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I've been using Sennelier oil sticks for years. Usually reliable, a bit soft in warm weather but nothing you can't work around. The one I bought last week, a raw umber, came out of the tube with the consistency of toothpaste that's been left uncapped all night. Crumbly, dry, almost no oil feel at all. I had to break it up and mix it with stand oil just to get it to stick to the knife. I emailed the supplier. They said it's a known issue with a batch from the summer. No recall, but they'd replace it if I sent photos. Which I did, but I'm stuck on the fact that they knew and still shipped it. That's three tubes of paint I've had problems with this year across different brands and I'm starting to wonder if the supply chain issues everyone talked about in 2022 are still showing up now as rushed batches and bad checks. Anyway. The raw umber is fine now after the intervention. But I shouldn't have to doctor a Sennelier stick like it's cheap student grade. Anybody else hit a dud batch lately or is it just me.

Still using the same tube of Sennelier ultramarine I bought in Paris in 2003. The crimp at the end is almost completely folded over now, every week I squeeze it a little flatter and think this is the last canvas, and then there's always a little more. I've moved twice with that tube. It survived a marriage and a divorce and a second one. Probably thirty canvases have a bit of it in them somewhere. I keep meaning to buy a fresh one. And I don't, because somewhere in there I've decided the old one is the better colour, which is nonsense, it's the same pigment, same batch probably. But you know, the tube itself has the right temperature now. A new one would feel cold. My wife thinks this is sentimentality. It isn't. It's superstition, which is a different thing entirely.

They arrived Tuesday. The box has that wooden smell and the sticks are wrapped in paper like they're something precious, and I have been walking past them for three days now. Meanwhile I am still working with the flattened stubs from my cheap set, the ones that are basically just dust held together by hope. Which is silly. I know it's silly. You buy them to use them, that is the whole point, and I am not the kind of person who saves things for a special occasion. But there is something in my head that says if I break the good ones open I have to make something worth them, and I don't know yet if I can. The portrait on the easel is a study of my own hands, which is harder than I expected, and I keep thinking maybe I'll just do a few more of those first before I open the box. A few more. Sure. Anyone else have this? Or do you all just tear the paper off immediately like normal people.

I've had a pastel portrait of my sister sitting face-down on the shelf for about four months. Toned grey paper, a bit of Sennelier on the cheekbone that actually worked. I kept telling myself I'd fix the ear first. The ear was fine. I just couldn't stand looking at the rest of it next to the ear. She came over Sunday for coffee and I forgot it was out. She picked it up, turned it over, and said "oh, that's me," in this normal voice, not the polite gallery voice. Then she asked if she could have it. So I bought a frame today, 40x50, cheap one from the place on Karmelicka, and it's hanging in her hallway now. It is not my best work. The jaw is too heavy and I know exactly which stroke I should have left alone. But it's on a wall. In a house. Someone wanted it there. I don't think I've ever let a piece leave the room before without apologizing for it first, and this time I just said thank you, which took me a second to manage. Still strange to me that the ones I want to hide are sometimes the ones people see themselves in.

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.

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.

I have this old cookie tin, the kind with the dented lid, and in it go the pastel studies that don't work. Not the disasters, I throw those out. The almost. The ones where the mouth is right but the jaw is wrong or the whole thing is just slightly dead in a way I can't name. I counted today while I was looking for a Sennelier that rolled under the desk. Forty-one. Eighteen of them are the same face. I don't know why I keep them or what I think will happen. It's not a nice tin to look through. But every time I say I will empty it I open it first and then I don't. There is one from maybe two years ago that is better than anything I have made since, and I don't know how I did it, and that is the real reason the tin stays full I think. Does anyone else keep the failures? Or do you destroy them properly like a functioning person. Asking for a friend who is me.

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.