I quoted $650 for a 9x12 gouache and then spent 11 hours on it
Okay so I need to say this out loud somewhere. I quoted $650 for a 9x12 gouache of a friend's kitchen, the one with the terrible yellow tile and the window over the sink, because that's the size I usually do and $650 felt like the number. Fine. Reasonable. I said it fast so I wouldn't flinch.
Then I got in there and the tile ate me alive. Every single square needed its own decision, plus the grout, plus the light coming off the sink faucet which is honestly the most beautiful thing in the whole painting and also pure evil in gouache because you can't lift it back. I logged 11 hours. ELEVEN. On a 9x12. At $650 that's $59 an hour before I take out the paint, and the yellow alone was a whole tube because I kept mixing it wrong and starting over.
Here's the part I keep chewing on though. I don't think the mistake was the price. I think the mistake was 9x12. I do 9x12 in my sleep usually, so I priced it like a 9x12, but this one was a 9x12 with a hundred tiny shapes in it and I didn't look at the photo long enough to notice that before I opened my mouth.
So now I'm trying to figure out if I need a number for "small but insane." Do you all price by size, by how dense the thing is, or do you just eat it and call it a learning experience and cry a little into the rinse water. Because I'm doing all three currently.
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Honey, that yellow tile is a whole sermon and you preached it. Eleven hours on a 9x12 is not a failure, that's just what "every square needs its own decision" costs you. The thing I'd take from it is that the price was never the problem, the estimate was. You didn't know the window light was going to be the hard part until you were in it, and nobody can quote for a thing they haven't met yet. Next time somebody hands you a kitchen, ask yourself first how much deciding is hiding in it. And don't be so quick with the number next time, saying it fast so you don't flinch is how we all end up working for less than we're worth. That painting's going to be somebody's favorite thing on the wall though. The ugly tile usually is.
"ask yourself first how much deciding is hiding in it" is the line I'm stealing, that's the whole thing in one. I've a rule now that I charge the deciding, not the size, because a 9x12 of a plain sky is a day and a 9x12 of a cluttered kitchen is a week and the paper doesn't know the difference.
The flinch line is fair too and I'll say the quiet part, the number you say fast is nearly always the number you're afraid to say slow. I've a fella I print for who does exactly this with framing quotes, blurts it out and then does the sums on the drive home. Costing yourself a bit of money once is grand, it teaches you. Costing yourself every time is just a bad habit wearing a friendly face.