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Someone asked me to paint their grandmother's house in Malleswaram, the one being sold, about to be knocked down for yet another apartment block. They wanted it as a gift for the whole family. I was so touched by the reason I just said ₹3,000 without thinking. Then I actually did it. Reference photo was terrible, old phone pic, bad lighting, half the house hidden behind a tree. I had to go there twice to sketch it properly, spent a full Sunday morning sitting on the kerb drawing, then another two days painting at home. The house had this lovely old chettah-style window detail and I ended up redoing the whole thing because the first wash went muddy. So that's roughly 20 hours of work for ₹3,000. ₹150 an hour. Less than what I pay my domestic help. The family loved it, cried actually, and that's worth something. But I sat there thinking, why do we do this to ourselves? Because the story was good? Because saying a real number felt awkward? I wouldn't ask my plumber to work for ₹150 an hour. Still haven't figured out what I should have charged. ₹8,000? ₹12,000? I honestly don't know what a fair rate is for this kind of thing in Bangalore. What do you all charge for a detailed architectural watercolour, a full house, not just a loose sketch?

It's not even the first time she's said something like this. But today it landed differently because I was actually in the middle of painting, a house on Wheeler Road that's being demolished next month, and she walked in, looked over my shoulder, and said it so casually. Like it was just obvious. Like I was a child playing with paints. I didn't say anything back. What do you even say? I have an architecture degree, I worked at a firm for seven years, I know what a "real" career looks like. I chose to leave it. Doesn't make the painting less serious to me but try explaining that to someone who watched you struggle through five years of college and waited for you to "settle." I keep thinking maybe if I had a gallery show or sold more or had some external marker of success it would shut this up. But also maybe it wouldn't. Anyone else's family just not see what you do as work?

There's this old bungalow on Nandi Durga Road, one of those Art Deco ones with the curved verandah and the beautiful terrible paint job, salmon pink over original white, peeling everywhere. I've sketched it maybe five times, painted it twice before, and both times it came out technically fine but completely dead. No life in it. Like a photograph but worse. Today I went back with just my travel kit, small palette, one brush, no pencil underdrawing. Sat on the compound wall for about 45 minutes in that late-morning heat that makes you regret every life choice. And something just… unlocked. I let the watercolour bleed into the sketchy ink lines. Didn't try to fix the wonky bits. Left the verandah half-raw. It's not my most accurate piece by a long shot but it's the first one that feels like the house, not like my anxiety about drawing the house properly. Anyway I'm still riding that high. Chai and Marie biscuits kind of celebration tonight. 🙏

I went back to a street in Malleswaram today. There was this old house with a blue veranda I'd sketched in 2022, beautiful chettiar-style columns, the whole thing sagging just a little in that way old houses do. I wanted to paint it properly this time, in watercolour, give it the treatment. Pulled up to the spot and it's a construction site. Apartment going up, probably 14 floors from the look of the pit. I sat on the compound wall of the thing next door and painted it anyway from memory. Came out alright actually, maybe better than if I'd had the real thing in front of me, because I had to really remember what I loved about it. Weird feeling, documenting things as they disappear. But I'm glad I have that old sketchbook at home. At least someone drew it.

I was reading the recent posts here about handwritten notes and old-fashioned outreach, and it made me think about something I haven't told many people. Five years ago, I wrote a letter to a gallery owner in Connecticut whose program I had admired for years. Not an email. A letter. On Arches hot press, with a small watercolour study of a trillium I'd painted that spring tucked inside. I told her honestly that I wasn't sure if she was accepting new artists but that I respected what she was doing and wanted to introduce myself properly. She wrote back. She said the letter sat on her desk for three weeks before she called, because she kept looking at the trillium and trying to decide if it was worth the risk of meeting me. She took me on. That gallery remains the steadiest source of my serious sales. Not Instagram. Not my website. A letter. I don't think the lesson is that we should all be sending letters. I think the lesson is that the real connections happen when you do something that costs you something real -- time, skill, the vulnerability of putting a small original painting in an envelope and hoping it lands with the right person. It is harder to ignore than a form submission. I still send a letter occasionally when a connection matters to me. I have never once regretted it. I have regretted the polished emails I overthought and never sent.

I paint by the window in the morning because the light is supposed to be better, that's what every tutorial says, right? But my window faces west. So the light I'm getting at 7am is this weak, flat thing that barely casts a shadow. By the time the light gets interesting, it's 2pm and I've already lost momentum. I keep telling myself I'll shift my table to the other room where the east window is. But that room has the dining table and my mother-in-law's plants and it just doesn't feel like my space. So instead I sit here at my west-facing window with my lukewarm morning light and make it work. I finally bought one of those little clip-on daylight lamps last week. It helps, but it's not the same. There's something about real morning light on watercolour, the way it hits the paper at an angle and you can actually see the sheen of the wet wash. Can't fake that with a lamp. Anyone else make do with a workspace that's technically wrong for what you do?

My parents put their house on the market last week. The one in Malleswaram where I spent 26 years. My room, the jasmine creeper over the gate, the terrace where Amma used to dry mango pickle in summer. Someone's going to tear it down and put up an apartment block, I'm sure of it. I've been putting off painting it for months. Too close, too much pressure, too many feelings. But yesterday I just sat on the floor of my old room with my sketchbook and did it. Watercolour and ink, the way it looked in the late afternoon when the light slants through the neem tree outside. Cried a little while painting. Then laughed at myself for crying. My husband found me like that and just handed me a cup of chai and walked away, the man knows when not to say anything. It's not my best work technically. But it's the most honest thing I've done in a while. I don't know if I'll frame it or stash it away. Just needed to put it down somewhere before it's gone.

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.

Had a client last month, wanted a watercolour of her childhood home in Malleswaram, the one that got sold and is probably going to become an apartment building soon. She was lovely, genuinely emotional about it. But she wanted a detailed breakup of costs before confirming. Paper, paint, framing, my time. Itemised. I sat down and did it properly. Paper is Arches, 300gsm, cold press, a full sheet costs about ₹1,200 now. Paints, I use Artists' quality, and honestly a single tube lasts ages so allocating cost per painting is a joke. Framing with archival mount and UV glass runs around ₹2,500-3,000 here. And then I put down my time at what I thought was a modest ₹500 an hour. Came to about ₹8,000 for the whole thing. She looked at it and said "that's a lot for a painting." And I just sat there thinking, ma'am, I gave you the honest breakdown you asked for. ₹500 an hour is less than what I made as a junior architect ten years ago. The materials alone plus framing eat up almost half of it. And this is me not even charging for the reference photo walk I did, the three rounds of approval sketches, the time I spent staring at your old family photos to get the bougainvillea colour right. I didn't say any of that. I just smiled and said I could adjust the framing to something simpler. She agreed. The painting came out nice. But I keep thinking about how the moment you show someone the actual math, it suddenly feels too much, even when the math is already lowballing yourself.

tell me the real reason you started. not the tidy bio answer, the actual one. mine: i was eight, home sick from school, and my nan shoved a tin of dried-up watercolours at me just to keep me quiet. something happened in my chest that i have been chasing for thirty years since. what's yours

I've been using the same Saunders Waterford cold-pressed block for years. 300g, the one in the grey wrapper. Bought a new one last week and something's off. The sizing feels different, it's drinking the watercolour wash faster, giving me that rough dry edge I don't want. I went back to an old sheet from the previous block to check, and it's definitely not the same. Could be a bad batch. Could be I'm doing something wrong. But I've been doing this long enough that I trust my hand more than the manufacturer's QA. Anyone else run into this? Or is it just me and I need to adjust.

I have a shelf that was supposed to hold reference books. It now holds about forty tubes of watercolour, arranged by colour family, most of them nearly full because I keep reaching for the same eight or ten. I told myself each new one was for a specific specimen, and it was true at the time, but there were so many specimens. I sorted them properly last week and found three tubes of alizarin crimson, two of them from different decades. That gave me pause. The hoarding of materials is its own quiet compulsion, separate from the painting itself. I think we all know this. I am not quite ready to call it a problem. But I moved a single tube of sap green to the windowsill as a test, to see if I would use it more, and it has been there untouched for six days now.