. that one's actually going somewhere. there's no logic to it, the one i let slide is worse than the ones i killed. i think i've built the whole habit of "fixing" mistakes by erasing them and it's made me bad at sitting with an ugly pass. everything has to be clean by the end of the day or i feel like i failed. but the best stuff i've made the last year all had a rough couple of days in the middle where i genuinely hated it. anyway the muddled one is dry now and the corner is fine. i just had to not look at it for 48 hours. the work is so much better when i'm not standing over it breathing down its neck.

I spent three weeks fighting a harbor scene and finally gave up on it one night, shoved it in the back of my closet. Pulled it out two months later mostly to see if the canvas was worth reusing, and you know what, it was actually fine. A few glazes later I really liked it. Ended up hanging it at a little craft fair in November. Not expecting anything from it, it was the piece I kept apologizing for when people stopped at my table. A woman came back twice to look at it and ended up asking if I could do something similar for her lake house. Smaller, different colors, but same idea. She just sent me the deposit. I keep thinking about how close that painting came to being gessoed over. Also the timing is funny because I'm exactly the kind of person who would've talked myself out of even putting it on the table. Glad I didn't.

i don't have a routine, i have a superstition. i can't start painting until i've made the first mark with a color i don't care about on a surface nobody's going to see. usually it's the back of whatever panel is closest or a scrap of gessoed cardboard, just a dumb flat wash of raw umber or whatever's already mixed and dying on the palette. once that's down i can actually work. if i sit down intending to start on the real thing i'll stare at it for 40 minutes and then "organize" my brushes. i know how this sounds. it's basically a warm up lap. but i've been doing it for like two years now and i can't skip it, tried last week and ended up cleaning out my entire tab drawer instead of painting, so. the muscle has to move before the brain believes it. anyway the actual thing on my mind is that i'm three panels into a series where i'm deliberately ignoring the design part of my brain, and it's going terribly, and i keep thinking about how every single thing i make eventually becomes design. like i can't not compose. someone tell me you can unlearn that part or i'm gonna start believing the dropout thing was a mistake

left a tub of gesso open over the weekend, right next to the radiator. came back this morning to a crusty puck of chalk sitting in there like a fossil. my own fault, and honestly for a second I thought about just chipping the top layer off and using what's underneath. then I realized i've done that. i've done that three times with the same tub. so I threw the whole thing out and it felt weirdly good. like admitting the cheap route was just me being stubborn, not broke. the new tub is sitting there all smooth and white and it's almost too clean to touch. I know i'll have it half filthy by end of week. that's fine. that's the point.

there's this canvas i started like eight months ago that went nowhere. composition was trash, colors were muddy, i hated it. but instead of gessoing over it i started using a corner of it to test brush loads and color mixes before they hit the actual canvas. like a palette that hangs on the wall. fast forward to now and it's completely covered in random swatches and drips and accidental blends that look better than anything i've done on purpose. it's this chaotic artifact of every painting i've made since february. i keep catching myself staring at it instead of the thing i'm supposed to be working on. half tempted to sign it and call it a day.

I've been in the studio since 7am and it's almost 9pm now. Didn't eat. Forgot. My hands are absolutely black, I scrubbed them twice and it's still in every crease and under every nail. I love it and I hate it lol. Started a piece this morning that I was SURE about. Like, this is it, this is the one. By 2pm I wanted to gesso over the whole thing. Talked myself down. Kept going. Now I think it might actually be something?? Not sure yet. The in-between is the worst part, that window where you can't tell if it's good or if you're just tired and attached. What do you guys do when you hit that wall mid-painting? Where you can't trust your own eyes anymore. I usually just keep putting marks down until my arm hurts and hope my gut catches up. Works about half the time 💀