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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.

i know there's a "right" way to wedge. i've watched the videos. but my body just wants to do this violent ram's head slam every time and i swear the clay remembers the aggression. my left wrist has started clicking in a way that's definitely not normal. tried soft wedging yesterday like a normal person and the clay felt dead. like i'd been polite to it and it didn't trust me. had to go back and really put my weight into it before it started feeling alive again. my teacher from the course would be so disappointed. but also she had perfect wrists at 55 so maybe she was onto something. idk. anyone else have a bad habit you KNOW you should fix but it works so you don't?

Kept it in the bottom of my toolbox like I was going to fix it. You don't fix a chisel that splits at the tang. I knew that. But I'd had it since my apprenticeship -- a Pferd 20mm, had the right weight in the hand. Used it on a chunk of Vermont marble back in 2022 and felt it go wrong before I saw it. Put it in the drawer anyway. Tossed it this morning. Felt stupid about it. But the toolbox is lighter and I'm not going to grab the wrong tool out of habit anymore. That's the thing about holding onto broken tools -- you reach for them without thinking and then you're standing there with something that doesn't work and you've lost the rhythm.

I carved a granite bench a few years back for a public garden. Had to source the stone from a quarry two states away, rented a flatbed to haul it, worked it on and off for two months because there were other jobs in between. Sold it for $1,200. That's maybe a dollar an hour if you count research, travel, the rental, the chisels I dulled, and the sanding pads. I knew it at the time and I still said yes. I told myself it was a "public installation" and that was worth something. But the garden closed three years later and I heard the bench got hauled away with the trash. I don't know what the right number was. Double maybe. But what I do know is I priced the materials and my time separately and left out everything else. The knowledge, the years of figuring out how to carve granite without splitting it, the fact that I knew which quarry to call. That all went for free. I still do it. Not as bad, but I still leave money on the table somewhere. Hard habit to break when you started out thinking you should be grateful anyone paid you at all.

I scraped it down yesterday before starting a new interior study, which I do maybe once a month if I'm being honest. By midday it was already a swamp again, all the mixed leftovers from the morning pushed into one corner, titanium white bleeding into everything, a crust of ultramarine that's been there since Tuesday. Some painters I know keep theirs pristine. Little neat piles like a colour chart. I admire it, truly. But I work fast when I'm onto something and I don't have time to rebuild a clean puddle of flesh tone every fifteen minutes. I want the dirty grey that comes from five colours meeting by accident. That's where the interesting shadows live anyway. The downside is I waste a lot of paint. The upside is the painting looks like it was made by a person, not a machine. What's your worst studio habit that you've stopped apologising for?

Started painting again this morning after three days of not touching anything, work stuff piled up, you know how it goes. And I sat down with my palette and realised I was reaching for the same brush I always reach for first. This old Winsor & Newton series 7, size 6 round. The ferrule is slightly loose now, I should probably fix it, but I just can't use anything else for the first wash. I've bought fancier ones. Tried a silver brush black velvet that everyone raves about. It's good, it's fine. But this one has been through every bad painting and every good one. It holds water just right even if it's a little beat up. It's not even my most expensive brush. It's just mine. My husband says I'm superstitious. Maybe. But there's something about having a tool that's broken in with your own bad habits. You know exactly how it's going to behave, even when it misbehaves. Does anyone else have that one thing, brush, pen, pencil, whatever, that you keep going back to even though you have nicer ones? Or am I just being sentimental over a loose ferrule 😅

i have a drawer in my studio, just a cheap ikea thing, that's full of plates that didn't work. bitten too deep, not deep enough, a drypoint that caught something i didn't mean but also didn't hate enough to keep. i can't throw them out. they're not good, most of them, but they're the only record i have of the thinking that didn't land. i was talking to a painter friend in berlin last week and she said she scrapes everything over, her whole practice is covering. that's the opposite of what i do. i keep the evidence. maybe it's the printmaker in me, this need for the object to survive even when it fails. or maybe i'm just sentimental about my own bad decisions. anyway i pulled one out today from three years ago. a copper plate with a portrait of a woman who doesn't exist. the face is completely fine but the hand is this grotesque claw because i misjudged the acid. i remember being so furious. now i kind of like the claw. it's the most alive part of the image. i don't know if this is a confession or a habit worth defending. but i wonder, what do you keep that you probably shouldn't?