Search

ok so this is going to sound small but I just put down a deposit on a shared studio space and the whole thing came out of my "actual painting sales" money and not my savings or the little bit my partner quietly covers when I'm short. Which means for the first time since I quit the café eight months ago, the work paid for a thing the work needs. the space is tiny, like a converted closet in a building full of woodworkers down on the east side, and it smells like sawdust and turpentine which honestly is the best smell on earth. there's a skylight. A SKYLIGHT. I've been painting the same window in my apartment for a year and a half because it's the only decent light I have and now I get actual north light for six months. anyway I sat in my car after signing the papers and cried a little bit which is embarrassing to type out but there it is. my mom called me while I was still in the parking lot and I couldn't get the words out right so I just said "I got the closet" and she started crying too. we're a family of criers, it's a whole thing. the terrifying part is now I have a monthly bill I didn't have last week. but the good terrifying. I think. ask me in march haha

A woman saw one of my torn-photo pieces in a group show in March and asked if I'd make something similar, bigger, for her hallway. I said 900 and a 300 deposit, and she paid it that week without blinking. Here's the part I should probably feel worse about. The piece she liked was the third version. The first two I'd painted over because they were too tidy, and the one she saw had a big section where I'd ripped the surface back to the board and left it. That's the bit she pointed at. So now I'm making her a bigger one and I'm trying not to just remake the accident. I've done four starts since April. Two are dead. The third is fine, which is the worst thing I can say about a painting. The fourth has a real tear in it and I don't trust it yet. 900 is probably too low for the hours and definitely too low for the anxiety, but I quoted it on a Tuesday in a hallway with bad lighting and now it's a number I have to live with. She's been lovely. She hasn't asked once. That almost makes it worse. Anyway. If anyone has a method for re-making the thing that happened by accident, I'm listening.

A woman saw a piece in a group show last spring, one of the ones built around my brother's jacket. Wanted something in the same family, same size, roughly 40x50cm, paper and wash and a bit of the lining stitched in. I said 400. Just said it, out loud, before I'd thought about it, because she was standing right there and the number came out and then it was a commitment. Materials were maybe 60. The rest was eleven weeks of evenings. And the real problem isn't the 400, it's that I can't make a second one. Not that I won't. I can't. The first one used the only piece of that jacket I had left and I knew that when I said yes. So I took the money for a thing that doesn't exist twice, and I've been sitting on the deposit since March trying to figure out how to tell her. I keep drafting the email and it comes out either cold and businesslike or way oversharing, and both of those are worse than just saying it. The part that stings is that I priced it like it was a print. Same flat number you'd give for something you can run again. I don't have a formula for the ones that can't be remade, and I suspect a formula would be a lie anyway. Anyone else quote before their brain caught up? Or taken a deposit for something that turned out to be the last one.

Woman wanted a granite memorial bench for her husband's garden. Paid a $600 deposit up front, balance on delivery. I quoted $2,400, thinking that was about right for the material and shape. Then the granite I wanted had a two-month lead time. Then the supplier raised their price between order and delivery. Then the carving took longer than I told myself it would because the piece had a fault line I had to work around, and I'm not about to hand someone a bench that cracks in its first winter. Eleven weeks from deposit to install. Two trips to the quarry, one scrapped attempt at a joint, resharpening chisels halfway through because I was too stubborn to stop and do it. Netted out somewhere around $11 an hour if I count every hour. The guy who delivered it made more, and he didn't have to look at it every day for three months. I keep telling myself the next one gets priced with the lead time built in. Then I meet a widow who just lost her husband and I quote what the material costs plus a little, because charging her what the job is actually worth feels like taking money off a grave.

I had a commission finally paid off this week. Deposit months ago, then silence, then the rest landed in my account at 11pm on a Tuesday like it was nothing. No note, no explanation for the delay. Just the number. And here's the thing. I already spent the deposit months ago. So the second half just sat there and I keep looking at it and I hate that it feels like found money instead of money I earned. That's not how it's supposed to feel. I priced it at $850. Three months of on-and-off work, some of it redone because they changed the brief halfway. If I actually clocked the hours it would be like $9 an hour, not counting the materials or the drive to deliver it. I know I'm supposed to feel grateful. I'm not grateful. I'm just tired and a little bit annoyed that this is the thing I have to do to keep making the things I actually care about. Anyway. Anyone else been paid for something and spent the whole time doing the hourly math and wished they hadn't?

Okay so I've been trying this thing where I actually send invoices the day the work ships, instead of waiting weeks and pretending it's fine. First time trying it, client replied "let's circle back next week!" and now it's been a month and I've sent two gentle follow-ups and nothing. I know the lesson is supposed to be "put a number on it up front, get a deposit" and I did do that part, which is honestly why I'm not spiraling. The deposit covered materials and most of my time. But the balance is sitting there and it's the amount I was counting on for studio rent and I keep opening my email like a fool hoping there's money in it. The wild part is this person was so nice the whole time. Gushed about the piece, sent photos of it framed in their hallway. Then just... went silent the second money was due. I'm starting to think the "they're being polite" read and the "they're dodging" read can look exactly the same from where I'm sitting. Anyone else deal with this? Do you chase people or just eat the loss and never work with them again? I've got maybe one more follow-up in me before I do the passive aggressive thing of posting a painting and tagging their house lol. Not that I would. But I get it now.

Small thing, but I put the deposit down for a three day pastel portrait workshop in Katowice in October. It has sat open in my browser since April. I kept telling myself I would decide after the next piece was finished, and then obviously there is always a next piece. The part that made me press send, honestly, is that the tutor uses the same toned paper I do, the grey-blue Canson, and I have wanted for a year to watch someone else handle it live instead of guessing from videos. I have no idea what the level will be like. There is a real chance I am the slowest one in the room and I will spend three days quietly panicking at the back. But I paid, and it is not refundable, so now I go. I have never taken any proper class in my life, only books and the internet and a lot of ruined sheets. If any of you have done one of these, how did you survive the first hour? I am already thinking about what to bring and it is June.

ok so this is the thing that's been eating me all week and I need to say it somewhere. My cousin asked if I'd do a watercolor for her save-the-dates. Not a print, an ORIGINAL, one painting, and then she'd scan it and print however many she wanted. I said 40 dollars. Because she's family, because I panic-quote family, because I've been doing that since I was 19 and did my uncle's anniversary piece for a bottle of wine. It took me nine hours. TWO full evenings of layering washes so the olive branches didn't go muddy, plus the gouache accents on the lettering, plus two rounds of "can you make the green less green." Nine hours. Forty dollars. That's a bit under four and a half an hour, which, cool, great. And THEN. She posted it on facebook and told everyone her cousin does commissions "super cheap." And now my aunt is asking for one, and a friend of hers is asking for one, and I can feel the whole thing calcifying into my actual reputation. Like I've made myself into the discount. I set a number and now the number is me. The worst part is I can't even be mad at her, she was being sweet about it. I'm mad at myself. I have a real rate now, 38 an hour for commissions with a deposit up front, and I completely ignored it the second someone in my family asked. My partner says I need a flat number I say out loud instead of "oh whatever's fair" and I know they're right and I hate it. Anyway I'm painting the same window again this week because it doesn't ask me for a discount. Has anyone actually fixed this or do you just outlive it.

I nearly didn't put it up. Bad light, the smalti looked grey instead of the deep red it actually is, and you could see my slippers in the corner of the shot. I posted it anyway because I had nothing else ready and the algorithm is a hungry animal. Two days later a woman in Zurich wrote to me. She wanted a panel two metres wide for a stairwell. Paid the deposit the same week, no haggling, no "can you do it cheaper if we skip the gold." I asked her later what made her write. She said the slippers. She said it looked like a real person's floor, not a showroom. Meanwhile the professionally shot photos I paid a photographer 400 euro for, the ones with the grey backdrop and the careful angles, they got the likes. Nothing else. Likes and nothing. I still don't fully understand what I'm doing out here. I post less now and half of it is badly lit. But I've stopped pretending the work happens in a white room, because it doesn't, it happens in my kitchen with one cat sitting on the tesserae I just sorted.

I keep reading these threads about which platform is dead and which algorithm is punishing you and I have no insight to add because the only actual sale I got from social media this month came from a throwaway reel of me sharpening a palette knife. Just a plain knife and the ring of it against the sharpening stone. No music, no talking, 11 seconds, shot on my phone propped against a mug. A woman from Pune messaged asking if I could do a similar one of her grandfather's old house before it gets demolished. Paid a deposit before I even sent her a sketch. Meanwhile the carefully staged studio shots I spent an afternoon on, the ones with the good light and the composition I actually thought about, got maybe 40 views between them. I have stopped pretending I understand any of this. The algorithm wants what it wants. Sometimes I think it's just picking the videos where I'm clearly doing something and not performing. The minute I set up the ring light it knows and punishes me for it.

For two years I charged 400 zł for a 30x40 pastel portrait. Last month I finally moved it to 550 and I sat with my thumb over the send button for maybe ten minutes before I wrote to the first person. She replied in four minutes. "Great, can I pay a deposit now?" Then two more, same thing, no negotiating, one of them even asked if I do larger sizes. So now I have this uncomfortable feeling in my chest, which is not the relief I expected. It's more like, so I was leaving 150 zł on every single one of those for two years? How many was that. I don't want to count. The stupid part is I know exactly why I held it there. 400 felt like the number where nobody could accuse me of pretending to be a real artist. It was a hiding place and I called it being reasonable. I'm not going up again yet, I don't have the nerve. But I'm curious if anyone else had this, where the raise went fine and the regret was about all the years before it and not about the new number.

open studio was saturday. sold three things which, for a saturday in a converted warehouse with bad lighting and worse parking, is basically a miracle. but the thing i keep thinking about is this woman who came in around two, bought a small one, came back at four and bought another, then asked if i'd take a deposit and three payments for one of the big ones. i said yes immediately and then felt weird about it after. like did i just undercut myself? is this a bad precedent? am i a bank now? the whole drive home i argued with myself. and then i remembered being 24 and putting a $200 print on a credit card i couldn't pay off for a year. so. idk. i think i did the right thing and i also think i'm going to be chasing an email for six weeks. anyway the real win is that i stopped saying "no pressure" every time someone looked at a painting. that reflex is a disease

Small printmaker, so this is not some big studio story. I sell at two markets a month and take the odd commission, prints from €35 up to about €280 for the big framed ones. In January I put everything up by a third. Not because I'd found religion about my worth, mostly because framing costs went through the roof and I was sick of eating it. Didn't announce it, didn't write a post about it, just changed the numbers on the board. The thing nobody warns you about: the actual sales barely moved. Maybe a few less of the cheap ones. But the messages changed completely. The crowd that wants a €40 framed original signed to their mother in law on a Tuesday for a wedding on Friday? Thinned out. The people who do get in touch now ask real questions, sizes, editions, can they collect it Saturday. One lad last month paid a deposit before he'd even seen the block proof. I spent years thinking I had a pricing problem when what I had was a sorting problem. The low price wasn't making me sales, it was making me correspondence. The bit I got wrong though: I still price the small unframed ones too low and I know it. There's a stack of hares on the shelf downstairs telling me so. Curious if anyone else found the same after a rise, or if it was the opposite and the whole thing fell off a cliff.

Okay so everyone talks about getting the yes and nobody talks about the part where they hand you the terms and you have to keep a straight face. I'll go first. Small place, second gallery that ever showed me, and I was so excited I would have signed anything. Then she says 40% and also "we'd like first look at everything you make for the next twelve months." I genuinely didn't know if that was normal. I said yes, went home, called my mom, cried a little, then emailed a friend who'd been showing for years and she was like "no. that's not normal. the first look thing especially." I went back and we renegotiated down and it was fine but oof, I felt so green. Now I want to know what yours looked like, because I think this is the thing that actually separates people who survive their first gallery from people who get chewed up: Was it a percentage? A deposit for the show? Framing costs? Exclusivity, a consignment split, a "we handle the pricing" line, a contract that was just a handshake, a contract that was fourteen pages? And the real question underneath it: did you push back, or did you sign? Because I signed first and negotiated second, and I'm still not sure if that was the mistake or just the cost of learning. Tell me I'm not the only one who had no idea what was normal.

Ok so this is a win but it's also making me want to lie on the floor. Three commissions this week. Three!! I've had maybe two in the whole eight months since I quit the café, so this is genuinely new territory for me and I keep waiting for someone to email back like "oops wrong person." One of them is a portrait of a woman's dog, which, fine, I can do a dog. The other two are big-ish and I quoted prices without flinching and they both just said yes?? I reread both emails like four times. Things I did not expect to feel: mostly panic. Because now there's a version of me that costs money and can be disappointing, and I have to actually finish these instead of tucking them in a drawer when the second wash goes sideways. I did the deposit math on a receipt paper at my desk and then just stared at the number for a while. Also my partner came home and I told them and they picked me up off the ground which is the correct response. Anyway I'm celebrating but I'm also very aware I have no idea what I'm doing. If you take commissions, do you have a system for not spiraling between the yes and the actual starting? Because right now I'm just painting the window again instead of starting the dog

Had a gallery talk me into a pretty big commission a few years back. Sign nothing, deposits are the insurance. Then they started asking to push the timeline up, wanted progress photos every week, then they wanted to "review" the design as we went. That's not a commission, that's a job. I walked. What's the red flag that made you pull out of a gallery before it cost you?

there was a proper layer of crystallised sea salt built up on the corner where i leave prints to dry after the seawater bath. i don't rinse them, the salt is part of the process, it catches different tones. but the table had gotten bad. crusty. white deposits on everything. so i scrubbed it down this morning and now the wood looks too clean. like a stranger's workspace. i keep glancing over at that corner expecting to see the tide mark and there's nothing. i think i need to go get it messy again on purpose. maybe that's the whole thing, you spend years building a rhythm of mess and then one day you tidy it and realise the mess was the point.

I've done this three times now and I keep doing it. A client says they want the best, gold leaf, a hand-carved frame, the real thing, and I nod along because yes, that is what I want to make too. Then I order the frame from a specialist in Avignon who does nothing else, and I'm already €700 in before I've touched a brush to linen. The portrait itself took about six weeks, off and on, between teaching and the daughter's schedule. When I calculated my hourly rate after the frame, the stretcher, the materials, the varnish, it came to about €11.50 an hour. My daughter makes more babysitting. I know I should charge separately for the frame. I know I should quote the whole thing upfront with a deposit that covers materials. But there's something in me that wants the final price to just be the price, like the frame is part of the painting, not a line item. Stupid, probably. The client would never know the difference. Anyone else just bad at separating what you make from what you need to make it?

Right, I'll go first so nobody feels like they're confessing into the void. I said yes to a spot years back in a town I won't name. Small room, nice light, chap seemed sound, and about a week before the show he started asking if I'd "do the framing myself, like, to save us both a few bob." Grand, sure. Then he wanted a cut of the door on the opening night. Then he wanted me to help paint the fecking walls. I was that thrilled to have a wall at all that I said yes to every one of them and did the walls badly. Ended up fine, sold a few, learned nothing, went back to him twice more. That's the honest part. I didn't learn anything for years. So, what was the earliest red flag you spotted and ignored anyway? The deposit that never quite happened, the "we'll sort money after", the gallery that's actually a cafe with hooks, the landlord's cousin who "knows art people". Give me the one that had you going ah here, that's not right, and then you signed anyway. Not looking for the horror stories where it all went wrong, I want the small ones. The ones you talked yourself past. Tell me I'm not the only eejit.

I spent three weeks fighting a harbor scene and finally gave up on it one night, shoved it in the back of my closet. Pulled it out two months later mostly to see if the canvas was worth reusing, and you know what, it was actually fine. A few glazes later I really liked it. Ended up hanging it at a little craft fair in November. Not expecting anything from it, it was the piece I kept apologizing for when people stopped at my table. A woman came back twice to look at it and ended up asking if I could do something similar for her lake house. Smaller, different colors, but same idea. She just sent me the deposit. I keep thinking about how close that painting came to being gessoed over. Also the timing is funny because I'm exactly the kind of person who would've talked myself out of even putting it on the table. Glad I didn't.