I started telling people my actual hourly rate and now I can't stop thinking about it
So I did the math for the first time last week. Actually did it, not the vague "eh, it's fine" version.
Took one of my 9x12 gouache pieces, the window one with the morning light through the fire escape, the one I actually like. Tracking time honestly: sketches, the failed first pass I scraped off, the three days of staring at it deciding if the shadow was too purple. Fourteen hours. It sells for $280.
That's $20/hr before I've bought a single tube of paint. Before the framing. Before the 40 minutes I spent photographing it because my phone kept making the greens look radioactive.
I told my partner and they went quiet in that specific way and I immediately wished I hadn't said it out loud haha.
The thing is I KNEW this, kind of. Everyone knows this. But there's a difference between knowing it and writing 14 on a sticky note and dividing. And now every time someone says "oh I could never afford that" I have this new number sitting in my head and I don't know what to do with it. I'm not raising prices to $1200, nobody in my life is paying that, my whole audience is people who found me through a $45 print. But I also can't un-know it.
Curious if anyone else has actually done the math and then what you did after. Or if you deliberately haven't, which honestly I respect more.
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Honey, I did that same math on a quilt one time and had to go sit down. Fourteen hours is honest but it ain't the whole truth either. Some of those hours you were learning something your next ten pieces will use for free. The scraped-off first pass wasn't wasted, it was tuition. Now that don't pay your light bill, I know it. But don't let that $20 number talk you into thinking the work is small. Charge what the work is worth and let the clock mind its own business.
"the clock can mind its own business" is the best line in this whole thread and I'm stealing it for the next time someone asks me why a hare that took four hours costs what it costs.
I do a version of this to myself with the linocut proofs. Every edition there's a print I carve wrong, cut too deep on the shoulder of the thing, and it goes in the bin. I used to count that as a loss. Then I copped that the ruined one is what taught me where the gouge bites on that particular lino. You can't buy that off a shelf.
Where I'd half argue with you though is the "charge what the work is worth" bit. Worth to who? I've watched good makers price themselves into a hole because they thought worth was a feeling. The honest version for me was working out what I need to live on, adding the materials, and charging that without apologising. Turns out the number's usually higher than the guilt one anyway.
Wait, you're the hare person?? I saw that comment earlier and loved it, four hours for a hare makes total sense when you say it like that. And the failed linocut being the teacher, oh I felt that in my chest. I have a drawer of gouache pieces I scraped because I overworked them and I keep telling myself it's research, which is a nicer word for crying a little.
But ok, push back on the push back, because I want to actually understand it. What DO you charge for the print you ruined? I'm genuinely asking, not being cute. Right now I price by the piece and the hourly math is just the thing that happens in my notebook at 1am, but I can't tell if that's cowardice or sanity. My framing costs and my rent don't care how much I learned from the shoulder gouge, you know? So where's the line for you, does the learning ever show up in the price or is that just the cost of being a person who makes things?
ok the quilt thing got me because that's a different kind of hours entirely, all those tiny stitches, I'd have to lie down too. "tuition" is the word though. I keep trying to make the 14 hours into a receipt and it's not a receipt, it's more like... a semester I already paid for and will keep using. the light bill part is the part I haven't solved yet, but you're right that the $20 number is a bad little gremlin and I should stop feeding it. also now I want to see the quilt.