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Did a commission last year, a big welded steel piece for a private yard. Took seven weeks, three hundred hours easy. When I invoiced her I did the math in my head and it came out to about $38 an hour. That's my day rate, and I've been charging basically the same number for ten years. The scare is that I know exactly which clients would flinch if I moved it. One of them has been with me since I was doing fabrication for hire in the eighties. He pays on time, never haggles, sends me work when I'm slow. Raising my price feels like saying his loyalty runs second to my wallet. So I don't. I just quietly eat the difference and tell myself the piece took longer than usual. A younger guy in my shop asked me the other day what I charge and I lied about it. Not even a big lie, just rounded up a little so I wouldn't sound stupid. Ten years in this and I still choke on my own number. That's the part nobody warns you about: it's not the clients you're scared of, it's looking at yourself and admitting what your time is worth.

I had a small crisis in the studio yesterday that I'm still turning over. I've used genuine rose madder for years, mixed it myself from the lake pigment. It's fugitive, of course, everyone knows that, and yet there's a particular milky transparency to it that the modern quinacridone substitutes simply do not replicate. I've been rationing my last tube like it's contraband. Then I stopped and asked myself what I'm actually doing. I teach students that botanical illustration is about permanence, about recording a specimen faithfully so it outlives the plant. And here I am, hoarding a pigment that will fade in thirty years, putting it in paintings meant to last centuries. It's a bit absurd. Sentiment dressed up as craft. I've decided to use it up properly, on small private studies that are mine alone, and switch the teaching and commissioned work over to the substitutes. The colour will be close enough, and nobody will be lied to about permanence. But I do find I'm oddly reluctant to open that final tube. It feels like saying goodbye to a colleague, which is a ridiculous thing to feel about a pigment. Am I alone in this, or do other painters keep one obsolete material around out of loyalty rather than logic?

I have a gallery in a small city that has, in seven years, sold maybe two things off its walls. Yet I keep sending work there. The owner is serious, the space is quiet, and the pieces hang longer than anywhere else. Something in me values that over the turnover. Maybe I'm fooling myself. But I wonder how many of us have a gallery like that one, the place that's not about numbers, and how we square it with the one that actually moves work. Do you keep a gallery out of loyalty even when nothing sells? Or would you walk?

Had a gallery approach me years ago, all enthusiasm. Wanted first right of refusal on everything I made. No other galleries, no direct sales. I was young enough to be flattered and stupid enough to say yes. Nine months. They sold nothing. Not one piece. And I'd turned down two other opportunities because of the exclusivity clause. Anyone else get burned by a gallery that wanted all your loyalty but couldn't deliver a single sale? How long did you stay before you walked?

I spent most of yesterday painting a single section of a white camellia petal, and I have the faintest residual dread about peeling the masking fluid off today. You never really know if it's going to come away cleanly or take a thin layer of paper with it, and there is very little in studio life quite as deflating as a torn surface at the end of three hours of careful washes. I've tried half a dozen brands over the years. Pebeo is what I keep coming back to, but I wouldn't call it loyalty so much as the least-bad option. And I am still, after decades, occasionally too impatient about letting it dry fully before painting over it. You'd think I would have learned. Does anyone have a brand they actually trust? Or do we all just hold our breath and hope.<｜end▁of▁thinking｜> <｜｜DSML｜｜parameter name="tags" string="false">["watercolor", "botanical illustration", "masking fluid", "technique"]