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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.

A man came to the studio last week, looked at a small interior I'd been keeping for myself, the one with the morning light on the wall. He wanted it. I told him the price and he laughed, said that was too much for a painting that size, tried to bargain me down by half. I don't do the dance. I said, you don't have to take it, the paint will still be there tomorrow. He walked out. Came back two days later, paid the full amount without another word, and stood there looking at it for a while before he left. I think he wanted to hate me a little for making him do it, and I don't mind. He'll take better care of it because he had to fight for it. I've spent years undervaluing my own work out of habit. Saying the number out loud and not flinching when they laugh, that's its own discipline. Maybe harder than the drawing honestly.

Ok so I've been working on this one 9x12 of the window at 6pm, the gold hour one, and I've been through maybe eleven sheets of Arches trying to get the shadow on the sill right. Eleven. That's like $70 of paper just to learn that I keep lifting the paper when I want to lift the pigment, which, cool, great, love that for me. Anyway the electric company sent the bill and it's up $40 and my partner was like "you've had the lamp on till 2am every night for a month" and I got defensive for a second and then remembered I also run a hair dryer over every wash because I'm impatient and can't wait for it to dry on its own like a normal person. So I'm out here basically paying to speed up my own mistakes. On my own dime. As a person with no other dime. The thing is the window doesn't even look that different from the one I did in March and I can't tell if that's progress or if I'm just circling. I know the light changed because it's October now. I don't know if I did. Not looking for a fix, mostly just want someone to tell me the hair dryer thing is normal because I'm starting to feel insane about it

Someone in a crit last week said my collage work has "a consistent gesture" which I think was a polite way of saying every torn edge I make curls the same way. I checked three old pieces this morning. Yeah. Every single one, the paper rolls toward the same side. I tear with my right hand, pull down and left, every time, for years. It's like finding out you have a signature you never signed. Not sure if this is a thing to fix or just lean into. It's not a bad look honestly, the curl catches light. But now that I've seen it I can't stop seeing it, and knowing it's muscle memory kind of grosses me out. Anyone else ever find a habit this dumb baked into years of work?

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?

okay so I have this weird thing. half the time when I'm painting I'll set my rinse mug down on the radiator instead of the table and it stays there all afternoon, getting warm, and then I dip my brush in it and the water's basically tea temperature and it does something to the wash I actually kind of like?? like the pigment moves slower or something. I know that's not a real thing. but I painted a whole sky today with lukewarm rinse water and it was the best flat wash I've done in weeks. I'm not saying it's science. I'm saying it's MY science. my mom tells me to move the mug and I'm like no. the radiator stays. the warm water stays. this is how we live now. anyone else got a habit that makes zero sense but your work secretly depends on it. don't leave me alone in this.

Two years now I have a glass jar on the windowsill, and it is full of smalti that split in the wrong direction. You cut a smalto, it is supposed to break along the line, clean, one sound. Sometimes it goes sideways, or crumbles at the edge, and that piece is no use for the line you were setting. Most people sweep it up. I don't. Into the jar. Red mostly, some gold, the cheap turquoise I bought too much of in 2019 and regret. The thing is I have never once gone to that jar for a repair or a fill. Not once. So it is not a stash of spare material, it is a jar of failures sitting in my light. And I still will not empty it. Some mornings before I start I put my hand in and stir them around like coffee beans. Terrible habit, they cut you. I think I keep it because the good work is invisible in its own way. You look at a finished panel and you see the image, never the hundred cuts that were correct. The jar is the only place in the studio where the wrongness is still visible. Proof that most of it did not go how I meant. Anyway, there is a commission due Friday and I am sitting here shaking broken glass instead of setting. If you have a jar of your own I want to hear what's in it.

Been using the same 1/4 inch masonry bit since 1994. It's got maybe an eighth of an inch left on it and the carbide's chipped in two places. I've got a drawer full of new ones that cut cleaner. But that old bit has gone through three shop walls and half a dozen concrete pours, and I know exactly how it walks before it bites. New ones chatter. That one just goes. My daughter keeps telling me to retire it. Says it's sentimental, like the thing has feelings. It doesn't. It's just measured. When you've pulled a tool a thousand times you don't think about it, you just know the weight of it in your hand. Same reason I don't change how I set a weld after thirty years. Not habit. Just settled. Most people think the old guys are stubborn. We're not. We just already found the thing that works and we're not going to fight it.

A woman came to the studio on Saturday, spent maybe twenty minutes in front of the biggest cyanotype I have, the 70x100 with the net dragged across it, and then said she wanted it for her hallway. I wrapped it in the paper I always use and she carried it out herself. Then I sat in the car for a while before I could drive. Not sadness exactly. That piece was on the wall behind me for eleven months, through two winters, and I had got used to turning round and finding it there. Now there is a pale rectangle where it hung, and the wall looks undressed. I have sold work before. This one was different, I think because I had almost stopped believing it was any good. It came out of a morning when nothing worked, the solution was old, the sun went in, and I nearly rinsed the paper and started again. I did not. I hung it up to dry out of habit and it was the best thing I made all year. Anyway. The car park behind the studio smells of diesel and there was a man loading tiles into a van beside me, and I just sat there with the empty tube on the passenger seat.

I raised my originals by forty percent at the start of the year. Not a gradual thing, just a decision after a commission took me three weeks longer than I estimated and I did the math on what I actually earned per hour. I expected some pushback, at least a pause before purchases. Nothing. The last three pieces sold within the same window they always have. I am not sure whether to be relieved or annoyed that I undervalued myself for years. The work did not change. The buyers did not change. Only the number did. It makes me wonder how much of what we price is habit dressed up as principle. If you raised rates recently, did it change anything measurable? I would like to know whether my experience is the rule or the exception.

In Mithila painting the border is not decoration, it is the frame that holds the whole story. We put the fine line work there, the little fish and the lotus petals, because the border is what keeps the main figure from wandering off the paper. I have been filling these borders since I was a child, forty years at least, and yesterday while teaching one of the girls I finally saw something. I always begin the border from the top left corner and work my way around. My mother did the same, and her mother. But yesterday the girl asked me, why you start at the corner, and I could not give her a proper answer. I sat with it and I realised the corner is where the two lines meet and it is the weakest place. The pigment pools there, the line gets thick, and the whole border looks clumsy right where the eye lands first. My grandmother would have known this. She probably started somewhere else on purpose and I never thought to ask her. So now I am trying to begin from the middle of one side and work out to the corners, so the meeting place is not the beginning and not the end but somewhere in between. It is a small change and it feels like betraying my own hand. But the border is coming out cleaner. Has anyone else found a habit they were taught that they only questioned after years? And when you changed it, did the work improve or did it just feel wrong for a long time?

A painter friend came to the studio last week and said "you really like that corner" and I thought she meant the actual corner of the room, and I said no, it's just the north light. Then she pulled up three paintings on her phone, mine, and there it was. Same window, same plaster wall on the left, same table pushed at the same angle. Three times. I've been telling myself I'm exploring light and the fall of it over the day. In reality I found a composition that worked twice and I've been quietly doing it again and again. It's not a series, it's a habit wearing a beret. The funny thing is I didn't notice until she said it, and now I can't unsee it. So I'm forcing myself to move the whole setup for the next one. Rearrange everything, paint the corner from the other side, from the floor, anywhere that makes me have to actually look instead of arrive. Anyone else have a signature they didn't know was a rut until someone pointed at it?

I took the "oil on linen, 30x40" caption out of my posts for a month. Not the hashtags, not the process videos, just that little line at the end. I've always put it there out of habit, like a signature. Collectors want to know what they're buying, I told myself. The change was not dramatic but it was real. People started commenting about the light in the room, the mood of the thing, what the woman in the painting was thinking. Before it was mostly "beautiful work" and other painters asking about my medium. I think the technical note was giving people permission to look at it like a spec sheet instead of letting them just feel it. Once the frame of reference was gone they had to meet the painting on its own terms. I put the information back when the piece sells, obviously. But the post itself, the first encounter, I leave it bare now. The gallery can do the talking about dimensions and materials. My job on social media is to make someone stop scrolling because something in the image got under their skin, and I was undercutting that with my own footnotes. Maybe that's just me. Or maybe we all over-explain ourselves online because we're afraid of being misunderstood, and the fear itself is what keeps people at arm's length.

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.

There's a canvas on my wall right now with a jawline I've gone over so many times it's gone grey. Charcoal on top of charcoal on top of charcoal until the paper's got that slick shine where it stops taking anything at all. And I kept going. Kept saying "one more pass, the angle's just a little off" like the angle was ever the problem. It wasn't. I know it wasn't. The whole piece came out of the gut in twenty minutes last week and it was RIGHT, and then I got scared of it and started fixing. Now it's safe and dead and I've spent 45 minutes I'll never get back sanding the life off it with an eraser. I do this every time I get close to something real. Get scared, reach for the pencil, tidy it up. My old art teacher would say work the whole thing not the eye. I never had an old art teacher. I taught myself and I taught myself this habit apparently, sitting alone in a room deciding a thing I made is too much and dialing it down till it's polite. Anyway. It's 11pm. I'm either going to repaint the whole face over in one go and ruin it properly, or leave it til morning and hate it either way. Leaning toward ruining it properly. That's the only one that ever turns into anything.

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.

Started it two years ago. Anything that felt too good, or too easy, or came from a trip I wanted to remember properly, goes in the box and gets sealed with tape and a date on the lid. The rule is I can't open it until the date. Currently there's a folded sheet of 1930s ledger paper in there with a coffee ring on it that I think about more than is reasonable. The idea was to stop me using my best things too fast, because I have a habit of taking the perfect piece out and cutting it immediately and then regretting it for a year. That part works. What I did not expect is that not being allowed to use it has made everything else easier to use. Regular paper stopped feeling like a compromise. Two more years on the current box. I'm not sure I'll even like the ledger paper by then, and I've made peace with that. Curious if anyone else deliberately makes their own material harder to reach.

Bought it off a woman in Podgórze for 80 złoty, she said it was her mother's. When I got it home and unfolded the legs there's pencil all over the back rail: dates, mostly. 1978, 1983, then a gap, then 1994, 1997. No names. One date has "nie wyszło" next to it and I've been thinking about that for two weeks. I keep meaning to sand it off and I keep not doing it. It's not sentimental exactly, I didn't know her mother. But there's something about the gap between 1983 and 1994 that I can't stop looking at. Eleven years. She must have been doing something else. Or she was working and just stopped writing it down. Anyway the easel is fine, it wobbles a bit on the left leg, and my hand still goes to the old one out of habit. If you've got old equipment with someone else's marks on it, I want to know if you kept them or cleaned them off. Mine is staying.

For years I kept prices off my site. Gallery habit, I suppose: you don't discuss money in public, the buyer asks, you reply discreetly, c'est ça. In March I finally put a range on the site, honestly, with a note that the small studies start lower and the large things are not cheap. What I expected: fewer inquiries. What happened: the opposite, and better ones. Someone wrote last week that she had assumed everything was out of her reach, saw the range, and bought a 24 by 30 study. I sold three of the small ones in two months. The questions I get now start at "is the light in this one from the window or from the lamp" instead of "how much." The thing I got wrong was thinking discretion protects the work. It mostly protects the awkwardness of the person asking. People want a number. Give it and you both stop circling. The part I still dislike: a few painters in my circle think it is vulgar. Maybe. But I spent a decade painting little and talking much, and I prefer this.

I priced a cyanotype at 240 euros for a small show here in Porto. Framed, 30x40, one of the big seaweed pieces from last August. Then I did the math properly, which I almost never do. Three days of work, plus the paper, the frame, the emulsion, and the fact that I lost an entire week of sun in July waiting for a print that didn't go grey. Divided out, that's less than I pay my neighbour to watch the cat. The gallery took 40 percent. I said yes before I had finished saying the number, which is a habit I'm trying to break. I think what bothers me is not the money. It's that I priced it like a picture of something, and it isn't. It's a piece of the Atlantic on paper and it took a whole summer to get right. So. 240. I'm putting that here so I have to look at it. What would you have asked? I honestly don't know where my own ceiling is anymore.