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I've been painting seriously again for about six years now, and I still keep ending up with the same brand of paint I started with. I've tried the fancy ones at workshops, bought a couple tubes of stuff that cost $12 each, and I always go back to the $4 tubes from Michaels. Maybe it's just what I learned on and I'm used to the consistency. Or maybe I'm telling myself it doesn't matter to justify being cheap, ha. But honestly I got a tube of something nice at a workshop last spring and it dried out weird and I was annoyed. So I'm back to my usual. Anyone else stuck on a brand they probably should have outgrown by now?

opened a delivery today and genuinely could not remember ordering it. just stared at this tube of pyrrole orange like it was a stranger in my house. which it is. i don't even like orange. i have never once thought "this painting needs orange." yet here we are. checked my paint drawer and i have three different brands of the same dull green i used exactly once in 2021. my brain saw a color chart at 2am and decided that was the move. the tube is still in the box. feels like a specific flavor of art delusion where buying the thing and using the thing are the same satisfaction to my brain. the paint sits there and i feel like i'm being productive. anyone else's studio budget just... a series of impulse purchases that never graduate into actual paintings? or do some of you have self control

freelance client asked for something "editorial, sophisticated, gallery-level" for a brand refresh. i sent them a study i did of a tulip that i genuinely think is some of my best work, the one where i let the flat shapes fight each other and barely cleaned up the paint edge. they said it was perfect. which is great for rent money but it's messing with my head a little because the piece itself is the least "design" thing i do. no grids, no thinking about hierarchy, just me and the color. and the people paying the most for it are the ones who can least see what's actually happening in it. tried to lean into "loud flat color" in the pitch and they nodded at all the wrong parts. whatever, invoice got paid in full today and that's the real editorial. kinda want to paint a whole series of tulips now and see if i can trick the market into funding my actual work. feels gross. probably gonna do it.

I've been using Sennelier oil sticks for years. Usually reliable, a bit soft in warm weather but nothing you can't work around. The one I bought last week, a raw umber, came out of the tube with the consistency of toothpaste that's been left uncapped all night. Crumbly, dry, almost no oil feel at all. I had to break it up and mix it with stand oil just to get it to stick to the knife. I emailed the supplier. They said it's a known issue with a batch from the summer. No recall, but they'd replace it if I sent photos. Which I did, but I'm stuck on the fact that they knew and still shipped it. That's three tubes of paint I've had problems with this year across different brands and I'm starting to wonder if the supply chain issues everyone talked about in 2022 are still showing up now as rushed batches and bad checks. Anyway. The raw umber is fine now after the intervention. But I shouldn't have to doctor a Sennelier stick like it's cheap student grade. Anybody else hit a dud batch lately or is it just me.

I keep a small notebook beside the board for every painting. Not the finished work, the process: pigment, brand, ratio, paper batch, the temperature of the room, and a one line verdict on whether the wash behaved. It is a habit left over from the laboratory and my students find it faintly ridiculous, but it has saved me more than once. This morning I was laying a first wash of French ultramarine over a hellebore leaf, thinned further than I usually dare, and it bloomed at the tip exactly where the veins tighten. I checked the log. The same thing happened in November, same paper, same paper batch stamp, same dilution, and I had written "too wet for this sheet, size it first" and then evidently forgotten. Two hundred and fourteen pages and I still repeat a mistake I had already identified and written down in my own hand. The log is honest. I am not always. I have started underlining anything that went wrong, so at least the failures are the things my eye catches first when I open to a new page. It feels a little like keeping a book of my own errors on purpose. Which, I suppose, is what it is.

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"]

Ok so I just finished off a tube of French ultramarine that I bought second year of my BFA. Second year. That's like six years of a single tube of paint, which sounds insane until you remember how little you need of it, a dot does so much work. And now the tube is split at the seam and I keep squeezing it like there's something left and there isn't, and I'm sitting here at my desk genuinely a little sad?? about a tube of paint. it's not even a sentimental object, it's not like my dad's brushes or anything, it's just that I bought it with money from a summer job I hated and I had no idea what I was doing and I thought you were supposed to buy the fancy brand and now I know I could've gotten the cheap one and been fine. And I've made probably forty paintings with it. Some of them are bad. A few are good. The window one from last spring is mostly this color. Anyway I ordered a new one and it's coming Tuesday and it will not feel the same at all, which is stupid, it's literally the same pigment, same brand, same everything. Except it won't be. Does anyone else get attached to supplies like this or am I just being dramatic because I'm avoiding the underpainting I'm supposed to be doing

got a DM last week from a skincare brand that wanted to "collaborate", which in their world meant i paint something with their product in it, post it, and they "amplify" (their word) on their channels. no payment. they said "the exposure would be great for both of us." i asked what they were offering. they sent back a moodboard and a brief that literally said "make it go viral" as the objective. i said i don't control viral and asked what the budget was. they said they'd "love to discuss value alignment first." i told them my rate is $800 for a commercial post. they said they'd circle back. they circled back yesterday to offer me $50 and a "feature" on their story. i said no thanks. they asked if i could do it for the "portfolio opportunity." i hate it here lol. anyway what's the best way you've shut down an insulting offer without burning the bridge entirely, asking for a friend who is me

i just dug through every drawer in this studio and discovered i own three tubes of burnt umber, all different brands, none of them more than half used. and not a single tube of black paint. not even a dried up one. i must have thrown the last one out at some point and just never replaced it. which is fine, i don't really use black straight out of the tube anyway. but it made me stop and think about what i reach for without noticing. burnt umber is basically my default for everything, shadows, underpainting, mixing down a color that's too bright. it's the first thing i squeeze out. and i didn't even know i was doing it until i saw three of them lined up like a little monument to autopilot. what's the thing you have five of without meaning to

spent an hour trying to rematch a green i mixed six weeks ago for the left half of a canvas and it's just not happening. same tube, same brand, same ratio, and it's off by a hair that i can't unsee. i've got the old swatch taped to the easel like a missing person poster. i know the answer is "paint the whole thing at once" but i built this thing in two sittings around a freelance deadline and now i'm paying the tax. genuinely considering just calling the seam a compositional choice and moving on. it's not a compositional choice. what do you do when you can't get back to a color, do you chase it or do you repaint the section

Okay so I saw that post about ugly websites converting and it got me thinking because honestly? My own marketing feels like that sometimes. Like, I'm supposed to be this "artist" with a clean brand but my process posts are always so chaotic, sometimes I even accidentally show my dirty mug or a paint smudge on my arm and omg, the engagement on those is SO much higher than the perfectly curated ones. People seem to like seeing the actual work and not just the finished product. It feels super counterintuitive to the whole 'aspirational' vibe that marketing gurus push, but I'm getting more comments and saves on the messy stuff. Anyone else finding that the more you lean into the imperfect, the better things perform? It’s kinda making me want to just dump all my WIPs and sketches everywhere lol.

I have spent two years being told I need to show the process. Reels of the underpainting, close-ups of the brush loading, all of it. It does bring people. My last three sales came from a woman who works at a picture framer in Annecy, a gallery in Villeurbanne, and someone who sat next to me at a dinner and asked what I do. Not one from the internet. The reels do bring something, to be fair. The last one I posted, a small study of my daughter's hand under the lamp, got maybe nine thousand views. Two emails about it. Neither asking to buy anything. One wanted to know which brand of brushes, one wanted to know if I could teach a workshop in Dubai. So voilà, the reach is real. It just has nothing to do with the painting leaving the studio. What actually works for me is unglamorous: the framer, the gallery, and the people I already know. That is the whole strategy. It feels like a strategy from another century and I suspect it is one. I keep the account going anyway. I am not sure why. Maybe because it is the one place I can show a canvas without somebody standing next to it saying something. But I have stopped pretending it is a business tool. It is a window. Windows are not doors.

Went to the art supply place on my lunch break, 40 minutes I don't really have, to get one tube of burnt sienna. Mine is a sad flat metal corpse, I've been squeezing it with pliers like a crazy person. Guy working there spends ten minutes telling me I should try their house brand instead, it's basically the same pigment, half the price. I said no thanks, I know how the real one behaves when I thin it. He says, and I quote, "they're all made in the same factory." Maybe they are. I still walked out with the expensive one and now I'm annoyed at myself for being the person who pays double for a label, and also annoyed at him for assuming I don't know my own paint. I've been using this color for nine years. I know exactly how it dries and how it looks over a wet sky. Anyway the sky on the piece on my easel is now the right color and I'm still thinking about it at my desk. Guess that tells you something.

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

the tube's got maybe a fifth left and i still can't throw it out. something happened to it about a year ago, it went chalky, and now every mix i make with it comes out looking like a laundromat wall. but here's the thing, i know where it goes. i can mix with it blind. so i keep squeezing it and pretending. new one arrived tuesday. cadmium, same brand, and it's loud in a way that's honestly kind of upsetting. i did two hours of studies with it and hated every square inch, which i'm choosing to read as a sign it's working. anyway the dead tube is still on the table. it's not sentimental, it's that throwing it away means admitting i spent a year painting around a color instead of fixing it. which, now that i type that out, is probably also a thing i do with other stuff lol

Not as a joke. There is a filbert, a size 8, rosemary and hog, that I have used on almost everything since 2021. The ferrule is dented from a fall on the studio floor and the handle is worn pale where my thumb sits. It has never been washed with soap. I wipe it on the rag, work it into a little linseed on the palette, shape it, and it goes back in the jar. People in my classes ask how often I clean my brushes and I know the answer they want. The answer is: this one has not touched water in four years, and it still holds a point better than anything I bought last spring. The hairs have gone soft and slightly hooked at the end and that hook is exactly what I need for the edge of a jaw. I am not recommending this. I lost a good sable to neglect once and I am still annoyed about it. But there is something in a tool that has been through enough of your own work that it stops being a tool and becomes part of your hand. I bought a replacement last year, same brand, same size, and I cannot make myself break it in. It sits in the jar like a new pair of shoes. Anyway. The painting it is on right now is a woman at a window, morning light from the left, and I have been fighting one passage on her forearm for six days.

so i did the thing everyone says to do. sat down, added up the real hours on my last three freelance design jobs instead of the hours i like to tell myself, and it came out grim. one packaging job for a small hot sauce brand, i quoted 1200 flat, took me roughly 31 hours with revisions. that's under 40/hr before i even think about software or the fact that i don't have health insurance. so i set my new rate at 55 and sent it to the one client i actually like working with, the hot sauce guy, for a label refresh. he went quiet for two days and then said it was more than his budget. which is fair. it's not a dig at him. but now i'm sitting here with a rate i believe in and one fewer check, and the freelance money is exactly what covers the difference between rent and what painting pays me, which is to say, everything. the annoying part is i know 55 is still low. i've seen designers with worse work than mine charging 90 and getting it. i just can't make my mouth say the number out loud yet. anyway the hot sauce label is up for grabs i guess. hmu if you know a brand.

Finished a Naples yellow tube today. That particular brand, LeFranc, they changed the formula a couple years back and it's not the same. The new one is cleaner, more obedient. The old one had something slightly disobedient in it, a greenish undertone that made you work for it but gave skin that living quality no other pale yellow does. I rolled the empty tube flat and put it in the drawer with the others. I don't know why I keep them. It's not hoarding, I throw everything. But there's maybe forty flattened tubes in there going back fifteen years and I can tell you exactly which painting each one belongs to. My daughter saw me doing it this morning and said I was like a soldier keeping his shell casings. She's not wrong. The new tube is waiting in the box. I'll use it. But I got through the whole day avoiding it, mixing my pales with white and cadmium instead, like that's not the same thing at all. All the way to the studio and back I knew I was being ridiculous. Voilà. Tomorrow I'll open it and it'll be fine, it's just paint. Just felt like noting it somewhere people would understand. The rest of the house thinks I've lost my mind over a tube of paint.

deadline's friday. freelance gig for a wellness brand, which already tells you everything. they sent the brief as a 14 page pdf and a separate mood board that's just nine screenshots of the same beige instagram feed. today's note: "love it! can we make the logo bigger? like 40% bigger." the logo is a wordmark. the whole card is the wordmark. making it bigger means deleting the phone number, which, sure, honestly, fine. the thing that gets me is i did this exact conversation in 2019. and 2021. i know all the moves. i say "sure, i'll try a version" and then i send the version where it's 12% bigger and they say perfect. i'm not even mad at them. i'm mad that i'm this good at it. spent two years in art school to get fluent in the language of making a thing slightly worse on request. anyway i'm gonna go paint something flat and ugly and loud after i hit send, for me, where nobody gets to say bigger.

Small thing that worked, and I feel a bit dumb about how long it took me. I paint at night, usually 9 to 11, and I'd been posting finished pieces on my page. Nice enough, a dozen or so likes, nothing moving. In March I started posting the mess instead. Palette with three days of dried paint on it. The jar of water that's basically mud. One photo of my 11 year old's spelling list sitting under the canvas because that's the only clean paper in the house. I don't know why that did it but it did. Two people messaged asking if I teach, which I do not, and a woman asked if she could buy the small barn piece before I'd even said anything about selling it. That's never happened to me off a finished photo. The annoying part is the finished photos still do nothing. I put the same barn piece up after, nicely lit, and it got nine likes and one comment from my aunt. I keep wondering if I've just trained people to want the mess and now I have to keep finding messes to photograph, which sounds like a second job. Also my table is genuinely gross and I'm not sure I want that to be my brand. Anyone else had something take off that you didn't mean to post?