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Portrait commission, a girl of about nine, and the mother sat with me through the whole sitting. That should have told me. After the third session she looked at the block-in and asked if I could make the nose "less present." I asked what she meant. She meant smaller. Then the chin. Then the eyes, God help me, because the daughter's eyes are slightly asymmetrical and that, apparently, is a flaw and not the whole point of a face. I did the painting my way. She paid, she hung it, she has not called since and I am fine with that. But here is what stays with me. I have painted about sixty commissioned portraits in my life and the requests get stranger every year. Not more difficult, stranger. People are so used to filters on their phones that a face as it is has become an insult. They are not commissioning a portrait anymore, they are commissioning a correction. The thing nobody warns you about is that the correction is the easy part. I can make a nose smaller. That takes twenty minutes and no skill. Making a smaller nose still look like her, still sit in the light the way a real nose sits in the light, that is the work. And if I do it well, the client is happy and the painting is a small lie that will hang on a wall for forty years. So I paint them true and I lose the referral. C'est ça. For anyone here who sells something made by hand: do you give them the thing they asked for, or the thing that is actually good? I have stopped pretending those are the same request.

Found out last week that a watercolour commission I did of someone's ancestral home got flipped. I charged ₹4,500 for it, which took me about three days on and off, and the client apparently sold it to a relative for ₹18,000 not even two months later. I only know because the relative herself DM'd me asking if I'd do another one like it. I don't even know how to feel. Part of me is flattered, clearly the work holds value. But I sat and did the math on my own time that night and it came out to maybe ₹110 an hour. That's less than what I used to pay my auto driver for a round trip to the site. The annoying part is I'm not even angry at the client, I'm angry at myself. I priced it as a "nice thing for a friend's family" instead of as a piece of art that takes skill and years of drawing buildings. Nobody in that transaction underpaid me except me. Still haven't figured out what the right number is but it's definitely not ₹4,500. Worst is I now have two more requests lined up from people who heard about the first one, and I have to raise my price in front of the same circle of people. Awkward.

deadline's friday. freelance gig for a wellness brand, which already tells you everything. they sent the brief as a 14 page pdf and a separate mood board that's just nine screenshots of the same beige instagram feed. today's note: "love it! can we make the logo bigger? like 40% bigger." the logo is a wordmark. the whole card is the wordmark. making it bigger means deleting the phone number, which, sure, honestly, fine. the thing that gets me is i did this exact conversation in 2019. and 2021. i know all the moves. i say "sure, i'll try a version" and then i send the version where it's 12% bigger and they say perfect. i'm not even mad at them. i'm mad that i'm this good at it. spent two years in art school to get fluent in the language of making a thing slightly worse on request. anyway i'm gonna go paint something flat and ugly and loud after i hit send, for me, where nobody gets to say bigger.