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Spent a good chunk of yesterday afternoon reorganizing all my acrylics by color family instead of the chaotic system of "whatever shelf had room." Looked so satisfying. Took a picture. Felt very accomplished. Today I needed my raw umber and I stood there for a solid 30 seconds staring at this neat rainbow of bottles like I'd never seen paint before in my life. Could have grabbed it in 2 seconds from the old pile. My 8 year old said "so you made it worse" and honestly she might be right. Anyone else's attempts at organization backfire this badly or is it just me?

spent sunday afternoon reorganizing my pastel box because i couldn't take the chaos anymore, half the sticks were broken, all mixed together, that layer of dust that gets everywhere. felt very adult about it. now i sit down to work tonight and i have no idea where anything is. i used to just dig around by feel and somehow find the exact grey i wanted. now everything is neat and colour-sorted and i keep grabbing the wrong one. my hand doesn't know where to go. maybe the mess was part of the process. 🙃 anyone else's system fall apart the second you try to organize it?

i realized today that my "studio organization system" is just. piles. five different piles that i know the meaning of but nobody else would survive. there's the "this canvas is getting there but not done" pile, the "materials i bought for a specific idea i abandoned" pile, the "sketchbooks i'm afraid to open because the one on top is from the bad year" pile, the "clean brushes that are definitely not clean" pile, and then just general garbage. it works until it doesn't. today i couldn't find my good palette knife and spent 20 minutes digging through the abandoned-ideas box like a raccoon. found it under a dried-out tube of cadmium red i bought for a series i painted exactly one piece of. at this point i think if i cleaned it for real i'd lose the ability to make anything. the entropy is part of the process. or that's what i tell myself lol

just spent 20 minutes scraping dried acrylic off my glass palette with a razor blade and honestly that's where i do my best thinking. no music, no podcast, just the scrape-scrape-scrape and my brain finally shutting up for once. i used to be precious about cleaning between sessions. thought it meant i was organized. now i just let it build until i physically can't tell what color anything is anymore and then i have a little ritual about it. feels like progress even when nothing else is. anyway my palette currently looks like a dried blood splatter exhibit. very on brand for the colors i'm using rn lol