I charged my mom's friend $150 for a 9x12 and now I can't stop thinking about it
Ok so back in maybe March my mom's friend Carol asked if I'd do a little watercolor of her parents' old farmhouse, the one they sold in like 2004, and I said sure thinking it'd take me a weekend. It took eleven days. Not because it was hard exactly but because I kept redoing the roof shingles and then the tree line behind it and then the sky, which I painted four separate times and none of them were right and one of them was genuinely bad.
I charged her $150. I don't even know why, she didn't ask for a discount, I just heard myself say it out loud on the phone and then couldn't walk it back. Eleven days. My Arches paper alone is like $6 a sheet and I went through five because of the sky situation.
And the thing is she cried when I gave it to her, like actually cried at her kitchen table, so part of me is like, ok, that's worth something, that's not nothing. But I also sat in my car afterward doing the math on my phone and felt sick.
I'm not even asking what I should have charged, I know what I should have charged. I think I'm asking how you stop doing this. Because I have another one of these coming, my aunt already asked, and I can feel myself about to say a number that's too low just to make the silence stop.
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The sky painted four times, that part I understood very well. People think we are only doing the picture, but the eye keeps refusing until it is right. My mother used to say the work is finished when your hand stops arguing with you, and sometimes that takes eleven days for a small thing.
But ji, one thing I will say honestly. When you say the price out loud on the phone before thinking, that is not a pricing problem only, it is that we were taught the money part is somehow shameful. In our folk work also this is there. We will give the whole life to the line work and then feel shy to name the rate. If you had said three hundred she would have paid, because what she wanted was her parents' farmhouse before it is gone from memory. That is not a small thing to give a person.
Only advice, do not lower it next time just to be polite. It is not greed, it is respect for the eleven days.
Yes. The shyness around naming a number is its own skill that nobody taught us, and it is not about confidence, it is about being raised to think the work should speak for itself and the money part is a small dirty thing underneath.
I still get it wrong. Someone asks, and I hear a smaller number come out, and I know by the end of the sentence it is already too late. What helped me a little was deciding the price before the phone, never during it. Not a formula, just the number already sitting there so I am not inventing it while someone listens.
Your mother's line is good. My hand argues for a long time.
"deciding the price before the phone, never during it" ok that's the actual practical thing in this whole thread and I'm stealing it. because you're right, the number I say out loud is always the one that was already sitting in my head, and what's sitting in there is whatever my mom's face looked like when Carol asked. so of course it comes out small.
and yeah, the raised-to-think part. my dad used to say about his own work "if you have to explain it, it's not done" and I think I absorbed that about money too, like naming a number is admitting the painting wasn't enough by itself. which is stupid when I write it out but it's in there deep.
what number did you land on the last time you got it right? like did you overcorrect and go too high for a while? I feel like that's my next phase, being weirdly expensive for six months out of spite 😭
"the work is finished when your hand stops arguing with you" ok I'm writing that down, that's exactly it. my hand argued with that sky for four days and then one morning it just went quiet and I sat there like, oh. THAT'S the version.
and yeah, the shameful part. I think that's the real thing and I've been dancing around it. I was raised by people who genuinely believed if you love doing something it shouldn't be a job, so charging for it feels like admitting I did it for the wrong reason? which is insane because I also need to eat. my partner keeps saying "you wouldn't tell a plumber their work should speak for itself" and I know, I KNOW, and yet.
did your mother do the folk work too? because I'm wondering if the shyness gets handed down along with the skill, like you inherit the hands AND the flinch.