A print sold for €180 but the paper alone is €14 a sheet and I keep doing the math over and over
Sold a 50x70 cyanotype last week for €180. It was a good week, I should have been glad. Instead I sat at the kitchen table that night counting again: the paper is €14 a sheet now, up from €9 two years ago, the ferric ammonium citrate another €40 for a bottle that makes maybe thirty prints, and I toss two out of five because the light was wrong or the sea water left a tide mark I didn't want. So per finished print, before my own hours, I am at maybe €25 in materials and half my days are duds.
€155 for a day of standing at the water, holding paper down, waiting. That is what it comes to when I let myself look.
I have not raised a price since 2019 and I am afraid if I do people will just stop. But the arithmetic is getting louder than the shame of asking for more. I think next order I will go to €240 and see who blinks. That number has been in my head for months now, and saying it out loud here feels like the first time it is real.
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I felt this in my bones. My ultramarine is up 60% in three years and I used to just quietly absorb it until I did the same math as you one night and nearly choked on my wine.
The thing that shifted for me was reframing how I price the failed ones. I used to feel like I should eat the losses, like they were my fault. Then I realised no working artist I respect prices that way. Every studio has its duds, every printer tosses sheets. If I'm honest, the cost of my finished pieces includes the ones that didn't make it, and the price should too. That's not greed, that's just true accounting.
You did the labour and you got €155 for a full day standing in salt water. That's the part that would bother me more than the paper. The sea gave you the surface, the light, the patience. Nobody prices that but you. Don't let the market do it for you from shame.
That true accounting line is the one. I think some of us carry it like a penance, as if the failed prints were a moral failure instead of just... weather. Half my duds are the sea's doing anyway. The Atlantic doesn't owe me a perfect tide mark.
You're right about the wine thing too. I did the math twice thinking I'd misadded. I hadn't.
I'm trying to build the waste into the price now, but there's a part of me that still hears my father saying "don't charge for what didn't work." Different world, that. He counted fish, not light.