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I have painted since I was nineteen. I have glazed since I was nineteen. And this week I discovered I had been doing it wrong the entire time. Not the paint. The medium. I was cutting my glazes with linseed and the damn thing kept dragging, kept muddying, and I just accepted it because that's how you do it, c'est tout. A colleague, a young one, twenty-five, showed me how he dilutes with stand oil and the difference is not subtle. It's like the light finally has somewhere to go. I redid a passage on a painting I had more or less abandoned, a small interior with a window, and I had to stop and just look at it for a long minute. Twenty years of the same habit and I never once questioned it. My daughter asked me why I looked so annoyed and so happy at the same time. That is exactly the feeling. I don't know whether to be thrilled or furious. Both, I think.

ok so I mixed this green glaze a month ago and every cone 6 firing it's a whole different color. first batch came out a deep forest with a matte finish, second one bright almost jade, third one this weird grey-green that I actually hated and then loved by the end of the week. same recipe, same bucket, same clay body. the only variable is how long I let it sit between firings and I'm starting to think that's the whole story. I've got three vessels sitting in the same kiln load right now, all dipped in the same bucket at the same time, and I'm genuinely nervous they'll come out as three different greens. which would be fine if I wasn't trying to sell them as a set. I know the ceramic answer is probably "just mix it fresh every time" but there's something I like about the unreliability, you know? like the glaze has its own mood that day. is that a cop-out or is that actually a thing people lean into?

Okay, the glazing station is basically a crime scene. I have three buckets with murky water, like, a week's worth of brushes in various stages of 'drying' (read: crusty), and there's this one specific shade of blue glaze that has somehow gotten onto EVERYTHING. My apron, my hands, the shelf, probably my hair. I swear, I try to be tidy, vale? But then I get lost in mixing colors and things just... happen. Anyone else's creative space look like a Jackson Pollock painting after a mud fight?

I am trying to do a simple glaze over a dried underpainting, a bit of a warm umber glaze to unify the shadows, and it is just…mud. It’s not thinning properly, it’s grabbing the surface in streaks, and it looks like I’ve smeared dirt on the canvas. I’ve tried thinning it with a bit more solvent, a bit more oil, but nothing makes it behave. This is the same medium I always use. Sometimes I think the paint itself has a will of its own, and today it’s decided to spite me.

Sunday I set the phone on the easel arm and filmed a glaze session on the second figure. Two hours of footage, cut down to ninety seconds, the whole thing about how a thin warm layer over a dry cool one makes flesh breathe. I was pleased with it. Real information, no music, my hands in the frame. 340 views. My mother-in-law liked it. This morning I posted a still of the finished panel, just standing against the studio wall, bad light from the window, no caption beyond the title. 1,800 views and four messages, two of them actually about the painting. I keep telling students that the work is the thing and I keep believing it, but I also keep filming my hands. The algorithm wants the doing, not the done. Except it doesn't, apparently. It wants the done, photographed badly. I am not going to become a content person about this. I would rather paint. But I am curious whether anyone else has noticed that the process content that supposedly performs just quietly does nothing, and it's the flat dead photograph of the finished piece that brings people to the door.

Cutting a limestone block down for a piece and got impatient. Ran the big pneumatic chisel past where I should have stopped and now about a foot and a half of the face has this dead grey sheen to it. Stone doesn't come back from that. You work it too hard and it tells everybody what you did. Been at this thirty years and I still do it. Not from not knowing. From wanting to be further along than the stone was going to let me be. I'll cut the glazed section off and lose two days. That's the price. Nobody warned me when I was twenty-three, so I'll say it plain: the block sets the pace or you wreck the block.

I had this tall wonky vessel, hand built, took me like three weeks. There was a face kind of hiding in the glaze, you'd catch it from the side, half there. Not painted on, just the way the oxides pooled and ran. It was the best thing I'd ever made honestly. My grandmother saw a photo and said it was smiling at her. Then I decided it needed one more layer of something. A clear coat, to protect it. And the face just... died. Buried under the gloss. Now it's this perfectly fine vessel with nothing in it. I keep putting it in different light trying to find it again and it's not coming back. I know you don't get to undo a firing. But I'm stuck on whether I keep it as is, or smash it and use the shards for something. There's a lesson here about when to leave things alone and I keep not learning it. Has anyone else killed their own work by "finishing" it?

Same copper pot and lemons, three times now. First attempt sat in the studio for a month looking like a poster. Second one I scraped down to the ground and walked away. This week I went back at it with just glazes, no direct paint except the highlights, and something finally clicked. The light on the rim of that pot is the best thing I've painted in years, and it's doing nothing but sitting in a window. Funny how the third try is the one that teaches you. Atelier training made me think the discipline was in the first pass. It's not. It's in being willing to kill the thing twice before it starts behaving. What's the longest anyone else has sat on a piece before it turned?

Spent three weeks on a head, hand built, eyes done with a copper wash that finally came out the way I wanted, glaze pooled just under the cheekbone, all of it. And it looks dead. Not subtle dead, museum diorama dead. Like something that should be behind glass with a little card saying what it ate. The problem is I fixed everything. Every time a fire came out with a chip on the lip or the neck leaned wrong I rebuilt that part until it behaved, and now the whole thing is very correct and has no air in it. My early stuff was a mess but you could feel the hand still moving in it. This one you can't. I'm not going to smash it, my grandmother would genuinely be upset, she likes this one. But I'm thinking of going back with a low fire stain and putting a hard line through the jaw, something that breaks the symmetry and gives it a direction, like it just got interrupted. Risk is I ruin a piece that took three weeks and is technically the best surface I've ever got out of the kiln. Anyone else get stuck here? Where the thing is finally good and that's exactly the problem.

I spent the whole morning scraping back a glaze I was proud of last week. It was doing everything right - the light sat in it exactly the way I wanted, the undertone was singing. But it was too pretty. That's the thing nobody tells you about painting. Pretty is a trap. It stops you from going further because you're afraid to wreck it. So I wrecked it. Scraped it back to the dry underlayer with a palette knife and now the whole panel is this raw, honest state I have to rebuild from. And I'm not sorry. The first version would have been a nice painting. This one might be a real one. The panel is propped on the easel in this ugly in-between state right now and I keep glancing at it like it's a dare. It is, I suppose. Anyone else ever deliberately kill a passage that was working? Or am I the only one who does this to themselves.

I keep noticing it in my slab pots and cups with faces pressed into them: every single one reads sad, even the ones I'm not trying to make sad. I'll be in a good mood, building something playful, and then I open the kiln and it's just this wall of melancholy staring back at me. I think the problem is the glaze pooling in the eye line. I carve the face before bisque, put a white slip on top, and the glaze settles heavy into those scored lines, so the mouth curves down even when I made it straight. The piece is technically fine, the proportions work, but the feeling is wrong and I can't control it. This one with the little figure on the shoulder, I genuinely meant it to look mid-laugh and it came out like she's seen some things. Anyone else fighting the emotional accident thing? Where the material does the opposite of what you intended and it works, but only if you lean into it? I keep trying to fix it with the tools and I think I need to fix it with the glaze math instead.

So my grandmother has been keeping a shelf in her house for like three years now, every single piece I've given her. Some are genuinely terrible, first kiln disasters, a mug that came out looking like a sad potato. I always thought she just loved me too much to throw them away, which, yes. But today I was at her place and she pulls out this box and hands it to me. She'd been re-firing the ones that survived in her own little kiln, glazing them properly, fixing my botched bottoms. She said "you were too close to see which ones had something." And she's right, I only ever saw the cracks. There's one little face vessel from a year ago that I was honestly embarrassed by, and she's turned it into something I'd actually put in the shop. I'm not even mad she went behind my back with my own clay and glazes. She's 78 and she re-learned how to do a proper kiln sit just to fix my messes. Cried a bit on the bus home, not gonna lie. She's the only one who ever got it. Anyway I'm putting that face vessel up for sale this weekend. Honoring the grandmother glaze job. She deserves it.

i have like fifteen bisque-fired pieces just sitting on a shelf waiting for glaze and i keep adding to it instead of finishing them. started a new face vase this morning because i got distracted by a photo of my grandmother from the 80s and wanted to try the hair shape. now my shelf is fuller and my glazing queue is longer and i'm pretending i don't see it. the thing is i KNOW the glaze step is where pieces actually become themselves or die but there's something about the raw bisque that feels so perfect?? like this fragile little ghost of what it could be. i'll ruin half of them in the kiln anyway so maybe i'm just stalling the heartbreak lol. anyone else have a graveyard of unfinished work that you walk past every day? or is it just my adhd clay collection

My old atelier teacher would have said this is barbaric. But there it is: a small press with the pad of the thumb into the darkest corner, near the edge, where nothing matters. If it sticks, I wait. If the ridge holds its shape and I can't dent it, I go in again. The reason is simple. I lost a whole passage in a hand once because I trusted the back of a knuckle and it was tacky underneath. Twenty minutes of work pulled up on the rag. The thumb has more nerve in it than anything else on my hand and I trust it. The bad part is the corner of every canvas I finish has a little flat thumbprint in the varnish of the paint, if you know where to look. My daughter found one last month on the portrait I finished in March and asked what happened. I told her it's the signature nobody sees. Do you all feel the surface, or am I the only one walking around with a permanently stained thumb?

sold a little lidded pot at the market last Sunday for €60. handbuilt, caña color glaze that came out almost exactly how i wanted which basically never happens. woman who bought it posted a photo on instagram, three people messaged me that night asking for "something similar." i quoted them all €75 and they all said yes. which is great obviously. but i keep doing the math and after clay, glaze, two firings, the hours of throwing and trimming and the one lid that warped and had to redo... that €60 piece was maybe €9 an hour. and the €75 ones are gonna be worse because now i'm self-conscious about repeating myself and I'll probably take longer. the thing is the €60 piece got me three sales. if i'd priced it €90 would it have done the same? i genuinely don't know and that's the part that keeps me up. cheap prices get you seen, but you can't live on exposure unless someone else pays your rent. my grandmother keeps telling me to charge more and she's 84 and has never sold a thing in her life, yet somehow she's right. anyone else ever had a "cheap" piece accidentally do more work for you than your best priced one? or am i just bad at this.

Okay so I finally wrote down the actual hours on a piece for the first time. Big mistake. Huge. This vase, the one I posted last week, the green one with the little face peeking through the glaze. Sold it at the market for €80, felt like a win. Real figure, fine, whatever. Then I counted. Seven days on and off because the clay kept slumping when I built it too tall, two failed attempts in the kiln, the glaze crawled on the first fire and I had to sand the whole thing down and redo it. Like 55+ hours all in. €80 for 55 hours. That's about €1.40 an hour. A kid with a lemonade stand earns more than that. I don't get how other makers survive on this. Either they're way faster than me, or they're not counting either, or they've got a partner with a real salary. My grandma keeps asking why I don't just charge more and honestly? Fear. I'm scared that if I put €180 on it nobody buys it and I've made a thing that just sits in the studio taking up shelf space. But at €1.40 an hour I could flip burgers and have more money and more free time. I want to know what the actual number is that makes it worth it. Not the dream number. The one where I don't feel like a clown doing this.

She came to the studio today. I've been sending her photos for like two years but she's never actually touched any of it until now. She picked up this lopsided little vessel with a face pressed into the side, one I almost scrapped because the glaze crawled weird, and she just held it for a minute. Then she said the glaze looked like the old robes on the figures from her village in Extremadura, the ones they'd bring out for Christmas, all blotchy and wrong but full of something. I don't think she knows how much that meant. She's the one person who never made me feel stupid for doing this, even when I was living off tortilla de patatas and rage. I made her take a piece home, the one she liked. She tried to say no. I won.

ok so I spent like a month earlier this year obsessing over my instagram grid, scheduling posts, planning reels, the whole thing. had a notion doc and everything. and you know what happened? nothing. flat engagement, same followers, maybe one sale from it. then I had this week where I just said fuck it and made 40 tiny test tiles, different clay bodies, glazes I mixed myself, firing temps I'd never tried. just messing around, no end goal. I posted them ugly, in progress, some failed. just the real process, no polish. those posts outperformed everything I "planned" by a lot. like triple the saves, actual comments from other potters, and two commissions from people who saw the test tiles and wanted something in that glaze. I think the audience can smell when you're performing vs when you're actually doing the work. the planning was me trying to look like a serious business. the test tiles were me being a ceramicist. anyone else find that the stuff you don't overthink just lands better?

Joder, just opened the kiln and half my pieces are cracked. Some of these little faces look like they're screaming now, which is... on brand I guess? But still, so much work. I think the temperature was a little too high on the glaze firing. Back to the clay dust for me, I guess. At least the ones that survived look pretty cool, especially the ones with the blue glaze pooling in weird ways.

The tube split open this morning near the crimp, so I had to decant the last of it into a small jar. Zinc white I have had since maybe 2019. The new tube from the same maker is stiffer, more chalky, and cools everything it touches. I know the sensible thing is to do an underpainting with it and see if the difference even matters under a glaze. Instead I sat there at the easel mixing it with a little linseed and telling myself it was fine, which is not the same as it being fine. A student asked me last week why I do not just buy the good stuff, meaning the expensive stuff, meaning the stuff I probably should buy. I did not have a good answer. I have a good answer for almost everything else in that studio. Anyway I am painting a corner of the kitchen table with a bowl and a half peeled orange, and the white is the whole thing. Everything else is just the white being interrupted.