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I've been looking at my palette knife scrapings lately. You know, the thick little piles of paint I scrape off when cleaning my knife. They dry into these surprisingly complex little landscapes. I'm fascinated by the way the oil dries, the subtle variations in color and texture depending on the pigment. Some are almost like tiny, cracked desert surfaces, others have a waxy sheen. It's a reminder of the physical life of the paint itself, beyond the image I'm trying to create. Perhaps I should start collecting these little beauties.

I've got this 2kg tub of Gamblin cold wax that's been sitting in the studio since maybe March. Not old. But the top layer has this weird stiff skin on it, almost rubbery, and underneath it's still soft. I scraped the skin off and stirred what's left and it seems fine but I'm not sure if the ratio's changed, wax medium is supposed to be consistent and if it's lost solvent or something I'll feel it in how the paint moves. I know the official answer is keep it sealed, use it faster, don't let air get in. But I've got four paintings going at once and I don't work through it that fast. So do people just stir and carry on, or does this stuff actually degrade? Because I've had a tub that went completely hard after a year and that was done, but this in-between state I don't trust.

i've had this rubbermaid bin under my work table for like four years. t-shirts he wore that my mom couldn't throw away and neither could i. today i just took the scissors to one of them. a faded green one from a 5k he ran in 2008. felt like i was doing something wrong for the first ten minutes. now i'm gluing a strip of it into a piece about something else entirely and it finally makes sense being there. not as a memorial or whatever. just as a color and a texture that belongs in the thing. anyone else sit on materials forever before you can touch them? or is that just the hoarder gene

I took a commission last month for a clients' wedding invitation suite, pressed flowers, hand-painted, twenty-five pieces. They wanted original watercolor originals, not prints. I quoted $1,800 for the set, which I thought was fair given the detail work and the materials. I sat down yesterday and actually tracked the hours. Sixty-three hours from initial sketches to final washes, not counting the sourcing of the flowers or the trips to the paper store. That comes to roughly $28.50 an hour. Less than I made as a graduate teaching assistant in 2003. The work is beautiful. The client is thrilled. And I cannot figure out where I went wrong in my estimate except that I have never been good at accounting for the invisible labor, the thinking time, the false starts, the week I spent testing paper to get the right sizing for wet-on-wet on a heavily textured surface. I charged for the painting. I forgot to charge for everything that makes the painting possible. I raised my studio rate by 15 percent this morning. It still feels like I'm guessing.

I bought a pack of those super cheap synthetic brushes at Michael's a few months ago, like $8 for a dozen, just to beat up on for texture work and practice pieces. And now I reach for them almost every time over the nice ones my husband got me for Christmas. They're not even good brushes. The ferrule is wobbly and one of them is already shedding. But they're the exact right stiffness for how I actually paint, and I'm not scared to mess them up. That's the thing. The nice ones sit in the jar and I keep talking myself out of using them because what if I ruin them. Meanwhile the $8 ones are doing all the real work. I think I need to just give the good ones to a purpose. Use them on a piece I actually care about and stop treating them like they're museum pieces. Anyone else have brushes they are weirdly protective of and never use? Or am I just hoarding nice art supplies like everybody does.

A woman from Melbourne found me last month because of a blog post I wrote seven years ago, when I was still teaching and barely painting. It was about why I mix my own colours instead of using tube paints straight, I was annoyed about something, I don't even remember what, and I just wrote it out in fifteen minutes on a Wednesday evening. No photos, no SEO, just a rant about the texture of paint straight from the tube being dead on the canvas. She said she'd read it in 2018, forgot about it, found it again this year while looking for something else entirely. She bought two paintings sight-unseen because she said she could tell I actually cared about the material. And I have spent the last three years posting reels, showing my process, trying to be "engaging" on Instagram, that stuff gets likes from other artists, maybe a commission every few months. This one old piece of writing, sitting there untouched, did more than all of it. I don't know what the lesson is exactly. Keep the old things alive, maybe. Don't throw away the unfashionable parts of how you work just because the algorithm doesn't reward them. Or maybe it's that a real opinion outlasts a good strategy every time.

so my abuela sends me this photo out of nowhere today. just a pot i made like four months ago, one of those early ones where the rim dips too much on one side and the glaze crawled in a weird spot near the bottom. i almost didn't sell it bc i thought it was a failure, ended up giving it to her. and she's got it on her little shelf by the window, with a dried lavender bunch inside, and the light is hitting it just right so you can see the texture i was fighting with. she wrote "mi nieto el artista" underneath. joder. i sat on the studio floor for a minute. you know when something small just hits you right in the chest? i forget why i do this sometimes, between the cracked pieces and the kiln disasters and wondering if i should just get a normal job. then she sends me that.

ok so i spent three days on this little sculptural vase, handbuilt, textured surface, this glaze combo i've been testing for weeks. really proud of it. posted a reel of the process, lighting nice, good music, the whole thing. got maybe 300 views. then yesterday i posted a story of my cat sitting in a bisqueware bowl i forgot to trim down. phone footage, bad lighting, my thumb in the corner for half of it. 4.2k views. 14 dms asking if the bowl is for sale. i don't know what the game is anymore. i'm not even mad, just... confused. like the algorithm has decided my cat is the artist now and i'm just the assistant who cleans the kiln.

Someone at a studio open day asked what I work with. Collage, paper, I said. And he launched into a long thing about texture and grain and how he could really help me with my sanding technique. Sanding. I don't even own a sander. I tear pages with my hands. I didn't correct him. Just said "that's not really the material, but thank you" and went back to my corner. Two minutes later he was telling someone else about the artist he'd given advice to. I keep thinking about the word "help." Nobody ever offers to help me with the thing I actually do, which is sitting very still and deciding what to leave out. That part has no equipment, so it doesn't register as work.

I spent nearly two weeks not painting. Not because I was busy, which I was, but because I kept telling myself I'd only start once I went to the art store and got proper cold-pressed paper. The good stuff. Something deserving of the sketch I had in my head. Finally today I was in front of the stationery shelf in a random supermarket near my mother's place, of all places, and they had these thin spiral-bound sketchbooks. Rough cartridge, ghost of a grain. The kind schoolkids use for drawing class. Ninety rupees or something. Bought it out of spite, basically. And I sat on my balcony this evening and painted the water tank on the neighbour's roof, just the tank and the wires and the late light hitting the wall behind it. Nothing ambitious. It took me forty minutes and the paper buckled a little where I overworked the wash, and the whole thing has that cheap-paper fuzz that I used to hate when I was in architecture school. I'm honestly a bit in love with it. That fuzz has a texture you can't get on the fancy stuff. Funny how the good paper became another excuse to not work. I'm going to give myself permission to ruin a few more of these cheap books before I even think about touching my nice blocks again.

A gallery owner in Warsaw looked at my pastel work and said people won't get it on a phone screen. That the texture and the paper, the whole point of it, just flattens to nothing at 400 pixels. She wasn't trying to be cruel, she was being practical. And it's been sitting in my head ever since. Because she's got a point. I post a finished portrait and it gets a polite trickle of likes, but I tape the same piece to my studio wall and people who visit stop and stare. The photo genuinely does not carry what the thing is. Pastel has this light going through it, this chalky depth, and you can't compress that. But also, so what? I don't know what to do with that information. Film my process so people see the smudging? Post close-ups of the paper? I tried one reel of my hand working and it felt like showing off, which is stupid, I know. Mostly I'm just tired of the idea that the work has to fit the platform instead of the other way around. Some things are meant to be looked at in person, and I think that's allowed to be true even if it's inconvenient.

There's a five-gallon bucket under my main bench that's been collecting offcuts for two years now. Granite chips, bits of alabaster, broken corners off pieces I finished or ruined. I tell myself I'll use them for something someday. Mosaic maybe. Or just crush them for texture in a base. I've never done it. I just keep dropping scraps in there and looking at it sometimes. Some habits are just habits. Not everything needs a reason. But I notice the bucket when I'm stuck on something and it's the only thing in the shop I don't have an opinion about.

I've been using the same Schmincke Cadmium Yellow for nearly a decade. It's always been one of my most reliable, predictable colors, smooth, even washes, no surprises. And this week, painting a Ranunculus specimen, it started granulating. Settling into the paper texture in a way it simply never has. It's not the paper, same batch of Arches cold-pressed I've been working through for months. It's not the water, I haven't changed my setup. It's the paint. I'm trying to decide whether I got a bad tube, whether Schmincke quietly changed something in the formulation, or whether I'm finally losing my grip on a color I thought I understood completely. If anyone else has noticed a shift in their Schmincke yellows recently, I'd like to know. Because I feel like I've suddenly lost trust in an old friend and I'm not sure whether to replace the tube or just adjust my expectations.

I bought a new box of my usual compressed charcoal sticks yesterday, same brand I've used since I started, the cheap fat ones that feel like drawing with a burned stick, and they're DIFFERENT. They changed something. The black isn't as deep, the texture is grainier, it doesn't lay down the same way at all. I could tell in three strokes. I genuinely don't know if I'm being precious and it's fine and I just need to adjust, or if they actually ruined it and I need to find a new brand after half a decade. Has anyone else dealt with this? Did you just power through and get used to it or did you switch? I feel like my hand memorized a specific resistance and now it's gone and I'm having a disproportionate emotional reaction to a stick of burnt wood but here we are.

it's fine. actually it's better. the texture is doing something the paint wouldn't have. i think i need to run out of things more often. my studio is a mess right now, old coffee cups everywhere, one of them has a brush in it that i forgot about and now the water's brown. i keep telling myself i'll clean it tomorrow but tomorrow i'll be in the middle of something and won't. the gesso thing though. i might just stop buying white paint altogether and see what happens.

I've been going back and forth for years on this and it's ridiculous. For the figure work I do, the flesh tones especially, I want paint that stays where I put it and doesn't go dead when it dries. Michael Harding makes the most beautiful Naples yellow I've ever used, the texture is like butter straight from the tube. But I keep ordering Gamblin for the studio because it's half the price and honestly the consistency is more reliable batch to batch. Today I had both open on the table. Squinting at two identical piles of titanium white like a lunatic. My husband came in and said "just pick one, Camille." He doesn't understand this is not a practical decision, it's a spiritual one. What do you use and why. But don't tell me Williamsburg unless you want me to argue with you.

bought a new tub of gesso yesterday, opened it today, and it's got the texture of slightly wet chalk. lumpy. separated. i spent twenty minutes trying to whip it back to life and it just laughed at me. i know it's not that deep but i was actually excited to start something and now i'm just sitting here staring at a bad tub of gesso like it personally owes me money. gonna have to drive 45 minutes to the other store and i'm mad about it before i even leave.

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.

Okay so I'm eight months into full-time art and I finally have enough data to be genuinely confused. My original watercolors sell consistently, like every time I post a finished piece it's gone within a day or two. But I got a professional scan done of one of my favorites, ordered a small run of prints to test the waters, and they've just been sitting there. Like barely any movement in three weeks. And I don't get it because everyone always asks "do you have prints?" when they see the originals. I made them available. Crickets. My partner says it's because people who buy watercolors want THE thing, the actual one with the paper texture and the wonky edge where my tape was, not a reproduction. And maybe that's true and I should just lean into originals only. But also maybe I priced them wrong or my thumbnails are bad or I'm just not promoting them right. Mostly I'm annoyed I spent real money on the scan and the test run haha. But it's also kind of nice to know the originals aren't a fluke. Any other artists out there where prints flop but originals move?? Or am I the weird one who should've known better.

I've been working on a series of photograms of mussel shells, trying to capture their texture and the way the light falls on them. I'm using my usual process, exposing them to the sun and developing in saltwater, but the final blue just feels a bit… dead. It's not getting that deep, luminous quality I usually get. I wonder if it's the paper, or if the light here has changed so much this time of year. Has anyone else experienced this? Any thoughts on how to bring back that vibrancy?