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had this little brass sharpener, must've been twenty years with me. came from some market stall in ennis, cost a euro maybe. kept it in the same tin as my carving tools. and the blade's been gone off it for about three years now, I knew it, I knew it was just chewing the pencils instead of sharpening them, but I couldn't bring myself to throw it out. it'd been everywhere with me. first studio, second studio, the shed phase, the kitchen table phase. anyway the wife bought me a new one yesterday, one of those crank ones you bolt to the bench, and I had to stand there and actually drop the old one in the bin. felt daft, felt like I was putting down a dog or something. the new one's fierce good though. grand twist on it. might name it.<｜end▁of▁thinking｜> <｜｜DSML｜｜parameter name="tags" string="false">["tools", "studio rituals", "letting go", "pencil sharpener", "the shed years"]

There's this one mechanical pencil from my architecture days, 0.3mm, must be fifteen years old now. I use it for anything that matters - the underlay before the ink goes down on a house I actually care about. And every single time I pull it out I think, this is the one day it runs out of lead, and I've never found a refill that feels the same. I keep a whole stash of cheaper 0.5s for sketching out ideas that'll probably get binned anyway. It's not rational. The sentimental value of a pencil is genuinely stupid. But there's something about drawing that first line with the same tool I used when I was terrified of a construction site at 24 that just settles me into the work. Does anyone else have a tool they've elevated way past its actual function?

I bought my drawing table second-hand in 2014 from a man in Rajajinagar who was closing his signboard shop. Teak, solid, one drawer that sticks in the monsoon. It has his pencil marks all over it. Layout lines, a few measurements, half a word I can't read. He clearly worked straight on the tabletop for years. I've had it cleaned, oiled, thought about sanding it smooth twice. Never done it. Those marks are the only reason I keep the table. Thing is, I've started leaving my own on it. Not deliberately. Just the small smudges where I test a nib, the outline of a 9x12 block traced so I stop placing it crooked. There's a coffee ring from last Tuesday that I'm pretending is a design decision. Anyway. Some mornings I sit down and see his lines under mine and it feels like working next to someone. Which is odd because I never met him and he was probably only tolerating me while I counted out the cash. I don't know what I'm asking. Maybe just curious if anyone else has a piece of furniture they bought used and can't quite bring themselves to properly own.

It's about an inch and a half long, no eraser, the stamp worn off. Been sharpening it with a blade for two years because it doesn't fit in the sharpener anymore. New 4b's feel like writing with a crayon someone else already chewed on. Mine's got my grip grooved into it. I know this is dumb. I have nine of them in the drawer. But the first mark on a new panel goes down different with the stub, it's like the pencil already knows the surface. Also, the apron pocket is now permanently stained graphite gray, and I've decided that's a feature. Anyone else refuse to retire a thing way past its usefulness? Or am I just hoarding dead ends.

Pulled the third state of a plate this morning and it was bad. Not wrong technically, the aquatint held fine, but bad in the way that matters, it said nothing. And I had already written 1/12, 2/12 in pencil on the bottom of the first two. There's a small horror specific to printmaking here. A painter scrapes down a canvas and no one knows. I pencil a number on the sheet and I have just declared that this thing exists as an edition, and it will exist in twelve copies, and each one will be signed and dated and sold and hang on twelve different walls. The commitment happens before the doubt. I know the theory. The plate is the matrix, the print is not the original, the multiple is a distribution not a reproduction. Barthes would have something to say about the pencilled number as the ritual of authenticity. But at 9am with a bad sheet in my hand none of that helps me. I am holding twelve lies, or one lie twelve times. I am going to destroy the plate. Not cancel it with a scratch, actually destroy it. I've done that once before and it was the right thing and I still think about it. Curious if other print people here have a rule about this. Do you proof more before you commit, or do you just accept that the number is a promise and sometimes you break a promise.

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.

Was at the market on Saturday, same spot I've had for years, and this fella stops in front of my prints. Looks at the big hare for a good long while. I'm thinking grand, we have a looker. Then he points at it and says, "That hare is anxious, you know. The eye's too big. I could sort that out for you, ten minutes with a pencil." Ten minutes with a pencil. On a linocut I carved over three weeks and pulled fifty of by hand. As if it's a doodle he can just fix. I says, "Ah sure, that's the thing about hares, they're anxious. That's the whole point of them." Which shut him up for about four seconds, and then he wanted to know what I'd charge to do a personalised version with a calmer hare for his wife. I told him I'd knock a tenner off if he promised to stay out of the studio. He laughed. I wasn't joking. Bought the small print in the end, the one with the heron, so all's well. But the head on me walking home. The eye's too big, says the man with the enormous head, and not a print to his name. Anyway. Next one I carve I'm giving the hare a dead calm face and a little smile, just for the pure spite of it. See how he likes that.

so I've been doing markets and little fairs for a couple months now and I've been writing prices in pencil on a little card, erasing and rewriting whenever someone's face did the thing. you know the thing. anyway a friend who sells ceramics told me to just write it in pen and stop editing and I did it on saturday and I swear my hands were actually shaking, which is so dumb, it's a number. I wrote $180 on the big one. the window one, the fourth version of it. and I stood there and hated it for about ten minutes and then a woman in a green coat looked at it for a long time and bought it without saying anything about the price at all. she just said something about how the light coming through looked cold and warm at the same time which is the exact thing I've been chasing for like a year and a half. I don't know. I think I've been pricing like I'm apologizing. like I'm asking for permission. and pen made it real in a way the pencil never was, even though it's the same amount of money. which makes no sense. it makes complete sense. the nail on that wall is empty now too and I keep walking past it

I have been painting the same Rosa canina sprig for four days, which is longer than it warrants, and this afternoon I discovered I had cut the sheet from the wrong side. The felt mark runs underneath and the sizing is subtly different. You would not see it in the finished painting, but I can feel it. The washes sit a fraction differently and I have been quietly blaming my own handling since Monday. I am going to finish it. Throwing away four days of work over a mis-cut sheet would be a poor sort of discipline, and the specimen itself is a good one. But I have written the correct side in pencil on the pad cover now, which I should have done years ago and did not because I was certain I would remember. Does anyone else keep making the same small, entirely avoidable mistake on the grounds that they are too experienced to need a note?

There's this old bungalow on Nandi Durga Road, one of those Art Deco ones with the curved verandah and the beautiful terrible paint job, salmon pink over original white, peeling everywhere. I've sketched it maybe five times, painted it twice before, and both times it came out technically fine but completely dead. No life in it. Like a photograph but worse. Today I went back with just my travel kit, small palette, one brush, no pencil underdrawing. Sat on the compound wall for about 45 minutes in that late-morning heat that makes you regret every life choice. And something just… unlocked. I let the watercolour bleed into the sketchy ink lines. Didn't try to fix the wonky bits. Left the verandah half-raw. It's not my most accurate piece by a long shot but it's the first one that feels like the house, not like my anxiety about drawing the house properly. Anyway I'm still riding that high. Chai and Marie biscuits kind of celebration tonight. 🙏

still thinking about the art teacher who told 12 year old me i was "wasting good paper" because i drew on it without sketching first. like i was supposed to map out every line in pencil before i was allowed to touch the good stuff. i sat in the back and drew anyway because i didn't know how to do it her way and i still don't!!! some people never let that voice go. took me fifteen years and a therapist to realize the voice telling me to slow down, erase, redo, was never mine. it was hers. i make fast and messy on purpose now. if it burns i burn it and i start again. that's the whole point. paper is cheap. your nerve isn't.

I quoted a client £480 for a study of their garden's camellia. When I broke down the actual time afterward I came out at under £9 an hour, because I only counted the brush hours. The days of sitting with the specimen, turning it in the light, the pencil studies I do before pigment ever touches paper, those never made it into the calculation. Botanical work is slow in a way that doesn't photograph well. A client sees one finished plate. They don't see the morning I spent watching how the petals fold at noon versus at six, or the three studies of a single leaf I discarded because the venation was wrong. I could raise my prices and pretend that accounts for it. I did raise them, modestly, and lost two regulars. The irony is the same people who balk at £480 for a week of my life would happily have paid a plumber that for an afternoon. I haven't decided what that says about me or about the trade I chose. It's on my mind because I just finished the ledger for the quarter and the number is not comfortable.

Small thing, but it has changed how I work. Before I coat a sheet I pencil the date and the weather on the back corner: sun, cloud, wind direction, how cold the water was. Nothing more than that. I started because I could not remember, months later, why one print came out so much softer than the one beside it. Same paper, same mixture, same seaweed. The only difference was the sky that afternoon in November, and I had not written it down. Now I have a drawer of these little notes and I look at them more than I should. It turns out the prints I love are almost never the ones made in full sun. They are the ones made under a thin white overcast, with the sea a bit rough, because I was impatient and pulled the paper early. It is a very small ritual and probably nobody else would care about it. But it makes the work feel less like something I am doing to the paper and more like something we did together that day.

For years I have kept notes in the worst possible way. On the back of stretcher bars, in a spiral notebook half full of grocery lists, on the wall in pencil where I would later paint over it. Last week the gallery asked for a proper chronology of the series and I panicked, then sat down and wrote the whole thing out. Forty-one pages. Date, size, what went on first, how many times I scraped it back, what the weather was like because the cold wax behaves differently in a cold studio. It took four evenings. The strange thing is what came out of it. Three canvases I had written off as failures in 2019 turn out to be the direct ancestors of the ones that finally worked. I had forgotten entirely. I had been telling myself for two years that the change came out of nothing, a lucky accident in spring. I don't think I am a better painter now for having the log. But I am less superstitious about it. The work has a spine I couldn't see because I was standing too close. Naja. Next time I will keep it as I go, which I say every time.

Since two weeks I am stuck on one thing and it is not the drawing, the drawing is fine. It is the black. In our work the black line is everything. Without it the fish is only a shape. But real black we do not buy in a tube. We make it from soot, from the lamp, and to bind it we use goat milk and a little gum from the babool tree. My mother used to keep it in a small brass bowl, covered with a cloth, and she would say do not let it dry, keep mixing. If the milk is more, the line becomes grey and faint like old writing. If the gum is more, the brush drags and the line breaks at the tail of the peacock, exactly where you cannot afford it. Yesterday I made a fresh batch and it came out wrong. Too thin. I painted one whole border before I accepted this, and now that border is sitting there looking like a pencil sketch, and I have to decide whether to go over it again or start the paper fresh. The paper is Sanganeri, not cheap, so I am not starting fresh. I am sitting with it. My mother never measured anything. She would dip her finger and know. I have tried many times to do that and I cannot, so now I keep a small glass bangle in the bowl to see the level. It is a poor substitute for her finger. Any of you who grind your own colours, kindly tell how you judge the binding. I am not asking for a recipe from the internet, I am asking what your hand tells you.

There's a house on Hutchins Road, the pale yellow one with the carved wooden brackets under the balcony, and the board went up last Tuesday. I'd been meaning to draw it for maybe three years. Kept saying next weekend. So I went on Wednesday morning with my book and a flask of chai, fully prepared to be shooed off. The watchman looked at me for a while, asked what I was doing, and then brought out a plastic stool. Two hours. Nobody else came. It was just me and the sound of someone inside taking the window frames out whole, because apparently the contractor's uncle wants them. I've posted maybe forty finished paintings this year. This one is a scrappy pencil study, half of it smudged because I was holding the flask in the other hand, and it's the only thing anyone has messaged me about. Four people asked which house it was. One woman sent a photo of her grandmother standing in front of the same gate in 1987. I don't fully know what to do with that. It's not exactly a marketing lesson, or if it is, it's one I don't like very much, because the thing that worked was the thing I wasn't trying to sell. But I'm going back on Saturday to draw the staircase before it goes, and this time I'll post the smudged page again. Anyway if anyone else has figured out how to make "I went and sat somewhere and drew it badly" into something that pays the electricity bill, do tell me.

Small thing but it sat with me all day. One of my students, a girl of nineteen with a good hand and terrible confidence, had spent three weeks fighting a drapery study. Every version was the same version. So this morning I put my No. 4 Isabey in her hand, the one I've had since the atelier, the one I'd probably run back into a burning building for. Told her to draw the folds with paint instead of pencil and stop apologizing to the canvas. She went quiet for about forty minutes. I nearly took it back twice. Then she did the thing, the highlight on the crest of the fold, one stroke, and it worked. Twenty years ago I'd never have let it out of the studio. Ten years ago I was so sure I'd stopped painting for good that I would have sold it. I don't know what changed exactly. Maybe just that watching someone find it is worth more now than the brush is. Anyway. She's using it again Thursday.

Small experiment the last three weeks. Along with the finished piece, I post a shot of the blank sheet, taped to my board, pencil grid barely visible, chai cup in the corner. No caption, no before/after, just the empty paper. Engagement is roughly double the finished paintings. Same people who scroll past a finished sketch of a Malleswaram house will stop and stare at a damp sheet of Arches. I have no idea what to do with this. On one hand it's lovely, people are curious about process. On the other, I spent eleven years learning to see and people want to look at the tape. My sister said it's because everyone can imagine themselves starting something, and nobody can imagine themselves finishing it. That stung a bit because I think she's right. So now I'm sitting here wondering whether I keep doing it, because it works, or stop, because it feels like I'm selling the idea of painting rather than the painting. Anyone else had a thing that performs well but sits oddly with them?

Twelve volumes, 40 kronor at a secondhand place in Majorna. The paper is perfect, slightly foxed, good weight, exactly what I use. That was the whole point of buying it. It's been on the studio floor for nine days. I've opened maybe four pages. There's a plate in volume seven of Nordic birds, hand colored, someone has written a name in the margin in pencil, I think a child. I keep not cutting it. The thing is I know how this ends. Either it sits there until it's furniture, or I cut it and it turns into three good pieces and a lot of scraps. Both are fine. I just don't like that I've made it into a decision. Usually the paper is just paper. Might start with volume one, the A's. Nobody's sentimental about the A's.

Sold a 190 x 150 canvas in June. Nine thousand six hundred euro, which is a good price for me, and I was pleased for about four days. Then the invoice came. Fifty percent to the gallery, which I knew, that is not the surprise, that is just how it is. But there was also a line for framing, 340, and a line for transport to the fair in Basel, 480, and a line for the catalogue photograph, 120. Nobody mentioned those on the phone. So the maths: 9,600 becomes 4,800, becomes roughly 3,860. Then the pigments and the wax and the linen for a canvas that size, call it 900. Eleven weeks of work, but not eleven weeks of only that work, so I cannot honestly divide it. Somewhere between 14 and 20 euro an hour, depending on how generous I am to myself about the hours. What actually keeps me up is not the number. It is that I signed the contract in March in about ninety seconds, standing up, because I was flattered to be asked. There is a clause about storage: if the work does not sell within eighteen months the gallery may store it and charge me 25 euro a month. I found this out last week. From a friend, not from them. I am not going to name the gallery. They sell work, they are serious, I would sign again. But I am reading the paper now with a pencil, and I have started writing my own exclusions into the consignment sheet, which so far has made one gallerist in Düsseldorf sigh audibly at me. Curious whether anyone here has actually won one of those clauses back, or whether we all just sign and find out later.