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i have a perfectly good easel. i have a drafting table i found on facebook marketplace for $40. and yet for the last three months i've been doing all my small studies on a clipboard i grabbed from the checkout aisle at stop & shop while buying trash bags. it's just... the right amount of friction. i can prop it on my lap, lean it against a stack of books, take it outside, set it down anywhere. there's something about the lack of ceremony that makes starting easier. no adjusting, no standing up, no "ok now i am in the studio doing Art." just grab the clipboard and go. i think i've made more paintings this quarter than the last two combined and i hate admitting it's because of a $6 piece of bent metal and a spring clip. but here we are. what's the dumbest thing in your setup that you're secretly loyal to

had this little brass sharpener, must've been twenty years with me. came from some market stall in ennis, cost a euro maybe. kept it in the same tin as my carving tools. and the blade's been gone off it for about three years now, I knew it, I knew it was just chewing the pencils instead of sharpening them, but I couldn't bring myself to throw it out. it'd been everywhere with me. first studio, second studio, the shed phase, the kitchen table phase. anyway the wife bought me a new one yesterday, one of those crank ones you bolt to the bench, and I had to stand there and actually drop the old one in the bin. felt daft, felt like I was putting down a dog or something. the new one's fierce good though. grand twist on it. might name it.<｜end▁of▁thinking｜> <｜｜DSML｜｜parameter name="tags" string="false">["tools", "studio rituals", "letting go", "pencil sharpener", "the shed years"]

my youngest, three years old, got in here last week while I was making tea. found my good carving tool, the Pfeil No. 11, the one I've had about twelve years, the handle's worn to fit my hand. took it out to the garden and carved his name into the concrete path. just scratched it in there, lovely and deep, like a little viking. I was raging for about thirty seconds before I realised that's the most permanent mark I've ever seen that gouge make. sure I'll never move house now, there's a signature on the place. the worst of it though is I spent the next hour hunting for the gouge I was actually using before he came in, the 5mm V-tool, I'd only put it down for a second, and I still haven't found it. it's gone. the kids have their own dimension where tools go. I'll find it in a welly boot in three years. anyway the path has beautiful lettering now, fair play to him. kid's got a steady hand.

Not a metaphor. It is gone. Small one, the thin trowel shape, worn down on one side from fifteen years of scraping. I have turned the studio over twice, checked the jar of linseed, the freezer, the pockets of the coat I only wear when the heating dies. Nothing. What bothers me is not the knife, I can buy another for nine euros. It is that I cannot remember the last time I held it. I remember holding it on the Corot copy two weeks ago, that grey passage in the drapery, and after that, blank. So somewhere in my own studio I put down a tool I have used nearly every day of my working life and simply stopped seeing it. That is the part I do not like. Not the loss, the not noticing. My daughter says this is what happens when you turn forty-four, very funny, she is sixteen and thinks the whole thing is a comedy. My husband suggested I had perhaps already looked for it, which is the kind of sentence that ends a marriage in theory. I have now ordered a replacement, which of course means the original will present itself tomorrow on the windowsill like nothing happened. Always the way. Meanwhile there is a half-finished interior on the easel with a knife-painted edge on the tablecloth that I cannot finish until I find it or admit defeat, and I have been standing in front of it for two days doing neither.

I have this shallow drawer in my flat-file that's just chaos. Scraps of paper too small to use, edges I trimmed off, bits of envelopes, a receipt from an exhibition in Copenhagen three years ago, one single glove. Everything else in the studio is ruthlessly ordered, papers sorted by colour and weight, tools in their places. But that drawer is a mess and I can't bring myself to clean it. I think it's because if I sorted it, all those tiny bits would stop being potential and just become trash. As long as they're in the drawer they might still be something. I know that's not rational. But I don't think the studio needs to be rational everywhere.

There's a sledgehammer that's been propped in the corner of my studio since 2004. Not mine, nobody remembers how it got there. I trip over it, I move it, it comes back. Yesterday a young guy came to help with a frame and he asked what it was for. I said I don't know, it just lives here. Then I thought about it. Twenty years of stepping around a tool I've never once lifted. That's not a studio, that's a relationship. I finally carried it out to the yard. Felt like breaking up with someone I never dated. Now the corner looks empty and I can't decide if that's better or worse. Maybe I'll buy a different hammer to take its place. Some of us just need the weight in the room.

Took me years to admit I'm useless for the first hour in the studio. Coffee, walk around, stare at the piece, move a tool I don't need, leave again. Used to call it procrastination and push through it. Made worse work. Now I just accept it. First hour is for warming up the eyes, not the hands. The real work starts when I stop forcing it. What do you do in that dead time before anything happens?

The cordless drill gave up this morning, mid-screw, some little mounting bracket that has no business being dramatic. Twenty-two years, that thing. Two batteries, the chuck replaced twice, survived the fire in the Karlin studio and the divorce where I got custody of it along with the good ladder. Now it just sits there, warm, refusing. The new one is cordless, lighter, quieter, and honestly I already don't trust it. It hums too politely. The old one roared like something offended. I keep the dead one on the shelf. Not for art. It's a witness. I think that's what a studio is, half the time. A graveyard of tools that outlasted their jobs, and then in a room somewhere someone walks through the whole thing and calls it a statement. It's a drill. It's a drill that worked for twenty-two years. I'm going to drink my coffee and look at the bracket I didn't finish mounting and feel old in the way that's actually fine.

weird thing I've never told anyone in studio circles. the thing I reach for most to cut paper and carve into board is a bread knife my ex left behind when he moved out. he didn't want it, it was in the drawer of stuff neither of us claimed. serrated edge is perfect for tearing through wet paper without crushing it. been using it four years now. sometimes I think about how the best tool in my practice is a piece of a marriage I didn't even want to keep. I don't know what that says about me or the work but it's true. anyone else working with objects that have a weird history attached? not sentimental pieces, I mean the ones you use daily without thinking until suddenly you do.

Still using the same tungsten carbide chisel I bought in '96. Handle's been replaced three times. The steel is still good. Most of the young guys I see in studios are buying new sets every couple years. They think the tool wears out. It doesn't. You just have to know how to sharpen it. Spent this morning dressing it on the diamond stone. That's the real skill nobody teaches anymore. Not the swinging. The maintenance.

The little flat chisel I apprenticed under old man Kowalski with finally cracked this morning. Thirty-eight years I've had that thing. Ground it down so many times the handle was about two inches long and wrapped in electrical tape I'd replaced maybe a dozen times. First tool I ever bought with my own money. Fifty cents at a flea market in 1982, and I remember thinking I was being robbed. I stood there for a while not knowing what to do with myself. That sounds soft. But it was the only thing in the studio I didn't have to think about. Pick it up, it does what you need. No decisions. I know it's just a tool. I've got a drawer full of better ones. But I spent the morning looking at the break instead of starting the piece I'd planned, and that's not like me. Boxed up the two pieces. Going to bury it out back with the other ones I've worn past saving. Give it a little ceremony nobody's going to see. Then I'll pull a new one off the shelf and get on with it. Don't know why I'm writing this on here. Maybe so somebody else who's got a tool with too much history in it knows it's normal to feel stupid about it when it goes.

People assume the important equipment in the studio is the welder or the gantry. It's a magnet on a length of builder's twine. Maybe 40 cm of twine, a speaker magnet from a dead radio, and I lower it into whatever cavity I've built and listen for the click. Steel frame, hidden nail, a screw I forgot. If it snags, I have found the thing that will hold the weight. If it goes quiet the whole way down, I go back and rethink. I have a laser level. It lives under a pile of rags. The magnet is in my jacket pocket right now and has been for maybe six years. There is something honest about it. It cannot lie to me and it does not need batteries and when the piece is finished nobody will ever know it was there. Most of the work is like that. Also the twine has a knot about a third of the way along that means nothing. I have forgotten what it was for. I will not be removing it.

There's a little fleam I bought off an old carpenter at a market in Ennis maybe eight years ago, cost me a fiver, and it's still the sharpest thing in my toolkit. Handle's held together with electrical tape at this stage but I'll not part with it. Every morning I'm in the studio I run it along the edge of a gouge a couple of times and it brings the life back into it. And then I've a brand new burnisher I paid forty-odd quid for sitting in a drawer since I got it because the one I actually use is a smooth bit of bone I found on the beach in Connemara. Kid you not. Dog dug it up, I cleaned it off, and it's the perfect thing. What's the bit of kit you won't let go of because it works and that's all that matters, and what's the expensive thing you own that you barely touch? I'm not talking brushes obviously, we all have the brush we'd cry over losing. I mean the odd bits.

I spent this morning painting a section of an old workbench in my studio. The light here in Lyon, even on a cloudy day, has this particular quality that catches the grain of the wood, the worn patches where tools have rested for years. It’s a subtle thing, this interplay of light and texture, but it’s what I’m always chasing. It makes you feel the history of the object. It’s why I love oils so much; the paint itself can hold that physical sensation. Some days it feels like a battle to get it right, but when it clicks, voilà.

Right so, small confession. Years ago I stopped trying to carve cold lino. You'd be fighting the stuff, the tool skidding, the surface like a frozen jaffa, and you'd blame your hands when really the block was just stone cold. So now the kettle goes on the minute I get in. Not for tea, not at first anyway. I sit the block on an old tea towel beside it, let it take the warmth for ten minutes while I have the actual tea and stare at the drawing and convince myself I know what I'm doing. Means the studio smells faintly of burnt dust and hot rubber now. Which is a smell I've come to love and absolutely nobody else would. The wife came in last week to call me for dinner, saw the block propped up on the towel like a patient in a hospital bed, and just looked at me. "It's not even a real setting, Niall." It is though. It's the setting between boil and off. That's a setting. Anyway I'm midway through a big heron piece, 40cm by 60cm, three blocks for it, and the grey block is the one giving me trouble. Grey always takes the warmth worse than the brown. I'm aware how mental that sentence would sound to anyone outside this room. What's the mad ritual you'd have to explain with a straight face? I'll read them all tonight before I go back to the heron.

ok this is going to sound ridiculous but i'm sitting here cleaning my brushes after finishing a piece and i got genuinely emotional over my old escoda. i've had this one brush since my second year of undergrad, it's a size 10 travel brush, the handle is all chewed up because i was a nervous student who bit her brushes (gross i know but i was 19 and stressed), the ferrule is slightly loose, and i've rewarped the bristles like three times with my mouth after bad cleaning habits. but it still holds a point better than any new brush i own. i literally cannot paint without it. i dropped it once in 2018 and my heart stopped for a second. i know brushes are technically replaceable and there's this whole "don't get attached to tools" mentality in art but like. NO. i AM attached. this thing has been through every single painting i've ever been proud of. it was in my hand when i painted my dad's portrait the year he died. it came with me to every shitty shared studio i've ever had. it's survived three moves and a minor flood. my partner bought me a fancy new escoda for christmas and i keep it in the wrapper because i'm scared to use it. i don't want to replace my old one. it's not the same. anyone else have that one tool that's basically a part of them at this point

It was never meant for painting. It is a putty knife, a stiff one, with a wooden handle that has gone almost black at the thumb side. I bought it because I could not afford the proper scrapers that month, and now it is the only tool I really trust. Twenty-nine marks, if I remember right, and the shop is a bakery now. I have proper palette knives. Good ones, from a supplier in Düsseldorf, balanced and beautiful. I use them for maybe ten percent of the work. The rest is this ugly thing that I have to hold at a bad angle because the blade has worn uneven. It digs. It makes a scrape that the expensive knives cannot make, a kind of tearing that leaves the underpainting showing through in streaks. When I try to plan that effect with a good tool, it looks like decoration. With the putty knife it just happens. The handle is split now, about two centimeters down from the ferrule. I have wrapped it once with tape, which is worse than the split, so I took the tape off. I keep thinking I should buy another one, since putty knives are not rare. But a new one would have a square edge and a clean handle, and it would be a different tool. The whole point is that this one is no longer what it was sold as. Naja. Some days I think this is the only honest thing in the studio. Everything else I chose. This one I just kept.

I just finished an edition of 25 screenprints that took me four months from the first drawing to the last pull. Copper plates, inks, paper, the studio time, the proofs I rejected along the way. Sold the whole edition to a gallery for €900, which sounds fine until you do the real math and realize the materials alone were close to half that, and the gallery takes 50% on top. So I made 25 objects by hand and I think I netted something like €6 an hour. The gallery is happy. The collector is happy. I'm the only one who knows the number. The part I keep turning over is that I priced it like a print. Like the edition makes it cheap, because it's a multiple, because the original is the plate and the prints are just copies of it. But each one of those copies took my hands on it. That logic is from an old world where printmaking was a reproduction tool, not a primary medium. I keep selling work on a pricing model that was built for something printmaking no longer is, and I don't know if I'm too scared to break it or just can't figure out what the new number should be. I raised the price on the next edition by €300 and I'm already scared nobody takes it.

Been at the same studio for twenty-two years. My DeWalt angle grinder dates back to the first month. Replaced the brushes three times, new cord once, dropped it off a ladder onto concrete and it barely chipped. The shop supervisor at the fabrication place I apprenticed under always said you buy a good tool once and it outlasts every relationship you'll have. He wasn't wrong. Finally had to retire it today. The armature's gone, I can smell it, and no amount of new brushes fixes that. Put it on the shelf instead of in the bin. Can't bring myself to toss it. Which is ridiculous, it's a tool, tools get used up. That's the point of them. My kid asked why I kept it and I didn't have an answer. I think I just wanted one thing to outlast the work, not the other way around.

Month and a half sitting staring at the same half-carved block of a heron and hating every line of it. Told meself it was the wrong lino, wrong tool, wrong phase of the moon, whatever I could blame. The whole time the real problem was I'd decided this one had to be The Good One, the one that says something, and sure you can't carve under that yoke. No wonder the blade kept slipping. Then the kids got into the studio last week, the usual carnage, and my daughter knocked the block off the bench. Landed lino-side down on the concrete, gouged the corner of it. Would've wept a month ago. Instead I just carved straight through the damage, turned the scar into part of the bird's wing, and it's the best couple of passes I've done in three months. Proofed it tonight and there's a heron on the paper with a proper scuff in its wing and I'm mad about it. There's a lesson in there somewhere about not being so precious about your own work and I'm sure I'll forget it by Thursday. But tonight I'm chuffed. That's the win. And for the record the lino was grand. It was never the lino.