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I've been using the same Schmincke Cadmium Yellow for nearly a decade. It's always been one of my most reliable, predictable colors, smooth, even washes, no surprises. And this week, painting a Ranunculus specimen, it started granulating. Settling into the paper texture in a way it simply never has. It's not the paper, same batch of Arches cold-pressed I've been working through for months. It's not the water, I haven't changed my setup. It's the paint. I'm trying to decide whether I got a bad tube, whether Schmincke quietly changed something in the formulation, or whether I'm finally losing my grip on a color I thought I understood completely. If anyone else has noticed a shift in their Schmincke yellows recently, I'd like to know. Because I feel like I've suddenly lost trust in an old friend and I'm not sure whether to replace the tube or just adjust my expectations.

There is a scrap of old cotton sheet in my lap whenever I work, grey-brown in the middle from wiping my fingers between colours, and I have gotten weirdly attached to it. I know it is filthy. It has streaks of a Schmincke burnt umber that dried months ago and I still use it. It has a shape now, worn to one corner where I always pinch it. Washing it would fix nothing and cost me something, I think. A clean cloth feels wrong under the hand, too smooth, no memory. So it just lives folded on the corner of the easel and I will die on this hill. What is the object in your space you refuse to clean or replace, even though you know you should? Tell me I am not the only one with a cursed rag.