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I've been working on this little still life for three days, just lemons and a blue cloth, nothing fancy, and I mixed this gorgeous warm shadow color yesterday, like a deep ochre-y purple, it was PERFECT. Came back this morning and it's dried into this weak, chalky lavender thing that has absolutely nothing to do with what I saw on my palette. And I KNOW gouache dries down, I know this, I've been painting with it for years, but it still gets me every time. I just sat there staring at it like... who are you. I tried glazing a thin wash of the original mix back over it and now it looks muddy and overworked and I think I need to just let it dry again and reassess but I'm so annoyed. The lemons were looking so good 😭 Has anyone found a reliable way to predict the dry-down shift or is it just eternal suffering and learning to mix everything a little punchier than you think you need?

I mixed a big batch of cadmium red deep with a little burnt umber and a touch of cold wax medium last Tuesday. Laid it down in a broad band across the bottom third of a 180 x 140. Looked right. Earthy but alive. Yesterday I walked in and it had gone brown. Flat and dead. Not dried differently, the mixture itself seems to have settled or separated or just decided to be something else overnight. This happens to me more than I'd like and I still don't fully understand the chemistry. The pigment particles are heavy, I know that. Maybe the cold wax lets them migrate in ways I'm not accounting for. Or maybe I'm just not mixing thoroughly enough. But I stir it for a good five minutes, scrape and fold. I'm wondering if other people have a colour they love that reliably betrays them after a day. And if you've found a fix that isn't just mixing fresh every session because at this scale that gets expensive fast.

Not as a study, not trying to match anything specific. Just mixing it, scraping it off, mixing again. Different combinations of ivory black and white, a little ultramarine, a touch of raw umber, sometimes a speck of yellow ochre. Seeing how far I could push the temperature before it stopped being grey and became something else entirely. My husband came in to ask about dinner and I think he was a little alarmed. But this is the thing nobody tells you when you start painting, you will spend whole days doing something that looks like nothing, and it's not wasted time. The hand learns things the eye can't explain. What's your useless practice? The thing you do that produces nothing visible but you know matters.

ok so this is embarrassing and i'm probably the only person who does this but when i'm mixing colors, like really sitting there trying to nail a specific green or getting a skin tone right, i have a playlist i made that's literally just the first 30 seconds of songs repeated. like the buildup part over and over. i don't know why it works but my brain just turns off the "am i doing this right" noise and i can actually feel what the color needs. my partner walked in the other day and was like "...is this the same song?" and i had to explain myself and it sounded insane. but the color i mixed after that? genuinely the best warm grey i've ever made. so i'm not sorry hahaha does anyone else have a weird little ritual that sounds dumb but actually does something for your work??

Been using the same mix of ferric nitrate and water for twenty years. I know exactly how it will take on a given piece of steel, how the humidity matters, how clean the surface is, whether I've overheated the metal before applying it. The bottle from the supply house gives you a predictable brown that looks like nothing I've ever seen on actual weather-worn steel. Last week I watched a younger guy in the shared shop spray on a commercial patina from a pump bottle and wait for it to look like something. That's not how it works. You build it in layers, you react to what the metal does, you stop when it's right, sometimes ten minutes in, sometimes three days. I'm not saying everyone should mix their own. I'm saying the shortcuts don't teach you what's happening.

I've been going through the last few boxes I still had in storage. Found a stack of his mix tapes from high school, hand-labeled, terrible handwriting, bands I haven't thought about in twenty years. I took one apart carefully and mounted the tape reel inside a shadow box with the tracklist card. Just the thing itself, no embellishment. It came out better than I expected. It's not for sale, I think. Maybe I'll keep it for myself. Felt good to work on something that wasn't trying to be anything. Just a record of someone existing.

I've been using the same Gamblin cold wax for about six years now. Same supplier. Same shelf in the studio. And the last two tubs I've opened, the consistency is off. Not separated, not bad exactly, but it's stiff in a way it never was before. You know how it should feel when you mix it fifty-fifty with the oil? Like soft fudge. Now it's more like, I don't know, cold mashed potato. You have to work it longer to get it to incorporate. I mix a lot of my own paint, so this matters. When the wax doesn't move the same, the whole layering rhythm shifts. I've had to start warming the tub in hot water before I mix, which I never had to do. Could be a batch thing. Could be they changed the formulation and I missed the announcement. Curious if anyone else has noticed this or if I just got two bad tubs in a row.

Myself Ramesh. I want to say something that has been on my mind. In the old way, we make our own colours. Rice paste for white. Lampblack from the diya. The red from kusum flower or from geru, the earth. My mother she would grind these things for hours on the sil-batta, mixing with gum from the babul tree. The colour sits on the paper differently. It breathes. Now many students and even some senior artists are using poster colours from the market. It is faster. Also cheaper sometimes. But I look at those paintings and the line has no life. The colour is flat like plastic. You can feel no hand in it. One girl in my class last month she told me guruji natural colours take too long. I said beta that is not a problem. That is the art itself. The grinding, the mixing, the waiting, this is not wasted time. This is the painting. But I also understand. The buyers they want bright. They want quick. And we must eat. So I am conflicted ji. I use both now. Some natural for my own work, some synthetic when I must. But I feel a little shame mixing the two in one painting. Like I am cheating my grandmother. Anyone else feel this way about old materials vs new ones? Or is it only me.🙂

I have this old porcelain palette I've been using for maybe twelve years. It's cracked, the well in the corner has a chip that I keep meaning to sand smooth, and the patina of dried paint around the edges is so thick now it's changed the shape. My students look at it like it's a biohazard. But the thing is, I know exactly where every colour lives on it. My hand goes there without my eyes. I could mix a flesh tone in the dark on that palette. And when I try a clean one, a nice new piece of glass, even, I'm suddenly a stranger to myself. The mixes come out wrong. I'm hesitating. There's something about the accumulated stain of years that becomes part of the process. The ghost of a terre verte I mixed three weeks ago still faintly in the white. The smear of lead white that's been there so long it's practically fired on. It's not laziness. It's memory.

It's not just about neutralising colour. A good grey has life in it. It can be warm, cool, lean towards blue or violet, have an almost imperceptible undertone of ochre. Today I was trying to match the light on a pewter jug, that soft, luminous shadow. It took several tries, adding tiny touches of raw umber, a whisper of ultramarine, a minuscule bit of flake white. When it was finally right, that quiet hum of satisfaction. It’s a small thing, perhaps, but it’s everything. Voilà.

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.

There's this moment before I start, I scrape the palette clean with the knife, even if it's already clean from yesterday. That thin metal sound across the glass. Then I lay out the white, the earth colours, the few others I'll use. It's almost a little ritual. I don't know if it prepares me or just delays the moment of actually having to commit the first stroke. Today I had a tube of lead white that's stiffened to almost butter. Had to warm it in my hand for five minutes. Annoying but I like it more than the runny zinc stuff. You pay for the trouble, you know? The paint behaves better. How do you start? Not the aspirational version. The actual one.

I've been struggling with achieving a true, permanent deep red for a series of studies on Papaver somniferum. Cadmium reds, while vibrant, tend to shift towards orange over time, and alizarin crimson isn't entirely lightfast for this kind of archival work. My current approach involves layering a small amount of quinacridone red with a touch of ultramarine blue, glazed over a base of burnt sienna. It’s a painstaking process, but the resulting depth and stability are, I think, worth the effort. Does anyone else have a preferred method for this particular hue?

My apologies ji, but today the natural pigment for the blue colour is just not listening to me. I am mixing and mixing, using the same process my mother and grandmother taught me, but it is coming out dull, not the vibrant indigo it should be. This is the colour for the peacock's neck, you see, and it must be just so. Perhaps the humidity is too high in Madhubani today? It is frustrating when the materials themselves seem to have a mind of their own.

I had this whole thing planned out for today, I was gonna paint this corner of my studio where the afternoon light hits this dumb little ceramic donkey my mom got me at a flea market, and I mixed this perfect warm gray for the shadow side, really felt good about it, and then I walked away to let it settle for literally two minutes and came back and it was already cracking. Gouache is such a brat sometimes. Like alright fine I guess we're starting over?? And I KNOW it's because I didn't work the pigment back enough before I put it down, I was too excited, I rushed it. I do this every time I'm really into a piece. My partner says I need to slow down but like, the thing is when I'm excited about something I just wanna GET IT DOWN you know?? And then the materials are like nope sorry try again. Anyway I'm re-mixing and I'm gonna be real patient about it this time lol. The light's still good for another hour or so. We'll see if I learned my lesson.

I keep my palette clean maybe the first hour of a painting. After that it's just layers of dried paint I mix into, scrape off, add more on top. Someone told me last week I should clean it between sessions and I looked at them like they'd suggested I set my hair on fire. I know painters who treat their palette like an altar. Wipe it down, lay fresh piles, everything in its place. I've tried. I last about twenty minutes before I start working wet into wet and the whole thing turns into a crusty ruin again. There's something about the chaos that helps me find colour faster, I think. I don't have to decide, I just pull from whatever's there and adjust. Today I've got a smear of burnt sienna that's been there since Tuesday, a pool of medium I accidentally spilled, and what might be ultramarine or might be cobalt, I can't tell anymore because it's mixed with the grey from yesterday's shadows. It's fine. The painting is coming along. Maybe I'll scrape it clean when this one's done. Maybe not.

I had a booth at a local craft fair Saturday and a woman picked up one of my acrylic landscapes, looked at it for a good minute, and said "oh this is nice, I could probably do this with my daughter's $5 watercolor set." And I just stood there like... okay. So do it then? I'd love to see you mix titanium white into a puddle of Crayola paint and get that kind of coverage on canvas. Please. Film it. I didn't say any of that of course. I smiled and said "you should give it a try, it's really relaxing!" and she moved on. My husband said I was too nice and I probably was but also what's the point. People who think art supplies are all the same are not people you're going to convince in one conversation at a folding table. Still felt like packing up my easel and going home though.

I took on a commission last year that I was genuinely unsure about. A woman brought me a box of broken tile from her old family bathroom, the renovation had just torn it out, and asked if I could make something from it. Not a mosaic of something, she said. Just... the tile itself, made into something that feels like it means something. I said yes because I liked her face and I needed the work. Then I sat with five kilos of beige ceramic for three months not knowing what to do. Tried arranging it as patterns, tried mixing it with other material, nothing worked. It just looked like broken bathroom tile. In the end I cut every single piece smaller, reduced it all to tiny irregular shards, almost like coarse sand, and set it into a very simple circle, graded from pale to dark, like a kind of eclipse or a coin. No image. Just the material, transformed by being reduced and rebuilt. Took weeks of just cutting and placing, cutting and placing. She picked it up yesterday and cried. Said it looked like her grandmother's bathroom floor, which wasn't even something I knew about. I don't know if I'll ever do that again, but I'm glad I did it once. Something about letting the material lead instead of imposing a design. Hard to describe. But it worked.

had a woman reach out about a piece for her new apartment. wanted something "meaningful" but she kept circling back to can you do it for less. i gave her my actual number, $400 for a 16x20 mixed media on panel, which is already on the low side for me. she did that thing where they pause too long and then say "okay" in a voice that means the opposite. i offered to do a smaller size or a simpler palette to bring it down and she said no she wanted the original idea. so i said alright well that's the price. she said she'd think about it. haven't heard back. it's been two weeks. the part that gets me is i know i could've quoted $250 and she'd have said yes and i'd be making the same thing for less and resenting it the whole time. but also $400 isn't nothing to me either so i'm sitting here like was i being stubborn or just not desperate yet. still don't know which one is true.

A woman from Melbourne found me last month because of a blog post I wrote seven years ago, when I was still teaching and barely painting. It was about why I mix my own colours instead of using tube paints straight, I was annoyed about something, I don't even remember what, and I just wrote it out in fifteen minutes on a Wednesday evening. No photos, no SEO, just a rant about the texture of paint straight from the tube being dead on the canvas. She said she'd read it in 2018, forgot about it, found it again this year while looking for something else entirely. She bought two paintings sight-unseen because she said she could tell I actually cared about the material. And I have spent the last three years posting reels, showing my process, trying to be "engaging" on Instagram, that stuff gets likes from other artists, maybe a commission every few months. This one old piece of writing, sitting there untouched, did more than all of it. I don't know what the lesson is exactly. Keep the old things alive, maybe. Don't throw away the unfashionable parts of how you work just because the algorithm doesn't reward them. Or maybe it's that a real opinion outlasts a good strategy every time.