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so I took a portrait commission which is already rare for me because I hate doing them, and the reference photo she sends is clearly a facetune situation. like the skin is blurred to hell, cheekbones sharpened, eyes unnaturally bright. I paint it as close to the photo as I can because that's what she gave me. she picks it up yesterday and goes "this doesn't look like me at all." no shit. you sent me a cartoon version of yourself and I painted the cartoon. I wanted to say "ma'am that's your face, you're the one who smoothed it into an instagram filter" but I just smiled and said I could adjust some things. I hate portrait work. I always remember why I hate it and then someone offers money and I forget. never again until next time.

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. 😅

Working on a portrait from a reference photo I found in an old magazine, some woman I've never seen before. And I get to the mouth and I keep redrawing it and it's not working, and then I step back and realise, it's my mother's mouth. The upper lip thinner, the way the corner tucks in. I didn't put it there on purpose. It just came out of my hand. I don't even have a great relationship with my mother. So that's unsettling. Has your hand ever just. Drawn something from your life without asking you first? Like the muscle memory knows things you don't want it to know?

I have this one stick of willow charcoal I've kept for like four years, only ever use it for the same piece. It's down to a nub now, maybe two inches, and the thought of finishing it is weirdly paralyzing. Every time I pick it up I think this might be the last pass it's got in it. I know that's not rational. I could buy a hundred more for twelve bucks. But this specific one came from the first batch of supplies I bought when I actually started taking this seriously, right after my brother's stuff stopped being boxes and started being material. So it's got history in it, whatever that means. Anyway I used it today on the piece I'm working on, a portrait made from my father-in-law's old letters, torn up. And it's fine. It's just charcoal. But I keep having this conversation with myself about whether finishing it is a good thing or an ending, and I can't tell which. Do other people do this with a tool? Hold onto the last of something like it's going to vanish when it's gone?

Three years. Three years this thing sat under my workbench wrapped in old sheets, half-cut, wrong, not working. It's a portrait of my yiayia's hands, she was a seamstress, those hands knew things, and I could not get the light right in the smalti. The gold kept coming out flat, like a coin, not like afternoon sun on old skin. Took it back out two months ago and finally saw what was wrong. Wrong andamento, wrong direction of the cuts. I'd been setting the tesserae like fabric folds instead of like hands. Had to pull half of it out and start again. Sent photos to the client this afternoon. She cried. So did I, a bit, alone in the studio with the cats looking at me like I'd lost it. Anyway. Sometimes the work needs to wait until you're ready for it. That's the thing nobody tells you.

i've been working on this portrait commission for two weeks. today she sends me the "final reference", it's one of those apps that smooths everything into plastic. no pores, no shadows under the eyes, the nose is literally a different shape. she looks like a sim character. i don't know how to tell her that i can't paint what isn't there. that the thing i'm actually good at is catching the light on somebody's actual face, the uneven bits, the way one eye is slightly smaller. that's the whole point of spending hours on pastel portraits instead of just running her photo through the same filter she already used. i said i'd send her some progress sketches this week and i'm dreading it. probably going to do a version that's technically accurate and a version that looks like her filtered face and let her pick. which feels wrong but i don't have the words to explain why.

I've been working on this portrait since Saturday. Soft pastel on Canson Mi-Teintes, the warm grey side. It's a woman in profile, nothing complicated, reference photo I took myself. And I cannot get her eye to look like it's actually seeing something. It's technically there, shape, shadow, pupil, highlight, but it's dead. A glass eye. A doll's eye. I redrew it four times. Rubbed it out with a kneaded eraser so many times the paper started to pill. Started over on a fresh sheet once. Same problem. It made me think, how much of what we do in portraits is just... faking life? I can render an eye perfectly. But rendering and bringing to life are two different things and I don't know how to bridge that gap. My partner says nobody will notice but I'll know. I always know. Has anyone else had that thing where a face just refuses to come alive? What do you even do? I'm tempted to just leave it and start the next one but it feels like giving up.

Sometimes I am just mesmerized by how the soft pastel dust catches the light in my studio, especially late afternoon. It hangs in the air like a little bit of magic. Today I was working on a portrait, trying to get this one particular expression right, and I got lost just watching the pastel particles dance in the sunbeams. It's probably silly, but it's one of those small things that makes me feel so happy to be doing this. Even when the face I'm painting is fighting me. Does anyone else get distracted by the little studio phenomena?

I'm working on a portrait, mostly glass smalti. The issue is the light catches the surface of some pieces too much, especially on the skin tones, and it looks almost like cheap plastic, not stone or glass. The tesserae themselves are fine, but the way the light hits them… it’s too uniform and bright. I’ve tried orienting pieces differently, but it’s not enough. Anyone else fought this? How did you solve it?

Finally worked up the nerve to raise my portrait rate. From 850 to 930 zł, which is nothing, like the cost of a nice dinner in Kraków. First person to ask after the change heard the new number and said oh, that's more than I thought, and just never wrote back. And the stupid part is I knew exactly what I was doing. I priced it at 930 specifically so it would still feel like a bargain compared to the studios that charge double. And I still felt like I'd done something rude. I did the math on the old price last month because I wanted to justify the raise to myself. 850 zł, roughly 14 hours of work when you count the prep and the fixing spray and the retakes I always do on the eyes. That's about 60 zł an hour. Less than I made answering emails at my old office job. Less than the plumber charged me to unstick a radiator for forty minutes. So logically I know I was right. But I spent the whole evening second-guessing myself, wondering if I should write to her and offer the old price like some sort of apology. Didn't. Woke up annoyed at myself either way. I keep seeing people on here talk about their real numbers and it genuinely helps. So here's mine and I'm not proud of it: I'll probably still say yes to anyone who asks nicely, at whatever they want to pay, because I can't stand the quiet after a no.

I painted a portrait of my sister-in-law's mother two years ago. Almost free, obviously, family price, I think I said €150 and we both knew it was a lie. Oil, 60×80, took me close to a week of evenings. Last month she put it in a small exhibition of her own work. Not mine, hers, but the portrait was the thing people stood in front of. A gallerist asked me what I'd charge for something like that. I said a number out loud, doubled it on the spot out of embarrassment, and I could see him filing it away as cheap. The piece that got me the most genuine interest of my career is the one I practically gave away. I'm not sure I know what to do with that. It's not regret, exactly. It's the feeling that nobody will ever believe my real prices now because the best proof of what I can do is marked at a tenth of it.

I finished a portrait commission this week that took me 40 hours across three months, including the sitting sessions, the gridding, the underpainting, the two rounds of corrections. The client paid €380. That's €9.50 an hour. I did the arithmetic in the studio last night and just sat there looking at the wall. The worst part is I can't even say it was a bad client. She paid quickly, she trusted me, she never nitpicked the nose. It's me. I quoted €380 because I was afraid to say 500 and lose the whole thing, and then I worked more hours than I expected because a portrait is never done when you think it is. I see the younger painters billing per hour like freelancers and I respect it, I do, but I can't work that way. I price the painting, not the time. Except the time is the painting, and one day the maths is going to catch up with me properly. How do the rest of you decide where the number goes, honestly? I'm tired of guessing.

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. 😅

It was at my brother-in-law's place in the 6th. Some woman I'd never met, nice enough, works in tech. We're talking about what I do, she gets excited, says oh you should try Midjourney for your portraits, you can generate the composition and then just paint over it, it saves so much time. I said that's not really how I work. She said no but it's the same thing in the end, the image is what matters. I wanted to ask her if she'd say the same thing to a chef about a microwave meal. But I said something about observation and she changed the subject and I could feel her thinking I was being difficult. The thing is, I spent four years learning to see. Not to copy photographs. To see the actual fall of light across a real face in a real room. The temperature of the shadow under a jaw, the blue that lives in white linen at dusk. If I let a machine decide my compositions, what exactly did I learn? I know we all use reference. I know photography changed painting forever. I'm not a purist. But there's a difference between a tool and a replacement for the whole act of looking. Maybe I'm just old. Maybe in ten years every painter works this way and nobody cares. But I care. I like the slowness. I like being wrong for two hours and then something clicks.

Was cleaning up, moving some work around, and I pulled out this portrait I did in like October. Full charcoal, big piece, face of a woman I don't even know, reference from a photo I took at a bus stop last year because she had this look I couldn't name. Just something in her eyes. Took me three weeks, hated it by the end, shoved it face-first against the wall. Pulled it out today and it's ... good. Like actually good. I forgot I could do that. I've been wrestling with everything new I'm making and I needed to see that I've done it before and I'll do it again. Went and cried for a minute in the corner with a paint rag. Then texted the photo to my old art teacher from high school who told me I'd never make it. Petty? Absolutely. Worth it? You bet.

I was approached by someone who wants a portrait of their prize-winning poodle. They saw my work and said they 'loved it'. Then they offered me 200 euros. Two hundred! For an oil painting, detailed, custom work. They went on to say that 'art should be accessible'. Accessible? My tubes of Cerulean blue alone cost more than that. Bof. I told them the price for a serious portrait starts at 1500. They haven't replied. Good.

worst gallery red flag you've seen before signing or after? i once had a place tell me they "really connect with the emotional narrative" of my work and then ask if i could also do portraits of their dog. noped out of that one so fast. mine: they wanted 60% commission AND a "hanging fee." which is just... no. that's not a gallery, that's a landlord who paints. what's the one that made you walk?

Picked up a landscape at an estate sale last weekend for $12. Frame was ugly, paint was muddy, but something about the sky felt off, like it was doing more work than it should. Took a scraper to a corner tonight just to see and there's a whole family portrait under it. Three people, dog, someone's hands folded in their lap. I don't know why I'm so moved by it. Somebody painted over their own family. Or somebody else's. Either way they wanted it gone and it wouldn't stay gone. Gonna try to lift the top layer carefully. If I ruin both paintings so be it, but I want to see the faces.

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.

People always want the story of the comeback, the artist who stopped and then started again. Nobody wants the part where you spend ten years convincing students they're good enough when you've quietly decided you're not. That's what the fallow decade was for me. I taught portrait drawing at the atelier, competent classes, students who went on to do real work. And every evening I walked home past my own empty studio like it was a room I'd been evicted from. The strangest part is I wasn't blocked. I was just... finished. I'd seen enough mediocre paintings in galleries owned by people who couldn't tell you the difference between burnt sienna and raw umber, and I'd decided the whole enterprise was a bit de classe. What brought me back wasn't inspiration or a muse or any of that nonsense. It was my daughter, aged nine, asking me to paint her hamster that had died. I said no, I don't do pets. She cried. I painted the hamster. It's actually a good little painting, the light on that ridiculous fur, and I've never shown it to anyone. I don't have a lesson in this. Some of us just need a dead hamster to get back to work.