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Switched to a standing setup about four months back, not for any noble posture reason, purely because the folding table I was using was too low and I was hunched over it like a question mark by 11am. Now I've got the board propped on a broken tripod my husband was going to throw out, clamped at chest height, and I stand there for three hours at a stretch. Yesterday I did a fairly detailed ink study of the old tiled house near my mother's place, the one with the green shutters, and around hour two my lower back started sending me very clear messages. Ignored them, obviously, because the light was going. Today I'm walking like a woman of eighty. The funny part is the standing does help the line work. You loosen up when you can't rest your wrist on anything, you have to commit. But nobody tells you the trade off is that your legs and back enter the conversation. Considering one of those kitchen anti fatigue mats but then I'll be doing full shiatsu on my own feet and it will look ridiculous in here. Anyway. Standing, sitting, some third thing? What actually works for you.

finally framed a piece that's been leaning against my wall since march. two years of looking at it unframed thinking it was unfinished and wrong and honestly kind of bad. twenty minutes in a cheap frame from ikea and i get it now. it was never the painting, it was the context. there's something about the edge that tells your brain where the work ends and the room begins. anyway now i'm mad at every piece i've sold unframed and also slightly furious i've been showing work like this my whole life lol. does anyone else have a painting they've been living with for ages that a frame completely flipped? or is this just me finally developing taste at 33.

For two years I've painted sitting on a dining chair. Solid teak, my mother-in-law's spare, the kind that's built for a forty-minute meal and not a four-hour session. I keep a folded bedsheet on it for cushioning and I keep telling myself I'll get a proper stool. I have told myself this since 2023. The thing is, when I stand up after a long sitting my lower back is finished, and I've started noticing it in my line work. Ink lines get shorter. I stop reaching across the sheet. The drawing quietly shrinks to what's comfortable from one position, which for an urban sketcher is death, because the whole point is the long confident line that goes where it wants. Friend who does oils told me to just get a draughtsman's chair, the ones with the footring, and I looked at the prices and went quiet. So now I'm doing the classic thing of researching it thoroughly for months while continuing to paint on a chair meant for eating rice and sambar. Curious what everyone else is actually sitting on. Not the aspirational studio tour version, the real one.

when i dropped out of art school nobody told me the real curriculum was "learn to stand in one spot for four hours." i've been standing at the easel since 2021 and my right knee now clicks like a metronome when i walk down stairs. still not getting a stool. reason is dumb and real: sitting makes me think too much. standing, i'm physically in the thing, arm's already moving before the little committee in my head votes. i can see the whole 4x5 canvas without leaning back. the actual problem is my floor. it's cheap laminate and after three years of shifting weight in the same square i've worn a bald patch in the finish, right where my feet live. looks like a horse stood there. landlord is gonna love that. anyway i'm painting a big flat square of that cheap red-orange they use on soup cans, and the only way to feel if the density is right is to back up across the room and squint, which means i'm basically doing lunges all day. my legs are gonna be incredible by the time this show is done. the painting might not be.

Moved my desk out to the front verandah last week because the bedroom studio was hitting me with four walls and no air. Best decision in months. The auntie next door has now asked three times if my AC is broken, and the dog from two houses down comes and sits at the gate watching me paint like he's critiquing my composition. The light out here is genuinely different. I keep catching myself sketching the same old house across the street that I've painted maybe six times already, but at this hour the shadow falls completely differently and I can't help it. Downside is every passerby thinks you're available for conversation. Today the plumber who was fixing the neighbour's tap spent ten minutes giving me unsolicited advice on mixing skin tones. He wasn't wrong though. That's the embarrassing part. 🙂

Okay so I finally caved and bought a tube of genuine terre verte after two years of telling myself the synthetic mix was fine. It was $34. It's a tiny tube. And the second I laid it down I got it, because the synthetic one goes gray-blue and this one just sits there being green, like moss on a rock, it doesn't go anywhere it doesn't want to. Which is annoying honestly because now I have opinions. I'm the person with opinions about dirt now. The thing is I quit my café job in March and every single supply purchase feels like a moral decision. I stood in the aisle doing math on my phone. I know exactly how many tubes of this I could have bought with one shift, and I bought it anyway, and I've been painting a study of the window with the fire escape for two weeks and yesterday the shadow on the sill finally came out right because of it. My mom asked what I did today and I said "I bought some dirt" and she laughed for a solid minute. She's not wrong. Anyway I'm not going back to the synthetic one, that's the whole post.

I've been chasing a pale celadon green for six weeks now, trying to get it to sit correctly on a Ranunculus study I'm finishing. The color kept blooming on me, spreading into the veins of the petal like it had opinions of its own. I tried different paper, different wetness, different layering order. Last night I finally worked out that it wasn't the pigment at all, it was my water. Too much residual mineral in my jar. I switched to distilled and it behaved like a completely different paint. Thirty years in and I'm still surprised when the answer to a stubborn painting is something that boring and basic. The sheet is done now, properly done, and the pale green sits exactly where I put it. It's a tiny victory but it's mine and I'll take it.

ok so I'm at the art supply store today picking out watercolor paper, like actually taking my time because this stuff is expensive and I have a specific feel I'm going for for this piece I'm doing, and this older guy who works there comes up and goes "that stuff's overrated, you should try this" and hands me this cheap cold press that buckles if you breathe on it wrong. I said "oh thanks, I'm looking for the hot press actually" and he goes "no no, cold press is better for beginners, you'll get better results." like sir. I have a BFA. I have been painting with watercolor for eight years. I paint literally every single day. I did not ask for your opinion on my paper. and I just stood there holding my paper and being like "okay thanks" because I'm 26 and I still default to being polite and then I walked away and fumed about it the whole drive home. why do men do this. why is it always at the art store. I have never once had a woman employee at an art store assume I don't know what I'm doing. not once. anyway I bought the hot press and it's beautiful and I'm going to paint something really good on it out of spite. that's the plan.

I've been selling small etchings for €180 since 2021. Same size, same paper, same amount of work. Three years of the same number while my studio rent in Berlin went up twice and the price of copper plates nearly doubled. Last month I finally raised them to €240. Not a huge jump. Still probably too low for the time that goes in. But I did it. Then a former professor, someone whose opinion I actually respect, saw the new price list and said, in that careful tone, that the pricing was "ambitious." Asked if I was worried about "pricing myself out" of the market. The market being what, exactly? The market of people who think art should cost as much as a nice dinner? I didn't say what I wanted to say, which is that I know etchers in London charging £400 for a similar plate and nobody calls that ambitious. I just said I'd think about it. Now I'm sitting here wondering if I should have raised them more, or if I'm actually wrong. The math says €240 is still a bad hourly rate when you add up drawing time, plate prep, printing, editioning. But the voice of that professor is stuck in my head.

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.

doing a freelance thing for a small bakery, logo refresh, and the owner sent me a "brand guidelines pdf" that is three pages long and page two is just comic sans with a note that says "this is our font, it's fun." i have spent an hour now trying to make comic sans work. i have tried it big, i have tried it spaced out, i have tried it in a nice warm cream on brown. it still looks like a permission slip from 2004. i am losing to it. the worst part is she's right that it's "fun." it is fun. it's fun in the way that a whoopee cushion is fun, which is to say it works exactly once and then everyone in the room wants to leave. i can't say that to her, obviously. i sent back a version where i quietly swapped it for something friendlier and she replied "oh no, that's not our font." considering just painting a sign for my own wall instead of finishing this. my wall doesn't have opinions

ok so I've been going back and forth on this for months and I want actual opinions from people who've done it more than me. When you're cold approaching a gallery you've never talked to, do you just walk in with a portfolio and hope the person at the desk is in a good mood? Or do you email first and wait three weeks for a reply that never comes? I did the walk-in thing once. Drove 40 minutes, hyped myself up in the parking lot, walked in, and the woman at the front was SO nice and then told me the owner "handles submissions" and to email. Which I did. Never heard back. And then I sat in my car for like 15 minutes feeling like I'd been rejected by the receptionist, haha 😭 But honestly I still think the walk-in might be better?? Because at least they've seen your face?? Or is that just me being naive and wasting gas money. Tell me your actual method and whether it worked, because I'm 0 for 2 right now and starting to think I'm doing it wrong. also if you're a "walk in and ask to see the space first, talk about the art later" person, I need to know why, because that scares me more than anything

There is a man at the Sunday market who has now, three weeks running, come over to my stall just to tell me I'm drying my prints wrong. Not buying. Not asking. Just stopping to inform me that the washing line arrangement is inefficient and I should be using a proper rack with clips, the kind he uses for his own hobby, which is model trains. I stood there holding a sheet of paper that had been soaked in the Atlantic and left in the sun for eight hours and this man wanted to teach me about clips. The thing is, I smiled and nodded. I always do. I nod and let them talk and it costs me nothing and I hate that I do it, I hate the politeness of it, I hate that my mother raised me to be accommodating to men who have opinions about my craft that they arrived at without ever once doing it. I didn't say that the line is how it's done, that the clothesline is part of the process, that the paper curling in the salt wind is the whole point. I just said "hm" and handed his change back. I have been thinking about it all week. Not the man. The nod.

I wiped the same forearm four times this morning. Not the whole figure, just the forearm, from the elbow to the wrist, and each time it came back slightly worse than the one before it. The problem is the light in the studio changed between Tuesday and today. Nothing dramatic, just that grey February light of Lyon that has no opinion about anything, and now the arm I painted on Tuesday looks like it belongs to a different room. So I scrape it down and try again and it is still wrong. At the fourth attempt I realised I was painting the memory of Tuesday's arm instead of the one in front of me. Very humbling. The model comes back Thursday. I will probably do a fifth. Voilà. In the meantime I am looking at a corner of the canvas I am actually happy with, a bit of the shirt collar, and pretending the rest of it does not exist.

there's a clock radio in the studio, the kind with the red numbers, and the antenna broke off years ago so it gets exactly one station and half of it is static. I keep meaning to fix it. I never fix it. so the day has a shape now. some point in the afternoon the same furniture ad comes on and I know I'm about two hours from losing the light. I've started pacing myself to it without deciding to. heard that ad read so many times I can say it along with the guy. he sounds tired. I respect it. tried a playlist last week, lasted twenty minutes, everything about it felt like someone else in the room telling me how to feel. the static doesn't have opinions. anyway the paper I've been layering for the last three days is still buckling at the edges and I can't decide if I'm going to fight it or let it do that. leaning toward letting it.

I have painted standing at the same tilted board for eighteen years and I am not about to change now, but I will admit the body is keeping score. Two hours into a Rosa 'Fantin-Latour' study this afternoon, everything from the shoulder blade down informed me, quietly, that it had opinions. The thing is, sitting changes the angle of the arm and I can feel it in the line. Standing, the wrist comes off the board at a shallower angle and the edge of a petal behaves. Sit down and the whole stroke goes stiff and a little nervous. I know this sounds like superstition. I have tested it. It is not superstition. What I have done instead of sitting is bought a proper anti-fatigue mat, the kind meant for people who stand at benches all day, and it has helped more than I expected. The other change is that I now stop every forty minutes whether the wash wants me to or not, and I go and look out of the back window at the actual plants, which is not rest so much as research. I would genuinely like to know whether anyone here has solved the standing problem in a way that does not involve simply getting a decade younger. I am not interested in a drafting chair recommendation unless you have used it for botanical work specifically and can tell me what it does to a fine line.

sold a piece to a stranger in june. big one, took me like three weeks. yesterday i got an email with a photo of it hanging above their couch next to a framed print of... something from ikea i think? and honestly it looked wrong in their house. wrong scale, wrong colors for their walls, nothing matched. and i was weirdly happy about it? like yeah part of me is like "that does NOT go there" but also the painting has a whole other life now that has nothing to do with me and my studio and my opinion. it's just living somewhere, above a couch, next to ikea art, being somebody's Tuesday. that's kind of the whole point of making it in the first place. i don't know if i have a clean way to say it. it's just been on my mind all day. anyway if you ever wondered where your art goes, it goes to a stranger's living room that you would absolutely redecorate. liberating honestly.

Did the accounts for the last market season over a cup of tea this morning, the way you do, and I nearly spat it out. Sold 240 prints over eight Saturdays, which sounds great till you add up the fine: about €4,600 in, and then the stall fee, the petrol, the framing offcuts, the lino and ink and paper and the new gouges I had to buy because the old ones went blunt halfway through July. Net came out around €900 for the season. That's not a business, that's a very slow hobby with a stronger opinion of itself. But here's the thing I keep coming back to. I met a woman at the October market who bought one print of the heron and then came back the next Saturday with her daughter and bought another one the same, "one for each of them" she said. That's not in the accounts. And I sold one to an American lad who sent me a photo of it framed above his fireplace in Chicago, which is mad when you think the lino block it came from has a coffee ring on it from the Tuesday before. I know the whole thing should be priced better and I know the answer is I'm a coward with my own numbers. But I also know I'd still do the eight Saturdays for less than minimum wage, and I'm not sure whether to be proud of that or embarrassed by it. Maybe both. Anyone else ever run the numbers and then decided not to learn anything from them? 🙂

Gallery sold one of my bigger installations last spring. Fine, good money, I thought it was over. Then the collector's conservator calls me: they want to install it in a stairwell in a private house. The piece has a sprinkler head and a functioning old fire alarm that I wired to a bicycle bell. It's not decorative. It goes off if the humidity shifts. I spent three weeks in a correspondence about whether the bell is "part of the artwork" or "safety equipment." Their lawyers had an opinion. My whole life's philosophy was in that email thread. Anyway it's installed now, in a corridor, and the bell rings if someone opens the window in winter. The collector loves it. Says it's alive. Funniest part: the piece was originally built from an abandoned factory's evacuation signage. I made it about how we don't hear warnings anymore. Now it's genuinely annoying them in their own house. Sometimes the work knows better than you do.

The running hare. I've carved that fella five separate times over the years because I keep wearing the block down and telling myself I'll move on to something else, and then the proofs come out and I'm back at it again. Same hare, every time, and the dog genuinely sighs when he sees me pulling out the lino. Anyway I had a stack of the latest edition, 25 prints, sitting in the studio since before Christmas, and I've been carting them to markets and leaving them with the gallery in town and selling them one at a time off the website. And I checked this morning over my tea and there's one left. One. And then a woman from Boston bought that one before lunch. Twenty-five prints, every one hand-pulled by me, and they're gone. I know what the edition record says but it's not the money, sure it's not huge money, it's that there's 25 people out there who now have a bit of my head on their wall. That's a mad thought when you sit with it. The first time I ever sold a print was off a trestle table at a Christmas market for twenty quid and I nearly shook the woman's hand off her. The block's worn to bits now anyway. So it's onto the sixth one, or onto something else entirely. I haven't decided. The dog has an opinion and I'm not sure I want to hear it.