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Was picking up a new tube of titanium white today and this older gentleman starts chatting me up at the counter. I mentioned I paint in acrylic and he got this look on his face like I'd told him I color with crayons. Said, and I quote, "acrylic is a shortcut, you can just paint over anything and start again. Oil is real painting, watercolor is real painting. You can't hide in those." And I just stood there holding my six dollar tube of paint like a child who got scolded at school. I should have said something. I've been painting for six years, I sell the odd piece, I put in real hours. But I just nodded and paid and left. Here's the thing though. The "you can fix mistakes" argument gets me every time because it makes it sound like the fixing is free. Like I haven't spent whole evenings scraping off a sky that refused to work or layering the same green seven ways until it finally looked like grass instead of swamp. Fixing a mistake in acrylic is still two hours of work, it just doesn't require a respirator and a month of drying time. Anyway. I don't know why this one got to me. Maybe because I'm tired. Maybe because I've heard some version of it a dozen times and it never gets less annoying. My painting is mine and it doesn't need a gatekeeper's blessing. But man, I wish I'd said something smarter than standing there with my mouth shut.

so i did the math months later and that's like $18/hr before materials. and she was the one who suggested the price, i just nodded. i knew it was low but i didn't wanna be the guy who haggles with a friend. now every time i look at that painting i just see $18/hour staring back at me. i don't even know what i'd have said if i had to name it. 500? 800? feels fake to ask for that. but 200 also feels fake for 11 hours. so i'm stuck in the middle where both numbers feel wrong and i just don't talk about money with anyone i know personally anymore lol

got a bottle of golden fluid raw umber that's been slowly solidifying in the corner of my shelf for like a year and a half. it's not fully hard yet but it's got that thick yogurt consistency where you shake it and nothing moves. i know the official answer is throw it out but i paid like $12 for this and i can still see pigment in there. part of me wants to cut the bottle open with a knife and use it like a paint cake. part of me knows that's insane. has anyone actually done this or do we all just pretend we toss them and secretly keep a graveyard of half-dead paint bottles under the sink

A gallery contacted me last year, really interested, came to the studio, said all the right things about the work. Then the email: "Would you consider working in acrylic instead of oil? It would ship easier and sell better." I said no. Maybe that was stupid. But oil is what I do, the way it moves, the drying time, the glazing, it's not a preference, it's the whole practice. I don't know how to say what I want to say in acrylic. Has a gallery ever asked you to change your materials or your style to fit them? Did you bend or did you walk? I'm curious where the line is for other people.

so i did this thing a few months ago where a neighborhood coffee shop asked for four 24x36 acrylic pieces. walls are big, they wanted "something colorful," easy brief. i quoted $400 for all four because i'm an idiot and thought "bulk discount" like i'm selling socks. $100 per painting. that's like $2.60 an hour if you count the sketching and the repainting and the repainting again because acrylic dries fast and i hate myself. finally deliver them. they're thrilled. two weeks later i walk in for coffee and they've framed them in these cheap black frames from michael's. completely covering the edges. i paint the edges. that's like. a thing i do. the sides are part of it. they just. framed over them. i didn't say anything. i drank my latte and left. still haven't said anything. $400 and my edges are in framing jail forever.

I had a booth at a local craft fair Saturday and a woman picked up one of my acrylic landscapes, looked at it for a good minute, and said "oh this is nice, I could probably do this with my daughter's $5 watercolor set." And I just stood there like... okay. So do it then? I'd love to see you mix titanium white into a puddle of Crayola paint and get that kind of coverage on canvas. Please. Film it. I didn't say any of that of course. I smiled and said "you should give it a try, it's really relaxing!" and she moved on. My husband said I was too nice and I probably was but also what's the point. People who think art supplies are all the same are not people you're going to convince in one conversation at a folding table. Still felt like packing up my easel and going home though.

so a friend that owns a coffee place here asked if i'd hang a couple small pieces on the wall by the till. not a show, no hanging fee, no commission beyond whatever i bought in flat whites. i said sure, mostly to get them out of my apartment. one 20x20cm acrylic, one slightly bigger. little handwritten tag next to each, price and my IG handle. that's it. sold three in nine days. not the two on the wall, three, because people asked if i had more in the back and my friend texted me and i drove over with two more. here's the part that bugs me. last year i did an actual group show, framed stuff, printed cards, the whole thing, sold one. this is a wall by a pastry case next to a sign about oat milk. i don't fully know what it means and i'm trying not to build a whole theory about it. maybe framed art in a white room reads as expensive and scary and a small unframed panel next to your coffee reads as a thing a person could own. maybe it's just that people are already in a buying mood when they're buying a croissant. maybe i got lucky. ngl though i'm now walking around town looking at every counter and shelf like a weirdo thinking about where else i could leave a painting. the guy at the hardware store is going to think i'm unwell. anyone else done the non-gallery thing and had it go weirdly better than the gallery thing

Ok I need to hear real numbers because I'm starting to think I'm doing something wrong. I've sent out 9 emails to local galleries and small co-op spaces since February. Heard back from 2. Both no, and honestly one of those was so polite it still stung. The other 7 just... nothing. Crickets. Meanwhile I keep hearing people say "it only takes one yes" and I want to know how many nos that one yes came after. 5? 30? Did anyone here get in on their very first try and just never mention it because it sounds obnoxious? I'm not trying to complain, I genuinely want the real numbers. If the answer is "40 emails and a year" I'd feel a lot better about my 9. If the answer is "2" then I'll go rethink my whole approach. So: how many before your first yes, and how long did it take? Bonus points if you tell me what finally worked. (I'm acrylic, landscapes and still lifes, mostly local fairs so far. If that matters.)

The piece was 30x40, acrylic wash and torn paper over a photo of somebody's grandmother's kitchen. Client found me through a friend of a friend. 900 felt generous when I said it out loud. Then I actually sat down with the receipts. Panel 62. Mediums, call it 140 because I wasted a whole tube of a grey I ended up hating. The photograph was a scan and a print, 34. Frame, because it needed one and I didn't trust them to pick it, 210. Shipping 55. That's 501 gone before I touched it. What was left was 399 and maybe 60 hours. I don't work fast. I re-tore the same paper corner four times. So roughly 6 an hour, and that's before the gallery takes a cut if it ever shows. The part that actually bothers me isn't the number. It's that I knew it was low when I said it. I said 900 because I could hear myself about to say 1400 and it scared me. Fear has a price and mine is 500. Quoting a new one next week. Same size, same materials. I'm going to say the higher number and just sit there.

Six weeks ago I deleted the app off my phone. Not the account, just the app, because I kept opening it while standing at the sink and I couldn't tell you one thing I'd seen. Came back last week, posted a detail shot of the piece I've been chewing on since March. Somewhere around the fourth layer of acrylic the paper starts lifting and you get these little blisters that look like the surface is breathing. That's what I photographed. 11 likes. Two comments, one of them from a guy who wants me to check out his print-on-demand service. Here's the part that surprised me: it didn't sting. Usually I'd post, then check my phone forty times over two days, then feel like a vending machine that nobody was putting coins in. This time I posted it, closed the app, went back to the studio and tore a page out of a 1970s phone book for the next layer. I did lose something though. A woman who'd bought a small piece in 2022 messaged asking where I'd gone. I hadn't seen it for three weeks. That one actually bothered me. So now I'm trying to figure out if the account is worth keeping at all, or if I should just have an email list of eleven people and a note on the wall. Anyone else cut back and find the math worked out better than they expected?

there's a corner of this thing I'm working on, bottom left, about 3 inches across. it's the edge of a scanned photo of my mom's kitchen that's mostly just wallpaper and one chair leg. I've re-torn the same paper over it four times now. acrylic wash, let it dry, hate it, tear it back. the layers are getting muddy and honestly that's the part I like. told myself I'd stop at noon. it's 2:40. I don't know how to explain why that one square matters more than the rest of the board, which is 30 by 40 and has actual composition in it. it just does. the whole piece is sort of orbiting that corner. if I get it wrong the rest is decoration. anyway. back in.

I did a craft fair a couple weekends ago and made $64 total, but $40 of it came from two people I stopped being "the seller" with and just talked to like a normal human. One was a woman who asked a technical question about how I get the sky so smooth in acrylics, which turned into a 15 minute conversation about gesso and soft brushes, and she bought two small prints before she left. The other was a guy who told me his mom used to paint and we just stood there talking about her for a while. He bought one. I'm not saying this is some genius insight. But I spent the other five hours half-smiling at people and getting ignored, and the money came out of the two actual conversations. Kind of makes me wonder how much of my online posting is the equivalent of that half-smile at strangers. All these process reels and behind the scenes stuff I do, and it's the one-to-one stuff that actually moves anything. Anyway, back to my day job tomorrow. The fair was fun but I came home with more unsold inventory than I know what to do with lol.

charged a client $350 for a 4x4 acrylic piece last month. then i actually timed it out of curiosity. 40 hours total including sketching, the ugly middle phase, the "repaint the whole sky" phase i do every single time, and talking myself out of gesso-ing over it and starting fresh. that's $8.75/hr before materials. after materials it's like $7. and here's the sick part, i know a painting takes me 15 truly good hours and i know i price it like it takes 8. i have the data. i just get scared the number looks big and shave it down. meanwhile the client framed it, sent me a photo, thanked me again. they'd have paid $600 without blinking and i know that too. i'm trying to just... charge the honest number next time. we'll see if i actually do it or if i fold and give the "friends and family" discount to a stranger again lol. anyone else have the exact math memorized on what they should charge vs what they charge? sick of being my own worst negotiator.

when i was chasing my first gallery i got told my work was "too happy" which still cracks me up. it's acrylic, it's color, that's the point. they wanted something moodier. i painted moody stuff for like two weeks, hated every minute of it, went back to loud and never looked back. anyway, what's the weirdest reason you've been passed over for? the more specific the better. "not a fit" doesn't count, i want the one that made you laugh or die a little.

I've had a box in the closet since 2020 with a few things from my brother in it. Every so often I'd take the lid off and then put it back. Couldn't touch the boots. Something about them still holding the shape of his feet, the dirt baked into the toe, the laces stiff where he knotted them last. Anyway a couple weeks ago I cleared the table and started. Peeled one sole off with a flathead. Glued it down whole on the panel, dirty side up, and the rest of the piece built itself around it. Charcoal, some torn pages from a gas bill of his I found folded in the box, acrylic over the top so it sinks in. It's ugly in a way I like. It looks like something that was dug up, because it was. Part of me thinks I just ruined a pair of boots. The other part thinks they've been ruined for four years and I was the only one pretending otherwise. It's hanging on the wall behind me right now instead of in the closet. That's the whole win. Not the piece, just that it's out of the dark.

So I did the fall craft fair at our church hall last Saturday. Table was $35 for the day, which is why I keep doing it. I had a stack of small 9x12 acrylics, mostly the field and barn scenes I do when I don't have the brain for anything bigger. Priced them at $65 each. Sold four. Felt great until I got home and actually added it up. Eleven hours behind the table plus the framing plus the mats plus the booth fee, and I came out at maybe $9 an hour for work I did over about three months of Sunday afternoons. The thing that gets me is the woman who bought two and said "these are so reasonable." She meant it as a compliment. And I just smiled and said thank you because what am I going to do, argue with her in a church hall? I keep telling myself $65 is what the market here will bear for a small piece. But I've never actually tested that. I've never once put $110 on a painting and seen what happens. I just skip straight to the number that feels safe so nobody walks away from my table. My husband asked why I don't just try it at the spring fair and I didn't have a good answer.

i've got a 30x40 on the wall that i've been "finishing" for eleven days now. the underpainting, which took me like ninety minutes, was loose and dumb and had the whole gesture in it. then i started rendering and it died. flatlined. i can see exactly where i killed it, right around day three, when i decided to "clean it up." fourth time this year. i'm starting to think the skill i actually need is the one where you stop at 90 minutes. the annoying part is i know the drill: work in one sitting, no phone, big brush, don't go back in. and then i go back in. i always go back in. it's like the part of my brain that went to art school is still in there somewhere insisting the edges be right. anyway it's staying on the wall. sunk cost is my second favorite medium after acrylic.

I've been charging $75 for a 9x12 acrylic landscape for about two years now. Small canvas, usually a marsh or a treeline, the kind of thing that sells to somebody's aunt at a fair. Feels like a fair price, people don't blink. Then I did the actual math in the car on the way home Sunday. Canvas and paint maybe $12, frame $18 from the craft store when I catch a sale, and I don't count the varnish or the brushes. So $45 left. That piece was four evenings, probably six hours with drying time and reworking the sky twice. Seven and a half an hour, before I count the drive or the $40 booth fee. I know I'm not going to get $30 an hour at a church craft fair. I'm not trying to. But I sat in my driveway for a minute and thought about how I could just skip the frame and sell it on a panel and keep the $18. The thing is I like the frames. They make it look finished. Anyway, next fair is in October. I'm thinking $95 with the frame and seeing what happens. That's the whole post, I don't have a clean ending for it.

switched to painting on a sheet of tempered glass like 4 years ago, salvaged from a coffee table someone left on the curb on my block. still not sure it's tempered but nothing has exploded yet. the trick is you let the acrylic dry on it and then you peel it off in one sheet. i've got a stack of these paint skins under my flat files, probably 30 of them by now, each one a full record of a week. some of them are genuinely better than the paintings they came from and i refuse to think about what that means. also you scrape it clean with a razor blade and the whole thing is fresh in 20 seconds. plastic palettes stain and hold onto old color and i spent years convinced that was somehow part of the process. it wasn't. it was just dirty. the downside is i've dropped it twice and both times i aged about a decade. currently propped against the wall behind my desk because i still haven't figured out where to actually store a 3 foot sheet of glass in a room this size. anyway if you're still on plastic just know i'm not judging you i'm just quietly right about this one thing

sold a 60x80 acrylic for 480 at the weekend. buyer was lovely, paid in cash, carried it out herself. then i sat down and actually did the math, which was a mistake. canvas and stretcher 60. gesso and primer, say 15. tubes of the two colors i used up almost entirely, that's 70 because the good red is stupid expensive now. brushes i killed, amortize whatever, 20. three weeks of work, most of it on the sky, which i repainted twice because the first one was muddy. 480 minus 165 materials = 315. over three weeks that's 15 an hour if i count it as 20 hours, which is generous, because it was more. and i priced it off a number i saw on someone else's instagram. the annoying part is i'd do it again tomorrow. the money isn't really why. but i also can't keep pretending the money is fine, because it isn't, and the only person setting that number is me and i'm clearly doing it badly. sat there with the receipt in my hand and the buyer's car still in the lot and just went, huh. anyway if you're reading this and you also price off vibes and a screenshot you saved, at least we're consistent.