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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.

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?

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

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.

opened the kiln today and one of the bowls came out looking like a sad potato with a face. i didn't even put a face on it, the glaze just decided that's what it was going to be. i'm honestly keeping it. it's the most honest piece i've made in weeks. everyone talks about the beautiful surprises from firing but nobody mentions the ones where the kiln just insults you. like thanks, i know i slipcast that badly, you didn't have to make it look embarrassed about it too. putting the potato out at the market next sunday with a little sign. "face not intended." see if anyone bites.

opened the kiln this morning and the piece I'd been most worried about, this tall wonky vase with a face melting out of the shoulder, had blown itself apart. shards everywhere. and honestly? best thing I've made this month. not the shards themselves, that's junk. but the way it failed, the face kind of slumped and dripped into the glaze before it cracked, I saw exactly what I'd been doing wrong the whole time. too thick at the base, the weight pulled everything down. I can see the fix now. sometimes the kiln gives you the answer it thinks you need. knew this group would get it. who else cheers when a piece dies. rebuilding it today with a hollow foot. if it works I'll post it, if it explodes again you'll hear about that too.

I said yes because I felt for him. Grief makes people weird and I get it. But he sent me ONE photo of this dog, taken from like 20 feet away, half in shadow, and the dog was black so it's basically just a shape with ears. I spent 12 hours on this painting working from that and reference photos of similar breeds and he picks it up today and goes "I dunno, his nose was warmer than that." His nose. Was warmer. Than that. I wanted to say bro you sent me a photo where I can't even tell if the dog has eyes. I wanted to say the nose is gray because the dog was black and standing in shade and that's literally what color it was in the ONLY IMAGE YOU GAVE ME. I wanted to say I painted this thing with more care than I've painted anything in months because I knew it mattered to you. But I just said "I can glaze some warmth in" and he left looking disappointed and now I'm sitting here furious at myself for taking the commission and furious at him for not understanding what he was asking for and furious at the photo and furious at the whole thing. Why do we do this. Why do we take jobs we know are going to make us feel like this. Because we need money? Because we want to be helpful? Because we're so desperate to prove we can do it that we ignore every red flag? Anyway. He's coming back Saturday. I'm gonna put some warm brown in the nose area and try not to scream.

My sixteen-year-old came into the studio yesterday without knocking, which she never does, and stood behind me for maybe a full minute while I was working. Then she said, "Maman, your paintings look less sad now." I wanted to be defensive at first. But she's right. I didn't even see it until she said it. For years my palette was all terre verte and raw umber and bone black, everything in that low grey northern light. I think I was painting the inside of my own head without realising it. The fallow years I had, the disappointment, it was all there in the colour, every time. Now there's more warmth. Not bright, not cheerful, just... alive. A little Naples yellow in the shadows. A red glaze where I would have left it dead. Kids see things. She doesn't know about the decade I lost, she only knows what she sees on the easel. And she saw it.

Market yesterday, this woman comes over and starts pressing her thumb into every single vessel. Every. One. I counted the marks on three of them after she left. Not firm clay, they were fired pieces, so it didn't do damage, but the psychic damage was real. She looks at me and says "just making sure they're solid, you know how these things crack." Then buys nothing. Tells me she'll "come back with her friend who actually collects." I don't know why that one got to me so much. I've had people shake my pieces like they're testing avocados. Fingernails on the glaze. One guy licked a bowl once, which was weird but honestly less insulting. But the systematic poking, like I was selling her a suspicious melon, that really stayed with me all afternoon. At least she didn't say her nephew could do it. Silver linings, vale.