I spent a month on a copper plate for this figure study. Burnishing, scraping back, re-etching the same passages maybe four or five times, convinced each time I was just one pass away from getting the shadow right. And at some point the plate just stopped holding anything. The image literally disappeared into the metal. What's left is a ghost, a faint gray rectangle that reads as nothing. Everyone says the classic thing, that you can't overwork copper, you ruin the plate and then you learn. But I keep looking at the ghost and thinking it actually says more about how I work than the figure ever did. All that effort, all that repetition, and the honest end state is a worn-out surface. I don't know if I should pull a few prints of it like that or just bury it. Part of me thinks showing the failure on purpose is its own kind of move, especially in a medium that's all about the multiple and the proof. The other part thinks I'm just rationalizing a wasted month with a theory, which is exactly the thing I do when a piece doesn't work. Anyone else kept a dead plate and printed it anyway?
Working on a little 8x10 of a pear on a blue cloth for a craft fair submission this weekend. It's my third painting this week and I think I cooked it. The highlights on the pear started out nice and soft and I kept messing with them and now it looks like it's made of plastic. The cloth is okay but the whole thing just feels... tight. Like I sucked the life out of it by trying too hard. I know the answer is probably "put the brush down and walk away" but has anyone actually gotten better at knowing when a piece is done? Or is it always this guessing game of is it finished or did I just ruin it?
genuinely cannot tell anymore. been staring at this for two days. the lower half feels resolved but something about the sky is bugging me and i don't know if it's a real problem or if ive just looked at it so long my eyes broke. do i stop or keep pushing. be honest with me
I've had a student since October, a woman in her fifties who spent her whole life in accounting and paints like someone who has never been told a thing is good enough. She had the hardest time with the first lay-in. Everything she did, she wanted to finish immediately, blend it smooth, make it look like a photograph of a thing. I kept telling her: ugly now, beautiful later. She did not believe me, which is healthy, honestly. Tuesday she brought in a cast study, a plaster foot, and the grisaille was correct. Not pretty. Correct. Values sitting in the right place, the halftone where it belongs, the edges soft only where the light actually turns. She was almost apologetic about it, said it looked "unfinished and dirty." I told her that is what an underpainting is supposed to look like, and she went very quiet, and then she said, "oh. So I've been painting the wrong part of the process for forty years." That's the win. Not the foot. The forty years. I'm going to let her glaze it next week and I'm a little nervous, because glazing over a good grisaille is like putting a coat on a child and sending them out the door. If she overworks it I'll be sick. But she earned it.
Working on a half-length figure, a woman at a window, morning light from the left. Third glaze over a dry underpainting, just ultramarine and a touch of raw umber thinned down to almost nothing. Maybe forty minutes of work in the whole layer. My daughter called about something at school. I had the brush in my hand, so of course I kept going while I talked. Ten minutes later I looked and the whole passage had gone chalky and dead. I had overworked it with the phone against my ear instead of my attention on the surface. Not the paint's fault. Not even really mine. But this is the thing nobody tells you early: glazing is not a technique, it's a state of concentration. You cannot glaze and do anything else. The layer knows when you were somewhere else. Scraped it back with the palette knife, which is its own small grief when a passage was almost there. Tomorrow the underpainting is still underneath, waiting, which is the only mercy of the method. Nothing is ever truly lost until you build it up too thick to see through. I've started leaving my phone in the other room during the wet stages. Not out of principle. Just because the layer can tell.
Not a study exactly. More like I got stuck on the line from her ear down to the chin and kept thinking the next sheet would fix it. Eleven sheets of grey Canson, all of them on the floor around my chair now, and my thumb is so black it looks bruised. The annoying part is that I can see the problem in every one of them. Too soft in the corner. Then too sharp and she looks like a different person. Number seven is closest but I overworked the shadow under the jaw and now it sits flat. I know it is flat. I still cannot make my hand do the other thing. I read once that you should stop while it is going well, and I try, but with faces I never know when that is until two hours later when it is too late. Pastel does not let you take it back either. Once the tooth of the paper is full, that is that. Anyway. Does anyone else end up with a pile like this, or do you all stop at three and go make tea. I would honestly like to know what the stopping point feels like from the inside.
Every single time. The body will be alive, charcoal doing exactly what I want, the shoulders and the tilt of the head all working. Then I get to the face and something in my hand goes tight and I overwork it into a mask. Dead. Flat. I know the fix is to stop. I never stop. I stood back today and looked at this piece that was genuinely good up to the chin and I wanted to throw it across the room. I think it's that I'm scared. Like if I don't nail the face then the whole thing was for nothing, which is dumb because the whole thing IS the whole thing. The face is like 10% of the surface. But my brain treats it like the final exam. Anyone else do this with a specific part? Where you'll happily wreck a whole canvas but the second you hit this one spot you turn into a control freak? I've been trying to paint the face last and loose, just suggestion, and I keep caving. Would honestly love to know if anyone broke this or if we're all just fighting the same gremlin.
I spent nearly two weeks not painting. Not because I was busy, which I was, but because I kept telling myself I'd only start once I went to the art store and got proper cold-pressed paper. The good stuff. Something deserving of the sketch I had in my head. Finally today I was in front of the stationery shelf in a random supermarket near my mother's place, of all places, and they had these thin spiral-bound sketchbooks. Rough cartridge, ghost of a grain. The kind schoolkids use for drawing class. Ninety rupees or something. Bought it out of spite, basically. And I sat on my balcony this evening and painted the water tank on the neighbour's roof, just the tank and the wires and the late light hitting the wall behind it. Nothing ambitious. It took me forty minutes and the paper buckled a little where I overworked the wash, and the whole thing has that cheap-paper fuzz that I used to hate when I was in architecture school. I'm honestly a bit in love with it. That fuzz has a texture you can't get on the fancy stuff. Funny how the good paper became another excuse to not work. I'm going to give myself permission to ruin a few more of these cheap books before I even think about touching my nice blocks again.
I had a moment yesterday in the studio that I don't know how to name. The painting I'd been working on for three months, I sat down in front of it and there was nothing left to do. No scrape, no glaze, no thin wash over a passage that bothered me. Just stillness. I sat there for maybe twenty minutes and then I packed my brushes and left at three in the afternoon. This doesn't happen often. Most paintings I stop out of exhaustion or a deadline or because I've overworked them into a corner. But this one just closed itself. Like a door clicking shut. I walked home through the park and felt nothing like triumph. More like a kind of hollow quiet. As if the painting had taken something with it that I'd been carrying. My wife asked if I was sick. I said no, the painting is finished. She said ah, and that was the right answer. Tomorrow I'll have to look at it again and see if it's really true. But for now I'm still in that quiet.
two years it's been leaning against the wall in my studio, face turned away like I couldn't stand to look at it. this landscape I started right after my brother died, trying to paint the place we scattered his ashes, and it was just... bad. muddy. overworked. I couldn't touch it. today I finally pulled the staples out. ripped the canvas off the frame. just let it crumple on the floor. and then I cut out the only part of it that worked, maybe six square inches of sky, and glued it into my sketchbook. like a little window. the rest went in the trash. felt like I could breathe again.
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 had this little study going, just a corner of my desk with the morning light hitting a ceramic bowl, nothing ambitious, and it was genuinely working. The washes were doing exactly what I wanted, the edges were soft where they should be soft, I was so pleased with myself. And then I started "fixing" things. Just tiny little adjustments. A little more shadow here, a little more definition there. Twenty minutes later I had a muddy overworked mess and I just sat there staring at it like why do I do this to myself every single time. Watercolor is so unforgiving about that specific impulse. Oil you can scrape back, acrylic you can paint over, gouache you can reactivate if you're careful. But watercolor just sits there and lets you ruin it and you watch yourself do it in real time. I know the solution is to just stop. Walk away. Start something else. But man, the compulsion to keep noodling is so strong when something is almost there. Almost there feels worse than not even close, somehow. Anyway I started fresh and the second one is fine but not as good as the first one was before I killed it. Just needed to yell into the void about this specific flavor of artist self-sabotage. Does anyone else have a version of this or is it just me and my inability to leave well enough alone
I bought a hydrangea from the bodega on Monday because it was the exact blue of something I couldn't stop thinking about, and I've been painting it over and over trying to chase that color down. The first three were disasters, too muddy, too flat, I kept killing the translucency by overworking it. Last night I was so fed up I almost scraped the paper clean and gave up. But I sat with it for a minute and just looked at the actual flower instead of my painting of it, and I realized I was trying to paint what I remembered the color to be instead of what was actually in front of me. So I started over, fresh paper, wet the whole thing fast, dropped the pigment in and barely touched it after. And it just… worked. The light caught it and I actually gasped. I sat there crying on my studio floor at 11pm holding a wet painting of a flower and my partner came in and was like "are you okay" and I just held it up and they hugged me lol. Anyway that's the whole thing. I love this dumb frustrating medium so much. Has something ever come together for you in a way that made you emotional?? I want to hear about it.
Started three canvases this week and killed all three by Thursday. Overworked, muddy, the cold wax turning to glue because I wouldn't stop pushing. You know that feeling when you can feel yourself making it worse and you keep going anyway. This morning I scraped one of them down to the linen with a palette knife. Just a ghost of yellow ochre left in the weave. I thought, good, now it's a fresh surface and I've got nothing. Sat with it for an hour. Then I took a tube of Prussian blue and a rag and just wiped it across, thin, no plan, no composition. Let it dry forty minutes. Came back and put one mark on it, a single stroke, cadmium orange, right through the middle. Stood there. That was it. That was the whole painting. It's small. 60 x 80. But it has something the other three didn't have. It knows when to stop. I don't learn that lesson, I relearn it every time.
Not the whole drawing, just the first blocking layer on the face. I caught myself doing it last night around eleven, mouthing numbers, and I got to somewhere in the forties before I noticed what I was doing and stopped. It started as a way to keep myself from overworking. If I know a layer took me nine minutes I can leave it alone. But now it's turned into a little ritual I can't skip, and when I forget where I was I have to start the count over, which is silly because the drawing doesn't know anything about it. The portrait on the easel is a woman I've done twice already. Third time. First two are in the drawer and stay there. Toned grey paper, mostly burnt sienna and a bit of a pale blue in the shadows of the neck, and last night the jaw finally did what I wanted and I sat there with my hand still holding the pastel in the air like an idiot, not wanting to touch it again. Anyway. Does anyone else have one of these small pointless habits that started as a useful trick and now just runs you? I would like to hear that I am not the only one talking to myself in numbers at midnight 🙂
day 6 of the big one, a 36x48 with this figure holding a phone at chest height. hands are usually fine for me but this one's foreshortened and the thumb has to read at like 3/4 scale or the whole pose goes slack. painted it 11 times on scrap paper before touching the canvas. number one, the one i did fast before coffee, is the good one. the other ten are me trying to fix a problem the first one didn't have. i know this because i did it with a head last month and then a foot the month before that. i keep relearning it like a goldfish. the annoying part is the 11th is genuinely overworked, the edge on the palm is muddy, and i'm probably going to paint it anyway because i've been staring at it for four hours and i've lost the ability to see it. that's the actual wall, not the hand. i can't tell if it's bad or if i'm just tired. anyway if you have a trick for knowing when the first pass was right so you don't keep "improving" it into the ground, i'd take it. i don't have one. my trick is currently painting 10 more and then going back to number one, which is not a trick, it's just a tax.
I have a half-figure on the easel, a woman turned slightly away, one hand resting on the back of a chair. Almost nothing else decided yet. The hand is the problem. First pass I painted it thin, straight into the wet ground, no drawing underneath worth keeping. It was loose and a little clumsy and it read. Then I decided to take it seriously. Redrew it properly, measured it against the head, corrected the knuckle, gave it a real structure. Dead. Third time I chased that structure and overworked it worse. Fourth I wiped back to the ground and did it again fast, and it came out almost exactly like the first. What I keep circling: I know the anatomy, I know why the first one worked (the edge of the forearm got lost in the shadow, so the eye finished the shape), and I still could not paint it that way on purpose. The knowledge gets in front of the seeing. So the question I have no answer for, and I'd like yours: when you finally see what the good version was, do you paint it again clean, or do you scrape the whole thing and let it happen once? Also, for the record, I am not wiping the hand a fifth time. That is what I told myself this morning and I have already caught myself looking at the rag.
It has taken me four sheets and most of a week to get the silver marbling on a single Cyclamen hederifolium leaf correct, and I finished it this morning. The difficulty is not the pattern. Anyone can trace a pattern. The difficulty is that the silver is not a color laid on top of the green. It sits in the leaf and shifts with the light, and if you paint it as a flat grey wash you get something that looks like a print of the leaf rather than the leaf. I tried masking fluid on the second attempt and it left a hard, dead edge I could see from across the room. Third attempt I overworked it and the paper went to wool. This one is four thin washes of a very weak viridian and French ultramarine, with the silver left as bare paper and only the faintest cool shadow dropped in at the margins of the marking. I did nothing to it for two days in between and that was the trick, as it usually is. It is one leaf on a half sheet. My husband asked what I had been doing all week and I showed him and he said, "that's one leaf." He is not wrong, and he is also not a botanical painter. I have five more to do for the plate. Some weeks this work is entirely humbling and I would not trade it.
There's a spot on the piece I'm working on where the paper has gone soft and fuzzy from me going over it maybe fifteen times. I know it's overworked. I know it's dead. And I still keep going back to it with another wet brush like something's going to finally show up that wasn't there the first fourteen passes. It's a doorway. A doorway in an old photo I've been painting around for weeks. Every time I walk past the table I think okay, leave it alone, and then I'm mixing another wash. Anyone else got a patch they can't stop murdering? Not technique advice, I've heard it all. Just wondering if the compulsion is a thing or if I'm the only one doing self-sabotage in slow motion.
Found a photo of my grandfather's workshop tucked in a box of stuff my mom finally gave up. Grainy, probably 1960s, the bench is covered in things I can't identify. Tools, jars, something that might be a clamp. I've built three separate pieces around that photo now and every single one has a different kind of light in it. The original has none at all, it's just flat flash shadow. My brain keeps inventing light that isn't there because I want the room to feel a certain way. The last version is maybe the worst. Technically fine. Dead. I think I'm overworking the sentiment. I want the viewer to feel something I can't actually name, so I keep piling on. Wondering if the honest move is to just reproduce the photo flat and let it be flat. Let the sadness be the boring shadow version instead of the cinematic one. Anyone ever hit this, where you keep romanticizing a source image and the work gets worse for it?
