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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. 😅

Small thing I don't quite know how to hold. There was a little art fair on ul. Józefa yesterday, mostly ceramics and prints, one table with my pastels because a friend pushed me into it and I said yes mostly to stop talking about it. I priced them low. I was sure nobody buys a pastel in a plastic sleeve anyway. A woman in her sixties stood at my table for a long time and kept coming back to one head study, an old man on grey toned paper that took me three tries because the first two had no life in them. She asked who he was. I told her nobody, just someone I invented to practice the jaw on. She laughed and said that's the one, and paid me in cash and wanted the receipt signed, which I've never done before and my hand was not steady. It's the money, sure, but it's more that a stranger walked around for ten minutes and chose the face. My partner came home and I told him and then I cried in the kitchen, over a pastel. Ridiculous. I keep going between feeling proud and feeling like she made a mistake and will figure it out. Anyway. Does it get less strange, the first time someone you don't know takes a piece home?

So I had a first meeting with a small gallery last month, and I could not decide what to bring, so I brought one framed pastel plus a folder of prints. The gallerist picked up the framed one, no gloves, thumb right on the surface. Pastel does not forgive that. I said nothing, obviously, I just stood there smiling like an idiot. Still not sure if bringing the real thing was a mistake or if it was the only reason she took me seriously. What do you do? Bring one piece in person, or photos only until they commit to something? And if you do bring it, how do you protect it without looking paranoid? I am starting to think I should just say out loud, please do not touch the surface, but that feels rude to say to someone who might show my work. Maybe it is not rude. Please tell me it is not rude. If anyone has a line they actually use, I will take it. Mine is currently a very anxious silence. 🙂

I spent about six hours on a pastel portrait last week, a face I've redone maybe five times now, and posted it. Got a polite handful of likes and one comment from a friend. Then on Thursday I was cleaning up and took a lazy phone snap of the box itself. Stubs down to the wrappers, the dust all over the lid, my thumbprints on everything. Didn't even wipe the table. That photo has four times the reach of the finished piece. I'm not going to pretend I understand it, exactly. I think people liked seeing the mess more than the result? Or maybe the finished thing is just harder to say something about. Anyway I'm not going to start posting only pastel dust. But it's stuck with me, and it made me a little sad about the portrait, honestly. Has this happened to anyone else, the working photo outperforming the work?

I put 900 zł on a 10x14 pastel portrait last month. First time I ever said a number out loud without adding "but we can work something out" after it. My hands were shaking a bit, which is embarrassing to type. For context, pastel is fast compared to oils but it is not fast. Toned paper, the layering, the fixing between passes, the part where I sit with it two days and decide the jaw is wrong and start the whole lower half again. Eleven, twelve hours if it goes well. Then I did the actual math and it came to about 75 zł an hour, before paper and the fixative that costs more than I want to admit because I buy the good one. And here is the thing I keep turning over. I did not raise it because I suddenly decided I am worth it. I raised it because I had four commissions stacked in one week and I was not sleeping, and I thought if I say the real number maybe two people go away and I can breathe. Nobody went away. All four said yes, quickly, no haggling. One asked if she could pay extra for a bigger size. So now I am sitting here slightly annoyed at myself, which is a strange feeling to have about your own pricing. All those months of undercharging and calling it being realistic. I have another one to quote tomorrow and I have already written 1,300 zł on the scrap paper, and I keep looking at it like it is a typo. If anyone has gone through the jump from "please like me" pricing to the other thing, I would genuinely like to hear how the first few went, because the number itself was the easy part. Saying it without flinching is the rest of it.

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?

Working on a portrait of my neighbour, third attempt at the same face. I had one dark grey pastel, perfect for the line under the eyelid, and I ground it down to almost nothing over a week. Now the eyes look hard and dead and I know it's because I'm drawing with the side of something too blunt. I ordered a replacement four days ago. Polish post being Polish post, it's sitting somewhere in a sorting hall in Katowice. In the meantime I've been building up the ear and the jaw instead, telling myself it's "preparation". It's not, it's avoidance. But the jaw is honestly the best thing I've done in months, so maybe the delay is doing me a favour. Hard to tell when you're inside it. Does anyone else get weirdly attached to one stick of pastel like it's a tool you'll never find again? Or is that just me being sentimental about grey.

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.

Small thing, but I put the deposit down for a three day pastel portrait workshop in Katowice in October. It has sat open in my browser since April. I kept telling myself I would decide after the next piece was finished, and then obviously there is always a next piece. The part that made me press send, honestly, is that the tutor uses the same toned paper I do, the grey-blue Canson, and I have wanted for a year to watch someone else handle it live instead of guessing from videos. I have no idea what the level will be like. There is a real chance I am the slowest one in the room and I will spend three days quietly panicking at the back. But I paid, and it is not refundable, so now I go. I have never taken any proper class in my life, only books and the internet and a lot of ruined sheets. If any of you have done one of these, how did you survive the first hour? I am already thinking about what to bring and it is June.

So a woman from my building asked me to draw her mother from an old photo. Small thing, A4, toned grey paper. I said 400 zł. That took me, no exaggeration, about eleven hours over three evenings, and I redid the mouth four times because the reference was a scanned printout and half the shadow was gone. She loved it, which was lovely, and then said her sister wants one too, "the same but bigger, A3." Same price? I stood there in the stairwell and said yes. I don't know why I said yes. I knew what I was doing while I was doing it. A3 is not "the same but bigger" for pastel, it's a different drawing, more paper, more sticks, double the hours at least. I have done the math since and at 400 zł for the A4 I was working for something like 36 zł an hour, and I did not count the Sennelier sticks I went through on the skin tones. What I cannot work out is how to go back and say the bigger one is 700. She will think I am being difficult, or that I am suddenly expensive. I think maybe the real problem is that I priced the first one low because I was flattered she asked me at all. If anyone has untangled a thing like this without making it awkward with a neighbour, I would honestly like to know how you worded it.

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?

They arrived Tuesday, a Sennelier half stick set of greens. Thirty of them, all the way from the cold dark pine ones to a yellow green that is almost acid, and I keep opening the box and closing it again. The thing nobody tells you about pastel is that half the job is destroying it. You can't paint carefully with it, you have to break the sticks and grind them into the paper with your thumb, and every time I start a green I have this moment where I think, this one will be the muddy one, and then I do it anyway and it is muddy. I have a face I have been working on for three weeks. Toned grey paper, warm skin, and there is a shadow under the jaw that needs to be green or it goes dead. That is the whole reason I bought them. I know it, I have known it since the first week, and I still sat there tonight doing the ear again instead, which was already fine. It's such a stupid thing to be afraid of. Thirty sticks of pigment, and they cost more than my first box of everything. I'll ruin some of them and that's what they're for. Maybe tomorrow. Tomorrow I'm doing the jaw.

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.