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Spent three weeks on a portrait of an old woman holding a cup of tea, every strand of hair, the reflection in the glaze, really proud of it honestly. Posted it, 140 likes. Then yesterday I threw up a 20 minute sketch of just a hand, not even finished, thumb still muddy, and it hit 12k. I don't understand this platform at all. The frustrating thing is I know exactly why. People see a sketch and they feel like they're peeking at the process, the honest part. The finished piece is intimidating, it's closed. The sketch is open. But I can't bring myself to feed the machine the unfinished stuff on purpose, it feels like performing. Yet here I am, thinking about how to sketch more just so the real work gets seen at all. Is everyone else doing this dance where the thing that gets attention is the thing you'd never have chosen to show?

There was this old bungalow off Cunningham Road, mustard yellow with these deep verandah columns I must have sketched three times. Beautiful proportion, proper classical. Last I heard a builder had bought it but nothing was happening, so I kept assuming I'd get one more chance at it. Went past today for something else entirely and it's just a pit. Not even a construction site yet, just an excavated hole with a hoarding. I stood there like an idiot for ten minutes. I have the sketches. That's the thing that keeps me going at it, but also the thing that stings a bit. Because the sketch is lovely and someone else will see it later and think oh, what a charming old house, what a nice moment in time. They won't feel the actual loss. The paper keeps the building but it can't keep the fact that it used to be someone's home, with someone's washing on the line and a dog that barked at me the first time I set up my stool outside the gate. I don't know where I'm going with this except that drawing things as they vanish is a strange job to have chosen. Some days it feels like the only honest thing I do. Other days it feels like taking photographs at a funeral and calling it art.

I got a message from a friend on Tuesday morning, a photo actually. The old house on 4th Cross, the one with the red oxide floor and the wooden balcony with the turned railing posts. Gone. Just the compound wall and a pile of rubble and two men sitting on it having tea. I have eleven sketches of that house. Eleven. From different angles, different mornings, different light. And I still felt like I hadn't really looked at it. That's the thing that gets me. I could draw a building a hundred times and still not be sure I actually saw it, and then one day it's a pile and the sketches are all I have and some of them are wrong. The proportions off, the balcony too high, the shadow in the wrong place. When I was an architect I used to draw buildings so they could be built. Now I draw them so they can be remembered and honestly I'm not sure I'm any better at it. Different job, same feeling of missing something. Not looking for advice on this one. Just wanted to say it out loud somewhere. Tuesday was a bad day.

Small thing, but it's been sitting with me all week. I've been sketching at the old market near Avenue Road for months now. Same three vegetable sellers, same crates, same blue tarpaulin. And every single time someone walks into my frame I do the same cowardly thing: I look down, wait, and hope they move off. Which means three years of urban sketching and my sketchbooks are full of beautiful empty streets that don't exist. Anyway, Thursday I just drew the man. Sat down on the low stone step, ink first like always, and instead of waiting I just caught him where he was, mid-argument with the auto driver about parking. Took maybe forty seconds. His shoulders are slightly wrong and I gave him one leg too many folds in the lungi, but he's there. He's in the drawing. The odd part is the whole page came alive after that. The crates stopped being an exercise in perspective and started being a place where something happened. I don't know why it took me this long. I think some part of me was treating people as interruption rather than as the actual subject. Architect habit maybe, buildings don't fidget. Anyone else here guilty of the empty-street sketchbook? Or is it just me being a coward with a pen 🙏

Small experiment I ran over the last two months. On the website I had put "prices on request" for the commissioned location sketches. Then in April I just wrote the number down: ₹4,500 for a full day out, roughly six hours, one finished A3 watercolour and ink, plus a couple of pencil studies I throw in anyway. Enquiries halved. Straight away, within a fortnight. But the ones that came through were completely different people. Earlier I'd get eight messages asking for a "quick sketch" of a wedding venue or a house before demolition, and half of them would vanish the moment I mentioned any money at all. Now it's fewer people, and they turn up knowing what it costs, and we spend the conversation on the actual thing. Which lane the morning light comes in from, whether they want the whole elevation or just the gate and the old neem tree. Real conversation. So the number went down and the work went up in quality. I'm still not sure if halving my enquiries is a win, and I keep second-guessing whether ₹4,500 is too low for a full day plus travel across the city. Anyone else here put a real number up instead of "DM for pricing"? Did it scare off the right people or just everyone?

There's this old bungalow on Lavelle Road, the kind with the mossy compound wall and a jackfruit tree you can see from the bus stop. I sketched it twice this month, once in ink on a Tuesday and once in watercolour from the footpath because the security guard finally stopped shooing me off. Went past this morning for a third go and there was already an excavator in the compound, half the roof gone. The jackfruit tree is still standing, which is more than I expected. I keep telling myself the sketch is what matters, that I'm documenting the street not the building. But there's something about losing a place you only got to know by drawing it. You feel the loss almost like you lived there. Anyway. The painting from Tuesday turned out decent. The light was doing something good that day. I'll finish it now, properly, framed and everything. Feels like the least I owe that house.

timed my "quick warm up sketch" this morning just to see. 47 minutes. i do this every day and every day i lie to myself that it's gonna be like ten minutes. the ten minute sketch is a myth. it's a full ass drawing with a little bit of character study in it and a color block i'm "just trying out" and suddenly it's lunchtime. the actual painting got forty minutes and it shows. but also that warm up is the only reason i can start at all so we're stuck with it. anyone else's daily ritual secretly the main event or is it just me

So I did this commission last month, a little wedding gift thing, couple's pet portrait in watercolor, their dog who passed away. They had a reference photo and I got so attached to the story I underpriced it on purpose, like €120 for what I told myself was "a quick 6 hours." It was not quick. I did a full sketch, hated it, redrew the dog's face three times because watercolor doesn't let you fix a bad eye, you just start over. Real time ended up around 14 hours, plus paper, plus I ruined two sheets. When I did the math afterward I made like €6 an hour. My old café job paid better and I didn't have to cry over a dog's nose shape at 1am. The worst part is they were so happy and the painting came out genuinely good, one of my favorites I've ever done. So now I'm sitting here like, do I charge the next person with a sad story €400 and feel like a monster, or do I keep doing this and slowly fund my own studio out of my own pocket?? I know the answer obviously but I keep needing strangers on the internet to tell me I'm allowed to charge for the hours that actually happened, not the hours I hoped would happen.

I went back to a street in Malleswaram today. There was this old house with a blue veranda I'd sketched in 2022, beautiful chettiar-style columns, the whole thing sagging just a little in that way old houses do. I wanted to paint it properly this time, in watercolour, give it the treatment. Pulled up to the spot and it's a construction site. Apartment going up, probably 14 floors from the look of the pit. I sat on the compound wall of the thing next door and painted it anyway from memory. Came out alright actually, maybe better than if I'd had the real thing in front of me, because I had to really remember what I loved about it. Weird feeling, documenting things as they disappear. But I'm glad I have that old sketchbook at home. At least someone drew it.

The owner of the house I sketched last month called me yesterday. He'd found my number through a mutual friend, wanted to know if I still had the drawing, said the building comes down in March and his mother grew up in it. So now I'm sitting with a scan I made in ten minutes at Malleswaram, one of those old houses with the sloping Mangalore tile roof and the wooden pillars on the verandah, and it suddenly has to be a proper painting. Funny how that works. I've drawn it three times over the years and never once thought of it as important until somebody told me the date. I said yes before I'd thought about what I was promising. I'm not a portrait painter, I don't know how to put a family's feelings into a watercolour. I'm going to do it the way I know, and hope the light on the verandah does the work. Anyone else had a drawing become heavier after the fact? Not the ones we choose. The ones that choose us.

Sold a set of three watercolour sketches of houses off MG Road to a regular client last month. Flat ₹6,000 for the set, which felt fair at the time because it's a nice round number and I priced it on the spot without thinking. Then I tallied up the actual drawing time, not even counting the two mornings I went back because the light was wrong. Twenty-one hours. That's ₹285 an hour before paper, paint, and the frames I threw in as a "goodwill" gesture because they're a repeat buyer. I keep telling myself the goodwill matters, the relationship matters, the next commission matters. And it does. But I did the same maths my old architecture firm used to do on billable hours and I winced. The worst part is I know exactly why I did it. Round numbers feel easier to say out loud. I'm still scared that if I quote ₹9,000 or ₹10,000 for a set, someone will just go "okay, no thanks" and I'll have lost it. But honestly, the client who haggles over ₹3,000 is not the client I want anyway. Still haven't raised my price for the next set. Working up to it.

Went back this morning to the old house on the corner near Sunday market. The one with the chajja that's been drooping for years. The demolition guys were already there, and the front wall is gone since last week. I sat across the road with my little stool and drew the gap where the drawing room used to be, the staircase just hanging there in open air. Thing is, I've painted that house maybe six times over the last two years. Every time meaning to catch it before this exact morning. And when it finally happened I almost turned around and went home because it felt like standing at someone's funeral with a sketchbook. But I forced myself to sit. Twenty minutes. The plaster dust kept drifting over my palette. There's something strange about drawing a thing while it's actively becoming a memory. The sketch isn't even good, honestly. But I'm glad I did it instead of driving away. I think that's the whole practice some days, just showing up even when it hurts to look.

I've been drawing a house on 8th cross for nearly two years now. Old Mysore-style place, red oxide floor visible through the gate, a jasmine creeper that had climbed up past the window and gone on to the roof. I must have four or five sketches of it by now, different lights, different days. This morning they brought the machine in. I went with my book and my box, sat on the opposite kerb like an idiot, and did not open either. Just watched. The whole thing was down by about eleven, and the creeper went first, which I hadn't expected and which was somehow the worst part. What I keep circling back to is this: my drawings are careful. They're accurate, the perspective is right, I know that house better than most people who lived near it. And not one of them is from the day it actually went. I have all the before and nothing of the during. I don't think that's a failure exactly. I don't know what it is. But I've been sitting with my tea for an hour now and it's the only thing on my mind.

There's this old bungalow off Millers Road, the kind with the deep verandah and those green wooden shutters that still shut properly. It's coming down next week for another apartment block. I knew that before I sat down to sketch it, and I still spent two hours on it this morning, then came home and started a watercolour from the sketch because the sketch alone wasn't enough. I keep telling myself it's just practice. Perspective, foliage, that particular way bougainvillea sits against a lime-washed wall. But it's not practice, is it. It's the same reason I took photos of my grandmother's house before they sold it and I've never looked at them a second time but I can't bring myself to delete them either. The funny part is the occupant came out and watched me for a while. Old gentleman, probably lived there fifty years. He didn't say anything, just nodded at the end and went back inside. I don't know if he was pleased or annoyed or just tired. Maybe all three. I'll finish the painting this week. It feels important that it exists before the house doesn't.

Went for my walk at seven as usual and the compound wall was already rubble. They'd been at it since about five, I think, because the dust was still hanging in the air and the man on the JCB was eating breakfast out of a steel tiffin box, sitting right there on the machine, perfectly calm. I've drawn that house three times over two years. Once from the road, once from inside the gate when the watchman let me in because I gave him chai, and once badly, in the rain, standing under someone's tree. All three are in a folder and now the folder is the only place the house exists. What I keep turning over is this. I have the drawings. I have the proportions, the railing detail, the way the light came through the jaali in the afternoon. And I still feel like I missed it. Like documenting a thing is not the same as holding on to it, and I've been telling myself for a while now that it is. My husband says at least I got there. He's not wrong. But knowing something is different from feeling it, na. Anyway, the JCB man offered me his chai. I didn't take it, I was already late for nothing in particular.

I painted this old house on Wheeler Road maybe three weeks back. One of those 60s bungalows, the kind with the deep verandah and the latticed jali bricks above the door. Sat on the footpath across the road for an hour, the owner's son came out and asked if I was doing it for a project. I said no, just because it's beautiful. He said, "Oh. We're demolishing it next month." Went past today while running an errand. The chajja is already gone. The jali bricks are in a pile by the gate. It took them a week. I have the painting. That's something. But it's sitting in my studio and I keep looking at it and thinking I got the proportions of that verandah slightly wrong, and now there's no building left to go check against. So it just stays wrong forever. That's the part that's bothering me more than the demolition, honestly. That I'll never know if it was my eye or the light. Do other people here live with that? The painting becoming the only record, and no way to verify it?

Someone asked me to paint their grandmother's house in Malleswaram, the one being sold, about to be knocked down for yet another apartment block. They wanted it as a gift for the whole family. I was so touched by the reason I just said ₹3,000 without thinking. Then I actually did it. Reference photo was terrible, old phone pic, bad lighting, half the house hidden behind a tree. I had to go there twice to sketch it properly, spent a full Sunday morning sitting on the kerb drawing, then another two days painting at home. The house had this lovely old chettah-style window detail and I ended up redoing the whole thing because the first wash went muddy. So that's roughly 20 hours of work for ₹3,000. ₹150 an hour. Less than what I pay my domestic help. The family loved it, cried actually, and that's worth something. But I sat there thinking, why do we do this to ourselves? Because the story was good? Because saying a real number felt awkward? I wouldn't ask my plumber to work for ₹150 an hour. Still haven't figured out what I should have charged. ₹8,000? ₹12,000? I honestly don't know what a fair rate is for this kind of thing in Bangalore. What do you all charge for a detailed architectural watercolour, a full house, not just a loose sketch?

I posted a portrait at the end of January. Knew it was one of the better ones, the kind where you finish and step back and for once you're not picking at it. And it just... sat there. Two months of near silence. Fewer likes than a half-finished sketch I threw up to remind myself I still existed. Then last week someone messaged me asking if it was still available. She'd found it through a tag, not the feed. Said she'd saved it weeks ago and kept coming back to it and it kept being the one she looked at. I keep thinking about that. I spent a whole weekend trying to decode why the sketch did better. Posting time, caption wording, hashtags. And none of it was the reason. The one that mattered traveled through a completely different door and I was too busy staring at the front window to notice the side one was open the whole time. Not sure I have a neat take. Just that the numbers I can see and the things that actually move me forward seem to have very little relationship to each other, and I'm tired of pretending they're connected.

The algorithm pushed my old Mysore palace sketch from 2019 to 40k people this week. Four hundred likes on a painting I did sitting on a park bench with wobbly perspective because I was too lazy to walk around to the other side. Meanwhile the piece I spent six weeks on, the one where I measured everything twice and worked the light properly, is sitting at 31 likes. Three. One. I know the answer is supposed to be "just post more, the algorithm is random, consistency consistency." But I've been doing this long enough to notice a pattern now. The stuff that lands is never the stuff I sweated over. It's the throwaway morning sketch, the wobbly bench one, the half-finished thing I almost didn't scan. I don't know what to do with that honestly. Do I keep painting for the craft and accept the algorithm doesn't care? Or do I get smart and start churning out the loose quick ones that perform, and keep the serious work for prints and shows where it actually gets seen properly? Right now I'm doing neither and it's making me a bit cranky. Anyone else found a way to hold both, the work you care about and the work that works?

So I've been trying to film my sketching, because everyone says video is the thing now. Spent most of a Sunday on one: tripod, phone clamped to the easel, painted a house on 8th Cross while the light was going, then cut it into a 40-second reel with the brush sounds and all. Took me close to three hours start to finish. It got 900 views and zero enquiries. I was ready to give up on the whole format. Then last Thursday I was out at Malleswaram, half-finished sketch of an old tiled roof, and I filmed maybe 20 seconds by accident, phone just propped on my chai glass. No edit. You can hear a scooter and someone's pressure cooker going off. Posted it without thinking. Two commissions off that one, one from a woman in Jayanagar who said the noise was the reason she stopped scrolling. I don't know what to do with this information honestly. I can't fake the messy ones on purpose, that's the entire problem. And I'm not going back to three-hour edits. Also my hands look old in close-up and I've made peace with that.