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I had a new student in my botanical watercolor class yesterday. She's a pleasant enough woman, retired, looking for a hobby. We were going through the basics of setting up a composition from a live specimen, a simple cyclamen leaf, and she asked, quite earnestly, if she could just take a photograph of it and trace the outline instead. I explained that tracing would defeat the purpose of learning to see, which is rather the whole point of the exercise. She seemed unconvinced. She said it would save time and look neater. I suggested she give it a proper try first, and if she still wanted to trace at the end of class, I would help her. She did not want to trace by the end of class. But the amount of energy I had to spend not saying "you are paying me to teach you to draw, not to show you how to avoid learning to draw" was considerable. I understand that people want shortcuts. I do. Watercolor is difficult and it takes years to develop any real control. But the shortcuts don't actually get you where you want to go. They just leave you dependent on the shortcut. I suppose I am old-fashioned about this. Learning to see, really see, is the skill. Everything else is technique layered on top of that foundation.

I have a flat hog brush, maybe fifteen years old now. The ferrule is loose, the handle has a crack running through it where I must have left it in solvent too long once, and the bristles are worn down to almost half their original length. It's useless for any kind of clean stroke. But I keep it because it does something no new brush can do, it leaves a mark that's broken, a little ragged, like the paint itself is hesitating. I've tried to buy the same model new. It doesn't work the same way. A new brush is too polite. This happens with tools, but also with the way you work. You develop habits that are actually just wear patterns, and then you mistake them for technique. I don't know if that's a problem or just how it goes.

Went to this fine art fair over in Nashville back in the spring. Set up my booth, had my best quilts hung proper, the whole thing. Three days and I sold exactly one small wall hanging to a lady from Memphis who said it reminded her of her grandmother's kitchen. That was it. I was packing up feeling a little foolish for the booth fee when this woman from a gallery in London comes walking by. She'd been watching me from across the room for two days she said. Didn't want to bother me while I was working. She asked about my piecing technique and I showed her the back of a quilt where you can see all the stitching and she just stood there quiet for a long time. Now I'm getting ready to ship six pieces to England next month. First time my work crosses the ocean. The Lord moves in ways that don't make sense to us in the moment. That dry fair taught me something about who's really watching. It ain't the people handing you cash right then. Sometimes it's the one standing back taking notes while you're just doing your work.

Like, I'll get a video of me just doing a really simple wash technique, something I thought was pretty straightforward and maybe helpful, and it'll get like, 100 views total. Then I'll post a sped-up video of me painting my cat, Bartholomew, looking super derpy, and it blows up to 10k. Bartholomew, of all things! haha. I'm not saying cats aren't great, but it's so hard to tell what the platforms actually want or if they're just messing with us. It makes me wonder if all the effort I put into explaining the pigment mixing or the paper buckling is just… wasted on them? It’s frustrating because I want to share the skill of it, you know? Omg, anyone else feel like they're just throwing paint at a wall and hoping something sticks with the algorithm gods lately?

Seriously, I'm starting to think the only reliable way to reach people who actually care about my work is through my email list. Like, I spent ages on this new glaze technique, posted it everywhere - Insta, TikTok, even tried a few boosted posts on Facebook. Crickets. But then I sent an email about it, just a quick note with a photo, and bam! Sales. Like, actual orders came in within an hour. I know people say 'build your email list,' but joder, it feels more critical than ever when the social platforms are just these black boxes where your reach can go poof overnight. Anyone else feeling this intense pull back to the fundamentals?

I teach a beginner botanical watercolour class at the local art centre twice a year, and I start every session the same way: I hand everyone a sheet of cheap cellulose paper and tell them to paint a leaf on it. The groaning is predictable. But I want them to feel what bad paper does before they ever touch the good stuff. I want them to experience the buckling, the pilling, the muddy washes that happen when the sizing fails. Because until you've fought a losing battle against a sheet of Canson student-grade, you don't really understand why you're paying for Arches. It's the same reason I still keep a block of that wretched paper in my own studio. Every few months I pull it out and paint a study on it, just to remind myself. It keeps me honest about technique. You can't fudge your way through a wash on paper that won't hold it. You have to be deliberate.

I've been using Arches 140lb cold press for nearly twenty years. It was reliable. You knew what you were getting. That block of paper I opened this morning has sizing so uneven the paint is pooling in patches on the first three sheets. I'm not talking about a minor inconsistency. I'm talking about washes that lay down flat in one area and bead up like wax in another. I wrote to them a few months ago about a different batch and got a polite form letter suggesting I might be using too much water. Which, no. I know how much water I'm using. I've been doing this long enough to know the difference between a technique problem and a materials problem. I've already switched to Fabriano Artistico for my commission work. I didn't want to. I liked Arches. But I can't keep fighting the paper. If anyone else has noticed this I'd be curious, though I suspect most people just adapt and don't say anything.

I did a portrait yesterday I was genuinely happy with for once. Soft greys and a tiny bit of terracotta, the skin actually looked like skin. And then I sprayed fixative and it deepened everything by about two values and killed the light layer I had on top. So now she looks like she's in a dim room instead of the soft daylight I wanted. I know you're supposed to test on scraps. I never do. I'm too impatient and then I pay for it. Do you just... accept the shift and work lighter to account for it? Or is there a technique I'm missing? I've tried workable fixative between layers and final fixative at the end and it always changes something. Maybe I should just stop using it and keep everything under glass but then I worry about smudging when I ship.