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Had a piece ready for welding last month, a big steel armature that needed a structural weld I couldn't do in my own shop. Got a quote from a foundry I've used before for $600. Dropped it off. Picked it up and the invoice was $1,200. Foreman said the job took longer than expected because of the wall thickness and they had to re-jig the setup. No call to warn me, no authorization. Just the work done and the new price. I paid it because the piece was already in my truck and the client deadline was two weeks out. But I sat in the parking lot for five minutes first. That's the part I keep thinking about. Not whether they were right or wrong. Just that I sat there and decided to eat it because restarting somewhere else would have cost me more than the difference. Still don't know if that was smart or weak. Probably both.

i ordered pastelmat like i always do and somehow ended up with a pad of canson mi-teintes that's way too smooth. the pastel just sits on top, doesn't bite, three layers and it's already muddy. i was so annoyed i almost threw it in the bin. but i have been working on the same reference for four days now on paper i hate and something weird is happening. because it's not taking the pastel well i have to be more careful, work lighter, actually plan each stroke instead of just smudging everything into a blur. the face i'm doing has more structure than anything i've made in months. it looks like a drawing instead of a dream i had. i think sometimes the wrong materials teach you something the right ones can't. or maybe i'm just making peace with wasting twenty quid on paper i won't buy again.🙂

Been wrestling with this same piece since Monday. Big charcoal study of a seated figure, hip tilted, weight on one hand. Could not get the left shoulder to sit right. Kept pushing the value darker thinking that would fix it. Made it worse and worse and worse. Finally stepped back this morning and realized I'd drawn the whole arm wrong at the structural level. The angle was off by maybe ten degrees from the start and everything I did after that was just trying to prop up a mistake instead of undoing it. Erased the whole arm down to the paper. Redid it in like twenty minutes. Now it works. Hate that I spent three days being stubborn when the answer was just admit I was wrong and start over. Love that the drawing is finally saying what I wanted it to say. Both feelings true at once. Anyone else ever fight a piece for days only to realize the fix was way simpler than you were letting it be? Or is that just me and my brilliant stubborn brain 😭

It's a single nodding flower on a stem I cut from the garden last Monday. By Tuesday it had started to droop. By Thursday the petals were translucent and the stamens had begun to shed. Today it's practically a study in decay, the sepals are papery and brown at the edges, the stem is soft. I keep painting it anyway. There's a peculiar honesty to painting a specimen as it actually changes, rather than freezing it at its best moment. The color shifts, the structure fails, and you have to decide whether you're documenting the plant or your own attachment to how it looked three days ago. I think I'm doing both. I set up a new page each morning and work from life, not from the previous day's study. It's unsentimental work, or it's meant to be. The flower doesn't know it's declining. It just is what it is.

We've been trying to get more structured with our Instagram Reels. For ages, it felt like throwing spaghetti at the wall, you know? Lots of effort, not much to show for it. But this past week, we finally had a sequence of three Reels focusing on a step-by-step process for one of our smaller products just… take off. Like, double the engagement we usually get on any given post, and a noticeable bump in traffic to that product page too. It’s not a huge viral moment, but for us, it feels like a breakthrough after so much trial and error. Makes all the late evenings worth it, mostly! 🙂

Welded a steel base for a standing piece last Thursday. Quarter-inch plate, good beads, let it cool slow. This morning I'm wiping it down and there's a hairline running about two inches from one of the welds. Not structural yet. But it's there. I keep going back and forth on whether to cut it out and re-weld or let it ride and see if it stabilizes. The piece it's holding is carved limestone, maybe 150 pounds. If the base gives, that stone hits concrete. Part of me thinks I should have used a thicker plate. Part of me knows I've seen old street railings hold together with worse cracks for fifty years. What's your rule on when you chase a flaw and when you leave it?