Just priced a figure commission and my own rate came out to €9.80 an hour
I finally priced a new commission the honest way, hour by hour, and it came out to €9.80 an hour before materials. I'm 44, I've been doing this for almost twenty years, and I'm still making less than the person who serves me coffee. That number sat there on the page and I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
The problem is I price the whole piece, not my time. A seated figure, half-length, oil on linen, maybe 55x46. I know exactly what it takes because I've done it a hundred times. But when I think what the client will reasonably pay for that size, my brain gives me a figure and then I divide by the weeks and suddenly I'm ashamed of myself.
I raised it anyway, this time. Charged what the work actually costs. The client paused on the phone, that long silence that means I finally said a number too high, and I almost folded on the spot. Then she said fine, let's go. So now I'm terrified I've priced myself out of the next three, and quietly furious that I ever treated that fear as reasonable.
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Honey, I know that number. I sat across from that same figure more years ago than I care to count, sewing till my fingers ached and then adding it all up and just staring at what the arithmetic said.
But listen, that hourly math can lie to you if you let it. Folks don't buy the hours, they buy the thing that only you can make. That coffee person, bless them, they trade their hours and they're done. You're trading twenty years of knowing exactly how that oil sits on that linen, and that's not an hour's wage, that's a lifetime showing up in a frame.
Now I won't sit here and tell you the money's fair, cause it ain't, and that's a real grievance and you're right to be tired of it. But don't let that number be the only truth you carry. Price the piece for what it is, not what the clock says. And if they balk, let them walk. The right client's out there.
God gave you that gift for a reason. You been faithful with it for twenty years. That counts for something, even when the math says otherwise.
"that's a lifetime showing up in a frame", that's the whole argument, honestly, and I want to believe it. I do believe it. But then I finish a piece and my hand hovers over the price and I still lowball it, like the number's got more say than the hours do.
The hourly math is a trap, but it's also the only honest mirror I've got. The thing that only I can make doesn't pay my rent unless I'm willing to price it like it's true. And that part, the nerve part, is the part nobody taught us.
The coffee counter is a bad baseline, you're right. But it was the number that made me stop, not the comparison. Twenty years and I still needed a stranger's wage to make me sit down and look at the arithmetic properly. There's something humbling in that, and a little absurd too.
The thing is, I don't think I price against the market. I think I price against the fear that the client will walk. I've seen a hundred prices in my career and I've never once regretted one that was too high. Not once. But I've regretted low ones for years after.
That nerve part, nobody teaches it because nobody can. It's not technique. You just have to keep doing it until the high number stops feeling like a dare.
That's the part nobody talks about, how the figure is already built before you even pick the brush. The hours matter less than the fact that you can do it at all, that you've done it badly enough times to know what good looks like. That's not a wage, it's a skill that took a decade to even be mediocre at.
But I'll be honest with you, the number still stings. I don't want to be paid for the painting, I want to be paid for the life. And the market doesn't always care to make that distinction. I've come back to my own work lately with a bit more peace about it, but some days I sit with that €9.80 and I think, what am I actually protecting here? The work, or my fear of asking for what it's worth?
The hovering hand is the real enemy, not the arithmetic. You'll move it eventually. You already know the price is right; you just haven't believed it yet in front of the client.