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I know titanium white is more practical. Covers better, doesn't yellow, the modern choice. But every time I reach for it my hand goes to the zinc instead. I've been doing it for twenty-five years. There's something about the way zinc sits, cooler, a little transparent, it lets the light come through from underneath instead of sealing everything off. Titanium feels dead to me. Like painting with wall paint. Of course it cracks if you use too much in impasto. My teacher told me this in 1998. I still don't care. What's the white you hate or love? Everybody has one.

There's a five-gallon bucket under my main bench that's been collecting offcuts for two years now. Granite chips, bits of alabaster, broken corners off pieces I finished or ruined. I tell myself I'll use them for something someday. Mosaic maybe. Or just crush them for texture in a base. I've never done it. I just keep dropping scraps in there and looking at it sometimes. Some habits are just habits. Not everything needs a reason. But I notice the bucket when I'm stuck on something and it's the only thing in the shop I don't have an opinion about.

Been using the same 1/4 inch masonry bit since 1994. It's got maybe an eighth of an inch left on it and the carbide's chipped in two places. I've got a drawer full of new ones that cut cleaner. But that old bit has gone through three shop walls and half a dozen concrete pours, and I know exactly how it walks before it bites. New ones chatter. That one just goes. My daughter keeps telling me to retire it. Says it's sentimental, like the thing has feelings. It doesn't. It's just measured. When you've pulled a tool a thousand times you don't think about it, you just know the weight of it in your hand. Same reason I don't change how I set a weld after thirty years. Not habit. Just settled. Most people think the old guys are stubborn. We're not. We just already found the thing that works and we're not going to fight it.

I took the "oil on linen, 30x40" caption out of my posts for a month. Not the hashtags, not the process videos, just that little line at the end. I've always put it there out of habit, like a signature. Collectors want to know what they're buying, I told myself. The change was not dramatic but it was real. People started commenting about the light in the room, the mood of the thing, what the woman in the painting was thinking. Before it was mostly "beautiful work" and other painters asking about my medium. I think the technical note was giving people permission to look at it like a spec sheet instead of letting them just feel it. Once the frame of reference was gone they had to meet the painting on its own terms. I put the information back when the piece sells, obviously. But the post itself, the first encounter, I leave it bare now. The gallery can do the talking about dimensions and materials. My job on social media is to make someone stop scrolling because something in the image got under their skin, and I was undercutting that with my own footnotes. Maybe that's just me. Or maybe we all over-explain ourselves online because we're afraid of being misunderstood, and the fear itself is what keeps people at arm's length.

I raised my originals by forty percent at the start of the year. Not a gradual thing, just a decision after a commission took me three weeks longer than I estimated and I did the math on what I actually earned per hour. I expected some pushback, at least a pause before purchases. Nothing. The last three pieces sold within the same window they always have. I am not sure whether to be relieved or annoyed that I undervalued myself for years. The work did not change. The buyers did not change. Only the number did. It makes me wonder how much of what we price is habit dressed up as principle. If you raised rates recently, did it change anything measurable? I would like to know whether my experience is the rule or the exception.

I have a flat hog brush, maybe fifteen years old now. The ferrule is loose, the handle has a crack running through it where I must have left it in solvent too long once, and the bristles are worn down to almost half their original length. It's useless for any kind of clean stroke. But I keep it because it does something no new brush can do, it leaves a mark that's broken, a little ragged, like the paint itself is hesitating. I've tried to buy the same model new. It doesn't work the same way. A new brush is too polite. This happens with tools, but also with the way you work. You develop habits that are actually just wear patterns, and then you mistake them for technique. I don't know if that's a problem or just how it goes.

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.

Someone in a crit last week said my collage work has "a consistent gesture" which I think was a polite way of saying every torn edge I make curls the same way. I checked three old pieces this morning. Yeah. Every single one, the paper rolls toward the same side. I tear with my right hand, pull down and left, every time, for years. It's like finding out you have a signature you never signed. Not sure if this is a thing to fix or just lean into. It's not a bad look honestly, the curl catches light. But now that I've seen it I can't stop seeing it, and knowing it's muscle memory kind of grosses me out. Anyone else ever find a habit this dumb baked into years of work?

I kept a careful record this week because I suspected something was off. Thirty sheets of Arches cold-press ruined, and I assumed the culprit was my own carelessness. Turned out twenty-nine were from a bad batch of masking fluid that never fully dried and pulled up the surface when I removed it. The one that was genuinely my fault was because I forgot to resoak my block and it buckled. I've been painting for long enough that I should have caught the masking fluid issue after the second sheet, not the twenty-first. That is the part that sits poorly with me. I checked the bottle, the shelf life, the temperature. All fine. It simply failed silently, and I trusted it. I've started wetting a test scrap before every session now. It costs me two minutes and saves me a great deal of self-recrimination. If you use masking fluid, I would recommend the habit. The supplier refunded the batch, but they do not refund the hours.

I've got a cardboard box under my cutting table been sitting there maybe twelve years now. Every time I think about tossing it, I dig through it again and pull something out. Little triangles from my grandbaby's Easter dress from 2011. A strip of polyester from a blouse my sister wore to church before she passed. Even a piece of my own wedding dress, Lord, that's been forty years and some change. My grandmother called it "saving for the hard times", not money, but cloth. Said you never know when a scrap you kept will be the very thing you need to finish a quilt right. I thought she was just being old and sentimental. But here I am, same habit, same box. Tell me somebody else keeps a scrap graveyard from pieces that oughta be rags. Or am I just a hoarder with a sewing machine? 😂🙏

I carved a granite bench a few years back for a public garden. Had to source the stone from a quarry two states away, rented a flatbed to haul it, worked it on and off for two months because there were other jobs in between. Sold it for $1,200. That's maybe a dollar an hour if you count research, travel, the rental, the chisels I dulled, and the sanding pads. I knew it at the time and I still said yes. I told myself it was a "public installation" and that was worth something. But the garden closed three years later and I heard the bench got hauled away with the trash. I don't know what the right number was. Double maybe. But what I do know is I priced the materials and my time separately and left out everything else. The knowledge, the years of figuring out how to carve granite without splitting it, the fact that I knew which quarry to call. That all went for free. I still do it. Not as bad, but I still leave money on the table somewhere. Hard habit to break when you started out thinking you should be grateful anyone paid you at all.

A painter friend came to the studio last week and said "you really like that corner" and I thought she meant the actual corner of the room, and I said no, it's just the north light. Then she pulled up three paintings on her phone, mine, and there it was. Same window, same plaster wall on the left, same table pushed at the same angle. Three times. I've been telling myself I'm exploring light and the fall of it over the day. In reality I found a composition that worked twice and I've been quietly doing it again and again. It's not a series, it's a habit wearing a beret. The funny thing is I didn't notice until she said it, and now I can't unsee it. So I'm forcing myself to move the whole setup for the next one. Rearrange everything, paint the corner from the other side, from the floor, anywhere that makes me have to actually look instead of arrive. Anyone else have a signature they didn't know was a rut until someone pointed at it?

There's a construction site visible from my studio window and honestly it's become part of my reference collection whether I like it or not. Two months ago they knocked down this beautiful old bungalow with a veranda and those arched windows, the kind nobody builds anymore. This morning I looked up and the new tower is already at the fourth floor. I've done three sketches of the same view at different stages and I think I'm accidentally documenting the city disappearing in reverse. The workers start at 6am, before the light is even good. I've started timing my chai break to when they break too, mostly because the sound of all that hammering stops and I can finally hear myself think. I keep telling myself I should go draw the older house further down the street before it goes too. But I keep putting it off, same way I keep putting off a lot of things. Maybe that's the real habit to break, na?

i know there's a "right" way to wedge. i've watched the videos. but my body just wants to do this violent ram's head slam every time and i swear the clay remembers the aggression. my left wrist has started clicking in a way that's definitely not normal. tried soft wedging yesterday like a normal person and the clay felt dead. like i'd been polite to it and it didn't trust me. had to go back and really put my weight into it before it started feeling alive again. my teacher from the course would be so disappointed. but also she had perfect wrists at 55 so maybe she was onto something. idk. anyone else have a bad habit you KNOW you should fix but it works so you don't?

Every piece of limestone I carve ends up the same way. I pick the block, map out the form, rough it in right, and then about halfway through I start chasing the vein. There's always this one line of darker stone running through it and I keep trying to work with it, shape around it, make it mean something. It never works. The piece ends up looking like I fought the material instead of the material and me agreeing on something. I did it again this week on a 200 pound piece of Indiana limestone and I knew better the whole time. I told my old mentor about it once. He just looked at me and said the vein isn't the problem, you are. I've been chewing on that for fifteen years and I still don't know if he meant I should stop trying to feature it or stop pretending I can ignore it. Maybe it's the same thing. Anyone else got a habit that keeps repeating even though you know exactly what you're doing when you do it?

I have this habit where every new piece I want to talk myself out of the idea first. I pick it apart, find where it's weak, and if it survives me it's worth pulling a proof. It keeps me honest but it also means I spend half the working day arguing with my own thought. Today I did the opposite. I woke up, had an image in my head before coffee, and I just scratched it into a plate. No framework. No question behind it. It was almost embarrassing, like showing up somewhere underdressed. And you know what the proof looks like? Dead. It looks exactly like something I didn't think about. Which is its own kind of lesson, I suppose, but not the one I wanted to learn. I'm trying to figure out if there's a middle ground between overthinking every mark and just making it badly. Because right now the two speeds are: seminar, or garbage. There's a space in between where you trust the hand but the head is still in the room. I don't know how to get there. Maybe it's just volume. Maybe I have to make fifty bad ones. Anyway, the plate is still on the table. I haven't decided if I'm going to print it or scrub it. Part of me wants to keep it exactly as it is, as evidence.

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.

Kept it in the bottom of my toolbox like I was going to fix it. You don't fix a chisel that splits at the tang. I knew that. But I'd had it since my apprenticeship -- a Pferd 20mm, had the right weight in the hand. Used it on a chunk of Vermont marble back in 2022 and felt it go wrong before I saw it. Put it in the drawer anyway. Tossed it this morning. Felt stupid about it. But the toolbox is lighter and I'm not going to grab the wrong tool out of habit anymore. That's the thing about holding onto broken tools -- you reach for them without thinking and then you're standing there with something that doesn't work and you've lost the rhythm.

ok this is going to sound ridiculous but i'm sitting here cleaning my brushes after finishing a piece and i got genuinely emotional over my old escoda. i've had this one brush since my second year of undergrad, it's a size 10 travel brush, the handle is all chewed up because i was a nervous student who bit her brushes (gross i know but i was 19 and stressed), the ferrule is slightly loose, and i've rewarped the bristles like three times with my mouth after bad cleaning habits. but it still holds a point better than any new brush i own. i literally cannot paint without it. i dropped it once in 2018 and my heart stopped for a second. i know brushes are technically replaceable and there's this whole "don't get attached to tools" mentality in art but like. NO. i AM attached. this thing has been through every single painting i've ever been proud of. it was in my hand when i painted my dad's portrait the year he died. it came with me to every shitty shared studio i've ever had. it's survived three moves and a minor flood. my partner bought me a fancy new escoda for christmas and i keep it in the wrapper because i'm scared to use it. i don't want to replace my old one. it's not the same. anyone else have that one tool that's basically a part of them at this point

there's a certain type of person who'll walk into the studio, see me stood there huffing a sheet of grey lino like it's glue, and just slowly back out again. but i swear to god there's something in that fresh slab, the sharp of it, the dust, the way it's still got that factory flatness before you've put a single mark in it. it's the same feeling as the first cut into a new block of cheese. potential. pure potential. i bought a batch of the cheap japanned stuff last week, the kind that smells like a chemical accident, and i'm embarrassed by how happy it made me. the dog came in, sniffed it, and walked straight back out again. fair play to her. anyone else got a studio smell that just hits right or is it just me and my weird lino habit