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Ok so I just finished off a tube of French ultramarine that I bought second year of my BFA. Second year. That's like six years of a single tube of paint, which sounds insane until you remember how little you need of it, a dot does so much work. And now the tube is split at the seam and I keep squeezing it like there's something left and there isn't, and I'm sitting here at my desk genuinely a little sad?? about a tube of paint. it's not even a sentimental object, it's not like my dad's brushes or anything, it's just that I bought it with money from a summer job I hated and I had no idea what I was doing and I thought you were supposed to buy the fancy brand and now I know I could've gotten the cheap one and been fine. And I've made probably forty paintings with it. Some of them are bad. A few are good. The window one from last spring is mostly this color. Anyway I ordered a new one and it's coming Tuesday and it will not feel the same at all, which is stupid, it's literally the same pigment, same brand, same everything. Except it won't be. Does anyone else get attached to supplies like this or am I just being dramatic because I'm avoiding the underpainting I'm supposed to be doing

I spent two hours this afternoon laying down a single wash of ultramarine on a hellebore petal. Not the whole flower, the one petal. Stretched the paper, masked the veins, wet it just so, and let the pigment settle in three passes, waiting fully between each. Most people would call that wasted time. It isn't. That blue has to sit like a film of stained glass, and there's no shortcut to it. What I actually find curious is that I don't resent the slowness anymore. Ten years ago it would have chafed. Now there's something almost meditative in the waiting, in watching the water leave the paper and the pigment decide where it wants to live. Some of my students fight it terribly. They want the petal finished in an afternoon, and they'd rather have a muddy result than a patient one. I'll confess I'm glad the hellebore is done. But I'll also own that I'm a little sorry the waiting is over.

I've got maybe 45 minutes a night to paint, so three tries at the same patch of sky is basically my whole week gone. Working on a marsh scene from a photo I took at a rest stop in Delaware last fall, and the sky there is this washed out gray-blue that's honestly kind of ugly in real life, but in the painting it just turns to mud. Tonight's version is too purple. Tuesday's was too gray. Friday's was closest and I covered it up because I decided it looked unfinished. I keep doing this. I think it's because I only get the short window, so everything has to feel like progress, and a sky that's already right doesn't feel like progress. Anyway I'm leaving tonight's purple disaster on the easel until Sunday so I can look at it with actual eyeballs instead of tired ones. Anyone else paint better in the first pass and then ruin it trying to be careful? Also if you use Liquitex heavy body ultramarine, is yours weirdly glossy straight out of the tube or did I get a bad batch? Might be my medium but I don't think so.

I had about 40 minutes after bedtime to get the sky in on this field piece and I mixed what I always mix, ultramarine and a touch of white, that cold early-spring blue. She wandered out for water, looked over my shoulder, and said it looked like the sky in a cartoon. Then she went to bed. So that was helpful. The annoying part is she's not wrong. I've been using the same blue mix for years because it works and I don't have to think about it, and now I can't unsee it. It's flat. It reads like a color I chose instead of a color that was there. So now I'm going down the rabbit hole of warm blues and I'm realizing how much of my palette is just habit. Same three mixes over and over. I've got a tube of cerulean I bought in like 2019 that I've barely touched because it felt "too pretty." Not sure what I'll land on but the sky is going to be worse before it gets better.

It's not just about neutralising colour. A good grey has life in it. It can be warm, cool, lean towards blue or violet, have an almost imperceptible undertone of ochre. Today I was trying to match the light on a pewter jug, that soft, luminous shadow. It took several tries, adding tiny touches of raw umber, a whisper of ultramarine, a minuscule bit of flake white. When it was finally right, that quiet hum of satisfaction. It’s a small thing, perhaps, but it’s everything. Voilà.

ok so this is a commission, a small one, 9x12, a view of their parents' porch, and I sent the scan and they said "love it, could the sky be a bit bluer?" and I said sure! no problem! and then opened the file and just sat there. because there is no blue in that sky. it's payne's grey and a wash of raw umber and honestly it's the best sky I've painted all year, it's that flat pre-storm look, and "bluer" means french ultramarine and now it's going to look like a birthday card. and the thing is they're not wrong, it's their house, they're paying me, they can want a bluer sky. I just have to figure out how to do it without the whole thing going dead and I keep mixing test swatches on the back of an envelope like that's going to solve it. it's 40 minutes of my life. the envelope is full. I think I'm going to do like a quarter of a drop of cerulean. barely anything. and then tell myself it's bluer.

I sat down Sunday to do a small still life, apples and a white pitcher, and ended up spending half the time staring at my palette instead of the setup. I've got ultramarine, cerulean, and pthalo on there and honestly I use the pthalo maybe twice a month. It's so strong a dot of it takes over everything. Cerulean is the one I actually reach for in skies but it's $22 a tube now at my local shop and I keep nursing the last squeeze of it like it's medicine. Anyway I did not finish the pitcher. The apples look decent. I'm curious what blues other people keep on the palette, because I feel like I'm carrying dead weight and I can't decide which one to cut.

Working on a half-length figure, a woman at a window, morning light from the left. Third glaze over a dry underpainting, just ultramarine and a touch of raw umber thinned down to almost nothing. Maybe forty minutes of work in the whole layer. My daughter called about something at school. I had the brush in my hand, so of course I kept going while I talked. Ten minutes later I looked and the whole passage had gone chalky and dead. I had overworked it with the phone against my ear instead of my attention on the surface. Not the paint's fault. Not even really mine. But this is the thing nobody tells you early: glazing is not a technique, it's a state of concentration. You cannot glaze and do anything else. The layer knows when you were somewhere else. Scraped it back with the palette knife, which is its own small grief when a passage was almost there. Tomorrow the underpainting is still underneath, waiting, which is the only mercy of the method. Nothing is ever truly lost until you build it up too thick to see through. I've started leaving my phone in the other room during the wet stages. Not out of principle. Just because the layer can tell.

so i posted a finished piece last week, 12 hours of work, layered flat color, the whole thing. caption about process. it did fine, like 40 likes, some "so good" comments from other painters and my aunt. then yesterday i'm about to scrape down my palette and i take a photo of it first, dumb reason, just liked the colors sitting there. unwashed, dried up ultramarine next to a muddy pile of something that used to be vermilion. no caption, no hashtags, posted it at like 1am. it's sitting at 3x the engagement and two people asked if it was for sale. i don't think the audience wants the painting. i think they want proof a person was there. which is annoying because the painting IS the proof, but fine, i'll go take pictures of my trash now. the part that stings: i've been painting worse for the camera for a month. arranging the easel, wiping the edges, pretending i don't clean up. all of it did less than a photo i took by accident because i was too tired to wash a tray.

the palette is one of those cheap grey plastic ones from the art store, the big rectangle with the thumb hole. i've been using it so long that the actual mixing surface is a mound now, old ultramarine and burnt sienna and this orange i've been chasing for two years sitting under everything like sediment. i know a clean palette is "correct." i know the colors get muddy. i've been told. but every time i go to soak it or scrape it down i just... don't. part of it is laziness, obviously. part of it is that the dried layer is basically a color swatch of every decision i've made in that studio, and scraping it off feels like throwing out notes. anyway it's 11pm and i'm sitting here telling myself i'll clean it sunday. i won't.

Not as a study, not trying to match anything specific. Just mixing it, scraping it off, mixing again. Different combinations of ivory black and white, a little ultramarine, a touch of raw umber, sometimes a speck of yellow ochre. Seeing how far I could push the temperature before it stopped being grey and became something else entirely. My husband came in to ask about dinner and I think he was a little alarmed. But this is the thing nobody tells you when you start painting, you will spend whole days doing something that looks like nothing, and it's not wasted time. The hand learns things the eye can't explain. What's your useless practice? The thing you do that produces nothing visible but you know matters.

started limiting myself to four colors this month as an exercise. titanium white, cad red medium, ultramarine, yellow ochre. that's it. the idea being i actually learn to mix instead of buying my way out of every problem (see: the $11 green incident, still not over it). made it nine days. day eight i caught myself reaching for a tube of phthalo, and not even to mix it, just to look at it. like holding a cigarette you're not gonna smoke. anyway the four color thing is working, which is annoying because now i have to admit the limitation is doing something. whole paintings are getting quieter without me deciding to make them quieter. i don't love that. i like loud. flat loud color is literally my whole thing. the phthalo's still on the shelf. not gonna say it's gonna stay there

A woman came to the studio this afternoon for a little still life I did in October, the one with the copper pot and the half-peeled lemon. Six hundred euros. She paid in cash, which always feels slightly criminal, and she was lovely about it, asked good questions, did not once say the word "journey." On the way home I stopped at the shop on rue Sainte-Catherine and spent a hundred and forty of it on a tube of genuine lapis lazuli. Forty grams. I have wanted to try it for years and always talked myself out of it because ultramarine from the tube does the job perfectly well and I am not a fool. I got it home, opened it, made a little pile on the glass with a palette knife, and now I am almost afraid to mix anything with it. It is absurd. It is just a rock ground very fine, and I have painted for twenty-five years, and I am sitting here at eleven at night looking at a smear of it on the corner of the palette like a teenager. Tomorrow I will ruin it with a bad mixture, and that will be the end of the romance, and that is fine. But tonight it is still perfect. That is all. Just wanted to say it somewhere.

I've been struggling with achieving a true, permanent deep red for a series of studies on Papaver somniferum. Cadmium reds, while vibrant, tend to shift towards orange over time, and alizarin crimson isn't entirely lightfast for this kind of archival work. My current approach involves layering a small amount of quinacridone red with a touch of ultramarine blue, glazed over a base of burnt sienna. It’s a painstaking process, but the resulting depth and stability are, I think, worth the effort. Does anyone else have a preferred method for this particular hue?

Four sheets of Fabriano. Three of them are in the bin, and I do not say that lightly, because paper is not cheap and I am not made of it. The subject was a Digitalis purpurea I collected on a walk in late June, and the difficulty was entirely in the bells. Get the interior of a foxglove bell right and the whole drawing breathes. Get it wrong and you have a row of purple thimbles. My trouble was the shadow under the lower lip, which is not really purple at all. It is a cool, almost grey-violet, and every attempt I made with a straight purple mix went muddy and dead the moment it dried. Third sheet I tried lifting it out with a damp brush, which is the sort of thing one knows better than to do and does anyway at eight in the evening. Yesterday I mixed it instead. Permanent rose with a touch of French ultramarine and rather more cobalt than I would have guessed, laid in one pass and left alone. Left alone is the hard part. I sat with my hands under the table so I would stop fiddling with it. It is dry now and the bells have depth. There is still one anther I am not happy with. I mention this because I nearly abandoned the whole study on Tuesday, and the only thing that kept me at it was a note in my old tutor's hand in the margin of a workbook: the fourth attempt is usually the first honest one. I have found that true more often than I would like.

I am painting a corner of my studio in the late afternoon light and it is beating me. The wall on the left is a cold grey, the wall behind is a warm grey, and the floor throws a third grey up into both. Three greys, all different, all related. I should be able to mix this. I have been mixing greys for twenty five years. Today: burnt umber and ultramarine, too purple. Raw umber and white, dead. Ivory black and yellow ochre, chalk. I added a hair of viridian and made it worse. Six piles of mud on the palette by eleven o'clock, and the light had already moved on. The corner that was so beautiful at nine was gone. The annoying part is I know what the mistake is. I am mixing the grey I think the wall is instead of the grey I actually see. My head has an idea about what a grey wall looks like and my hand keeps reaching for it. Two hours of painting my idea instead of the thing. Tomorrow I'll scrape the whole corner back to the ground and start with clean, cool, no preconception. Bof. Easy to say tonight with a glass of wine in my hand. Cadmium prices are one thing. Losing a morning to my own stubbornness is another.

Found an unopened tube of Naples yellow in the back of my paint box today. Must be from my atelier days, so over twenty years old. The label is faded but the crimp is still sealed. I opened it and the pigment came out like butter. Better than anything I buy now. I used to be so careful with paint. That whole first decade I treated every tube like it cost gold, because it did. Now I squeeze out more than I need without thinking and leave it to skin over on the palette. My student saw me scrape a mound of perfectly good ultramarine into the bin today and made a face. She didn't say anything but I felt it. Maybe the discipline is still there somewhere, it just moved. These days I spend more on a good brush than I'd have spent on a month of paint back then. I'm keeping the empty tube on my shelf. Reminds me that I used to know the price of things.

ok so I used to be SO precious about my palette, like everything had to be squeezed out in neat little rows, same order every time, I'd scrape it clean after every session. And lately? complete chaos. I've got dried crusts of ultramarine from three days ago, a blob of rose madder that's started to separate, some random mix I forgot about that's actually a perfect grey I'm terrified of losing. And I'm painting better?? Like the mess is forcing me to work faster and stop overthinking every color choice. I just dip into whatever's there and make it work. My partner walked by and said "babe it looks like a murder scene" and honestly they're not wrong but I'm kind of into it now. Anyone else's workspace get worse as the work gets better or is this just me being feral

Noticed tonight that the middle of my palette is one gray-brown mass that I keep reactivating with water instead of squeezing out anything new. Burnt sienna, ultramarine, a little hansa yellow in there somewhere. It's basically mud with a history. It started because I was trying to stretch paint during the school break, and now it's August and I'm still doing it. Squeezing a fresh blob off the tube feels almost wasteful, like I'm spending money I don't have on a color I could just fake. Which is silly, tubes cost what they cost and I bought them already. But here's the thing I actually noticed. Everything I've painted since spring has the same temperature to it. That grayed-out look. Even the porch light in the painting on my easel right now, which should be warm, has this dead olive cast because I mixed it out of the pile instead of starting clean. So tomorrow I'm scraping the whole thing down to the white. Scraping it, not wet-paper-toweling it. Getting the plastic knife out and everything. I've got a tube of cad yellow light that's been sitting unopened since my birthday in May. The kids go back next week and I'll have my evenings again. That's part of it I think. Hard to start anything new when you're snatching twenty minutes at a time.

I keep a small notebook beside the board for every painting. Not the finished work, the process: pigment, brand, ratio, paper batch, the temperature of the room, and a one line verdict on whether the wash behaved. It is a habit left over from the laboratory and my students find it faintly ridiculous, but it has saved me more than once. This morning I was laying a first wash of French ultramarine over a hellebore leaf, thinned further than I usually dare, and it bloomed at the tip exactly where the veins tighten. I checked the log. The same thing happened in November, same paper, same paper batch stamp, same dilution, and I had written "too wet for this sheet, size it first" and then evidently forgotten. Two hundred and fourteen pages and I still repeat a mistake I had already identified and written down in my own hand. The log is honest. I am not always. I have started underlining anything that went wrong, so at least the failures are the things my eye catches first when I open to a new page. It feels a little like keeping a book of my own errors on purpose. Which, I suppose, is what it is.