I quoted £1,850 for a magnolia plate and then spent eleven weeks on it
A gentleman from the local botanical trust commissioned a single watercolour plate of Magnolia grandiflora, flower and leaf and a sectioned bud, on Fabriano. I quoted £1,850 because that was roughly what the last plate of that size had taken me and I thought I had learned something.
Eleven weeks. That is the honest figure, and it does not include the fortnight before I ever put paint down, which was spent at the herbarium and in a friend's garden with a torch at half past nine at night waiting for a flower to open properly.
I have done the arithmetic twice now and it comes out somewhere near £14 an hour, which is less than I was paid as a postdoc in 1998. My husband, who is an economist and therefore has no mercy, pointed out that I am effectively subsidising the trust's publishing programme.
The difficulty is that I do not know how to paint it faster without painting it worse, and painting it worse is not available to me. So the price has to move, not the method. I am going to quote £3,200 for the next plate of that complexity and I have not yet found the words to say it out loud to a client without apologising in the same breath. That is the part I am actually bad at.
2
2commentsSaveFollow threadShare
The fortnight before the paint is the part nobody ever prices, and it's usually the part that decides whether the plate is any good. You cannot put a number on a magnolia that refuses to open on schedule, but you also cannot paint it without that waiting.
The only thing I'd say against your arithmetic is that a first plate of a new species is not a fair base for the next one. Some of those eleven weeks was you learning that flower, and that knowledge doesn't get billed again. Which is small comfort when the invoice is already sent, I know. We are hopeless at quoting for the work we have not yet done.
The "knowledge doesn't get billed again" line is nice in theory but I'd argue the opposite in practice. What you learn about one flower is not transferable to the next species, so it never really comes back to you. In mosaic, tesserae behave differently depending on the material. A new stone teaches you nothing about the next one. The knowledge stays in that one plate. You just get faster at the part that is always the same, which is the cutting and setting.