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I took a finished portrait to get framed today and the woman behind the counter looked at it and said, with this sympathetic little head tilt, "oh, pastel. that's a shame, it's such a fragile medium, isn't it. not really archival." And then she showed me their "serious" framing options for oil paintings. I stood there holding my piece like a fool. It's a portrait of my friend's daughter, I worked on it three weeks, I got the light on her cheek right for the first time in maybe ever. And this woman just... dismissed it with one sentence. I didn't say anything smart back. I just said "oh" and let her frame it in something basic and left. And now I'm home and I'm so annoyed at myself for not saying anything. But also, what do you even say? It's not the first time someone's implied pastel is for hobbyists or children or people who don't want to commit to "real" paint. I keep thinking about that word. Fragile. Like my work is inherently less because of the dust on my fingers. Like the softness of it means it's weaker. Anyway. I'm going to keep using pastels because I love them. But I wish I'd said something. 😅

Someone at the framing shop today watched me bring in a piece for mounting and said, very kindly, that she thought I was "so brave" to work in pastel. Brave. Like I was doing something dangerous, not smearing pigment on paper with my fingers. I know she meant it as a compliment. I stood there and smiled and thanked her. But all I could think was that pastel isn't the brave part. The brave part is showing the thing to anyone at all. The medium is just the messy way I got there. I have a drawer full of pieces nobody has ever seen because they're all the ones I decided weren't good enough. Those are the brave ones, honestly. The hidden ones. Weird how that works. Anyway the frame is a warm grey and it looks better than the painting deserves, which is probably a sign I should just frame more of my work and stop hiding the drawer. Maybe that's the real brave thing. Not the chalk. 🙂

A gallery owner in Warsaw looked at my pastel work and said people won't get it on a phone screen. That the texture and the paper, the whole point of it, just flattens to nothing at 400 pixels. She wasn't trying to be cruel, she was being practical. And it's been sitting in my head ever since. Because she's got a point. I post a finished portrait and it gets a polite trickle of likes, but I tape the same piece to my studio wall and people who visit stop and stare. The photo genuinely does not carry what the thing is. Pastel has this light going through it, this chalky depth, and you can't compress that. But also, so what? I don't know what to do with that information. Film my process so people see the smudging? Post close-ups of the paper? I tried one reel of my hand working and it felt like showing off, which is stupid, I know. Mostly I'm just tired of the idea that the work has to fit the platform instead of the other way around. Some things are meant to be looked at in person, and I think that's allowed to be true even if it's inconvenient.

Still fuming about this from Saturday. I was at an open studio thing, just working on a portrait of an old woman I'd taken a reference photo of at the market. Her face is all lines and light, it took me maybe six hours to get the softness right in the cheek shadows, pastel is not forgiving if you rush it. This woman comes up, looks at it for maybe three seconds, and goes "oh, so realistic. It looks just like a photo. So where's the art in that then?" I just said "well, the photo is right there" and pointed at my phone. She didn't even look. Just walked off. And I sat there thinking, I spent a year learning how to not make pastel look muddy. I know exactly where every highlight on that face came from. I changed the light source entirely from the reference because the original was too flat. But sure. No art. Just copying, right? I didn't say any of that to her. I just smiled and went back to work. But I keep replaying it. Why do people think realism is just... cheating? Like there's no decision-making involved? Anyway. Just needed to put it somewhere. 😅

i notice it when i'm working on something detailed, i hold the pastel like it's a ballpoint, all tense, my whole hand cramped around it. then i look at videos of proper pastel artists and they hold theirs so loose, like they're barely touching it, just grazing the paper. i have to physically stop and shake my hand out and remind myself i'm not writing an email. i've been at this five years now and my hand still doesn't believe it's allowed to be soft. anyone else's body just not catching up to what you're trying to do?

A woman from a Facebook group asked me for a pastel portrait of her grandfather from an old photo. I quoted €60 because I was terrified of losing the commission and I still don't think of myself as someone who can charge real money. Fourteen hours on A3 Canson Mi-Teintes. That's €4.28 an hour before the pastels I wore down and the paper. She framed it and sent me a photo of it on her wall and I was honestly happy for a minute. Then I did the math the next morning lying in bed and felt sick. The worst part is I know exactly why I did it. I priced the piece like my fear of being rejected was a material cost. I'm trying to be honest that the problem isn't that she haggled, she didn't even try. The problem is I offered myself cheap before anyone could. I've accepted two more commissions since then and I charged the same €60 for both because raising it felt like a betrayal of the first woman. Does anyone else have this thing where your own past quotes become a ceiling you can't lift?

I saw someone mention timing their actual painting time and I thought, ah, I should do that, I bet I'm fine. So I kept a little notebook for a week. Ten hours in the studio turned out to be maybe four hours of my hand actually touching paper. The rest was rearranging pastels, wiping dust off my hands, staring at the reference photo, deciding the face is wrong and redrawing it from scratch, and one full hour of just sitting there working up the nerve to do the eyes. Four out of ten. I don't know if that's normal or if I'm just deeply afraid of ruining a good thing. Because the weird part is, once I finally start it's fine, the fear goes away. It's the getting in that's the battle. I tried today just to not put the pastel down for the first half hour no matter what and I got more done than in any of those ten hours. Maybe the answer is just forcing it. I hate that the answer is probably forcing it. 🙂

Commissioned portrait of a woman's mother, from an old photo. Two weekends of fighting with it, the hair nearly ended me, redid the left eye three times. I came out to about 16 hours and I charged 400 zł. That's roughly 25 zł an hour, which is about what a teenager makes stacking shelves, and I did it sitting on my kitchen floor with pastel dust in my coffee. The worst part isn't even the money. It's that I priced it by what I thought my work was "worth" as an unknown, self-taught nobody, and the woman cried when she saw it, said it looked just like her. So now I'm happy and embarrassed at the same time, which is a weird way to feel about your own labor. I keep going back and forth on what a fair price would even be. My materials cost more than I think people realize, good pastels aren't cheap and a sheet of good toned paper is not nothing. And time is time, nobody gets it back. But then I think, who's going to pay a proper rate to someone who's still not sure she's good? That's the trap. I walk into it every time. Has anyone here found a way to price from your own side instead of from what you're afraid people will think of you? Because I clearly can't do it on my own.<｜end▁of▁thinking｜> <｜｜DSML｜｜tool_calls> <｜｜DSML｜｜invoke name="emit_structured_response"> <｜｜DSML｜｜parameter name="body" string="true">Commissioned portrait of a woman's mother, copied from an old photo. Two weekends of fighting with it, the hair nearly ended me, redid the left eye three times. 16 hours in total and I charged 400 zł. That's about 25 zł an hour, less than a teenager makes stacking shelves, and I did it sitting on my kitchen floor with pastel dust in my coffee. The worst part isn't even the money. It's that I priced it at what I thought my work was worth as a self-taught unknown, and the woman cried when she saw it, said it looked just like her mother. So now I'm happy and uncomfortable at the same time, which is a strange way to feel about your own labor. I keep going back and forth on what a fair price would even be. Good pastels aren't cheap and a single sheet of good toned paper is not nothing, most people have no idea what the materials cost. And the time doesn't come back. But then I think, who's going to pay a proper rate to someone who's still not sure she's any good? That's the trap and I walk into it every single time. Has anyone actually found a way to price from your own side instead of from what you're scared people will think of you? Because I clearly can't do it alone.

I ran out of my usual Mi-Teintes mid-week and didn't feel like going into town, so I grabbed the cheapest pastel paper the shop had, the generic school kind, the one I used to look down on a little. Some hard gritty thing that grabs every layer and won't let go. And you know what, it's kind of wonderful. The tooth is so aggressive you can't over-blend, it stops me from smearing everything into that same soft mush I always fall into when I'm nervous. It forces me to commit to each mark because you can't really fix it once it's down. Ten euros for a whole ream instead of the price of one decent pad. I did a small portrait of my partner on it last night and the roughness actually suits him, his face is all angles and stubble, and I keep staring at it wondering why I never tried this before. Might be a phase, might be that I finally learned that the expensive stuff was just making me lazy. Anyway, I think I'll keep the ugly paper around. Does anyone else keep a cheap paper they reach for when the good stuff makes you feel too precious to touch? Or am I alone in this weirdness. 🙂

Finished a 30x40 portrait on Thursday. Woman in a red scarf, wanted to do it because the light on her jaw was exactly the thing I've been chasing for months. Took fourteen hours spread over a week. She asked the price before I started and I said €120. Never even paused. When I did the math after, that's €8.50 an hour plus the pastels worn down and the paper. I could make more babysitting. The worst part isn't the number. It's that I knew before I even said it that €120 was too low, and I said it anyway because the longer I leave the number hanging in the air the more I feel like I'm lying. So I blurt something out and then I'm stuck with it. My partner keeps telling me to write the price down before I'm face to face with anyone. God knows I've said the same thing to myself. Then it happens again. Anyone else here the kind of person who can't hold a price in the room, no matter how many times you promise yourself? I'm honestly starting to think I need someone else to do the talking for 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?

There's this one pastel stick, a Sennelier, some kind of warm ochre, I don't even remember buying it, that sits in the front of my box and I only let myself use it for the first marks on a fresh piece of paper. Just the blocking-in, the loosest shapes, the part where nothing matters yet. If I pick it up later in the process it feels wrong. Like I'm cheating. It's almost gone now, just a stub. I'm going to have to find another one when it's finished and I honestly don't know what will happen if I can't get the exact same colour. Maybe I just buy ten of them next time so I don't have to think about it. Or maybe the whole ritual is in my head and any warm ochre would do the same job. But I don't want to test that theory.

it's thirty degrees in my studio and the pastels are soft and greasy in a way that makes everything feel like I'm drawing with butter. I keep stopping to wipe my hands and the paper is taking the pigment differently, more smudgy, less controlled. I'm trying to do a portrait and the nose keeps turning into a muddy streak. I know I should just accept it as part of summer drawing but I'm fighting it instead, pressing harder, making it worse. does anyone else just... refuse to adapt for like a week before giving in? or is that just me being stubborn

I posted a portrait at the end of January. Knew it was one of the better ones, the kind where you finish and step back and for once you're not picking at it. And it just... sat there. Two months of near silence. Fewer likes than a half-finished sketch I threw up to remind myself I still existed. Then last week someone messaged me asking if it was still available. She'd found it through a tag, not the feed. Said she'd saved it weeks ago and kept coming back to it and it kept being the one she looked at. I keep thinking about that. I spent a whole weekend trying to decode why the sketch did better. Posting time, caption wording, hashtags. And none of it was the reason. The one that mattered traveled through a completely different door and I was too busy staring at the front window to notice the side one was open the whole time. Not sure I have a neat take. Just that the numbers I can see and the things that actually move me forward seem to have very little relationship to each other, and I'm tired of pretending they're connected.

I did a portrait yesterday I was genuinely happy with for once. Soft greys and a tiny bit of terracotta, the skin actually looked like skin. And then I sprayed fixative and it deepened everything by about two values and killed the light layer I had on top. So now she looks like she's in a dim room instead of the soft daylight I wanted. I know you're supposed to test on scraps. I never do. I'm too impatient and then I pay for it. Do you just... accept the shift and work lighter to account for it? Or is there a technique I'm missing? I've tried workable fixative between layers and final fixative at the end and it always changes something. Maybe I should just stop using it and keep everything under glass but then I worry about smudging when I ship.

I started signing the front of my pastels again. For years I only signed the back, because signing the front felt like announcing myself, like saying "this is good enough that I stake my name on it." And I wasn't sure it was. But I was going through old pieces this week and I found a portrait from two years ago that I'd forgotten, and it was... actually good? Not perfect, one eye sits a little high, but there was a life in it I don't think I could fake. And it's unsigned on the front, just a pencil note on the back, and it made me sad. Like I'd hidden the thing that made it mine. So now I sign the front of everything I manage to finish. Small, in the corner, soft pastel or pencil depending on the paper. My name, in my bad handwriting, which I've decided I'm allowed to have. It's a tiny thing but it feels like stepping out from behind something.

Quoted someone €350 for a 50×70 pastel portrait the other day. She paused and said "oh, I thought it would be less." And the thing is, I actually agreed with her in my head for a second. That's the problem. I sat down after and did the real math. The good pastels alone, the good paper, the fixative, the hours on a face that size, the do-overs I know are coming because I always redraw the eyes at least three times. €350 is honestly on the low side of fair. But it still feels like I'm asking for too much. I can't tell if that's the market or just the voice in my head from growing up being told not to be greedy. She hasn't written back. Part of me hopes she doesn't because then I don't have to sit with the discomfort of actually being paid what the thing is worth. I'm trying to hold the line this time. We'll see.

I finally got my first gallery interest last year. Small space, local, nothing fancy. They were excited about my pastels, I was terrified and thrilled. Then they sent the contract and it said I had to provide all framing myself, which, okay, fine, I get it for pastels since they're fragile. So I spent a small fortune getting proper frames made, shipped everything insured, held my breath. They emailed two weeks later saying the frames didn't fit their "aesthetic vision" and could I send different ones. I couldn't. I'd spent everything on the first set. So the whole thing fell apart. I'm still not sure if that was normal and I was naive, or if they were unreasonable. What's the weirdest thing a gallery has asked you to do that made you go... wait, what?

Found a scan from 2014 today, first pastel portrait I ever attempted. Same subject, same reference photo I keep coming back to because I'm stubborn. Put mine from last week next to it. The old one is so bad. I remember being proud of it when I finished. I remember thinking this is it, this is what I can do. And ten years later I can see every single thing wrong with it and I still kept trying the same face over and over until it finally came close to what I saw in my head. I think the win is not the new one. The win is that I didn't stop in 2015 when I should have, or 2018, or honestly last January when I nearly quit pastel for good. Nobody told me to keep going, I had to decide it myself, weeks at a time. And it worked out in a way I couldn't see from inside the bad years. Anyway. Old me would be so confused that the face in the picture is the same and everything else is different. 🙃

i ordered pastelmat like i always do and somehow ended up with a pad of canson mi-teintes that's way too smooth. the pastel just sits on top, doesn't bite, three layers and it's already muddy. i was so annoyed i almost threw it in the bin. but i have been working on the same reference for four days now on paper i hate and something weird is happening. because it's not taking the pastel well i have to be more careful, work lighter, actually plan each stroke instead of just smudging everything into a blur. the face i'm doing has more structure than anything i've made in months. it looks like a drawing instead of a dream i had. i think sometimes the wrong materials teach you something the right ones can't. or maybe i'm just making peace with wasting twenty quid on paper i won't buy again.🙂