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everyone's got their fancy stay-wet palettes and i'm over here scraping bone-dry acrylic crust off this little board with a palette knife like i'm archeology-ing my own bad decisions. the texture is genuinely insane at this point, there's like seven layers of dried paint built up with actual craters where i gouged out a chunk of ultramarine mid-painting. i know i should just sand it down or toss it but honestly i'm attached. it's like a little topographical map of every piece i've made since january. you can see the exact week i went through a burnt umber phase. tell me you also have a cursed palette you refuse to retire

After a decade of charging what I thought was reasonable, 800€ for a 40x50cm oil, I finally did what my husband's been telling me to do for years and raised them to 1,100€ for the same format. Same canvas, same hours, same me. Just finally stopped apologising for what I ask. I lost one client. A woman who'd bought three paintings from me over the years, always asked for a small discount, always got one. She sent a polite email saying she couldn't justify the increase. I wrote back, equally polite, that I understood completely. And honestly? The relief of not painting for someone who sees your work as something to bargain over is worth the lost sale. The other clients didn't blink. One said she'd been waiting for me to raise them. That stung more than the loss, in a good way. I know the numbers are different for everyone, different city, different medium, different audience. But I wish someone had told me ten years ago that the fear of losing clients is usually worse than the reality. The ones who value what you do will stay. The ones who don't were already costing you more than they paid.

OMG you guys I actually did it. That big commission for the hotel lobby? The one I've been talking about for weeks that was making me so anxious I could barely sleep? It's boxed up and gone to the shipper. I almost cried when I handed it over, not gonna lie, it felt like saying goodbye to a piece of myself after staring at it for so long, but it's done. It's such a relief, I can finally breathe and maybe even paint something just for me again. I think this calls for pizza tonight haha. So happy it's out of my hands and on its way!