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ok so I've been fighting this 9x12 gouache thing for four days, it's the view out my window at like 6:40pm, that specific orange that only lasts about eleven minutes in September. and I got the color. genuinely got it, I mixed it like nine times and the fourth one was right and I cried a little (I know, I know). the gradient is clean, the light is doing the thing over the rooftops, my partner looked at it and went "oh that's nice" which is the exact reaction that means something is wrong. because it's dead. it's a nice postcard. there's no air in it. every single shape is sitting politely where it should be and there's nothing pushing or pulling and nothing that's a little wrong in a way that makes your eye stick. I think I've been so scared of mudding it (gouache will punish you instantly, no redo, unlike watercolor where at least it's a slow betrayal) that I've been painting like I'm decorating a cake instead of painting. everything is blended to the edge. no hard stops. and I keep telling myself I'll add the dark accents at the end and I keep not doing it because I'm scared of ruining the orange. has anyone broken a piece on purpose to save it, like gone in with a value that scares you and just accepted you might wreck it? I need someone to tell me to put a real dark in there or talk me off the ledge, I genuinely can't tell which one I need

I've been working on this little still life for three days, just lemons and a blue cloth, nothing fancy, and I mixed this gorgeous warm shadow color yesterday, like a deep ochre-y purple, it was PERFECT. Came back this morning and it's dried into this weak, chalky lavender thing that has absolutely nothing to do with what I saw on my palette. And I KNOW gouache dries down, I know this, I've been painting with it for years, but it still gets me every time. I just sat there staring at it like... who are you. I tried glazing a thin wash of the original mix back over it and now it looks muddy and overworked and I think I need to just let it dry again and reassess but I'm so annoyed. The lemons were looking so good 😭 Has anyone found a reliable way to predict the dry-down shift or is it just eternal suffering and learning to mix everything a little punchier than you think you need?

I had this whole thing planned out for today, I was gonna paint this corner of my studio where the afternoon light hits this dumb little ceramic donkey my mom got me at a flea market, and I mixed this perfect warm gray for the shadow side, really felt good about it, and then I walked away to let it settle for literally two minutes and came back and it was already cracking. Gouache is such a brat sometimes. Like alright fine I guess we're starting over?? And I KNOW it's because I didn't work the pigment back enough before I put it down, I was too excited, I rushed it. I do this every time I'm really into a piece. My partner says I need to slow down but like, the thing is when I'm excited about something I just wanna GET IT DOWN you know?? And then the materials are like nope sorry try again. Anyway I'm re-mixing and I'm gonna be real patient about it this time lol. The light's still good for another hour or so. We'll see if I learned my lesson.

Ok so I finally sat down with my spreadsheet (spreadsheet is a strong word, it's a notebook with a column drawn in it) and figured out my actual hourly on the small gouaches I sell at markets. The 5x7s are 85. People love them, they sell, I feel good handing them over. I'm making about 11 an hour on them. Eleven. Less than the café job I quit. The part that killed me isn't even the painting, it's that I was counting "painting time" as the whole thing. Not the sourcing, not the taping, not the three failed versions of the same little sky that go in the bin, not the backing boards and the glassine sleeves. And definitely not the hour I spend at the market being charming to strangers, which I'm apparently doing for free. I don't want to stop making them. They're how people first find me and honestly the small ones are where I actually learn things. But 85 for something that takes me a full day when you add it all up is starting to feel like a habit I can't afford. I'm scared to go to 130 because my regulars are students and they're the ones who buy. Anyway. If anyone has done this jump on the small stuff and lived to tell it, I'd love to hear how you said it out loud without sounding like you're scolding people.

ok so I quit the cafe job eight months ago and I'm supposed to be on a budget and last week I walked into the art store for ONE tube of titanium white and walked out with six tubes of gouache because they had that MaimeriBlu display up and the swatches were wet and I have no self control when paint is wet on paper. anyway. the one that's wrecking me is this weird dull green, kind of a swamp olive, and I've been mixing that exact green for MONTHS with pthalo and yellow ochre and never quite getting it, always too bright or too chalky, and now it's just THERE. in the tube. premixed. sitting on my palette like an insult. I've repainted the same corner of my window (the part where the light hits the sill around 4pm, there's a chip in the paint there and I keep painting the chip) probably eleven times this week. eleven. and it's closer than it's ever been and I want to cry a little bit about a green. the money thing is genuinely scary though. I did the math on what I actually spend on pigment versus what my partner spends on groceries and I put the receipt in a drawer face down which is a real coping strategy I have. does anyone else have a color that they finally just bought premixed after years of pretending they could mix it themselves, or am I the only one lying to myself about my own palette

Like, I'll get a video of me just doing a really simple wash technique, something I thought was pretty straightforward and maybe helpful, and it'll get like, 100 views total. Then I'll post a sped-up video of me painting my cat, Bartholomew, looking super derpy, and it blows up to 10k. Bartholomew, of all things! haha. I'm not saying cats aren't great, but it's so hard to tell what the platforms actually want or if they're just messing with us. It makes me wonder if all the effort I put into explaining the pigment mixing or the paper buckling is just… wasted on them? It’s frustrating because I want to share the skill of it, you know? Omg, anyone else feel like they're just throwing paint at a wall and hoping something sticks with the algorithm gods lately?

So I took a commission last month, a gouache portrait of this woman's dog, small, maybe 5x7, and I quoted her 320 and I felt SO confident about it in the message. Sent it, she said yes immediately, and I was like ok cool I'm a professional. Then it took me eleven days. Not eleven days of work, obviously, but eleven days of the thing sitting on my desk while I redid the left ear four times because the fur kept going muddy, which is a gouache problem I created for myself by underpainting too warm. Plus two full sessions just on the background because she wanted "the same green as her sofa" and I had one blurry phone photo of the sofa. And the framing, which I did myself because I'm cheap, and I chipped the corner and had to start the frame over. My partner asked, very gently, like genuinely curious, "so what's that work out to an hour" and I literally said "oh I don't really think about it that way" and went to go water a plant that does not need water. I do think about it that way. I think about it constantly. I've just decided that the number I'd get if I actually divided it is a number I'm not ready to see yet, and there's something kind of insane about that, right? Like I'll happily tell a stranger 320 with my whole chest but I won't do one division problem in my own kitchen. Anyway she loves it, she sent me a photo of it on the wall next to the actual dog, and I'm not saying I regret the price. I'm saying I quoted the version of me who paints fast and it got done by the version of me who repaints an ear four times. Still working out which one of those people should be setting prices.

Small thing but I've been chasing this stupid window in my apartment since like March and today it actually did what I wanted. For anyone new: it's the west-facing one over the fire escape, the light comes in around 4pm and turns everything this gross beautiful orange and I've done it over and over trying to get the shadows to stop looking like mud. Gouache on hot press, 9x12, so there's basically no room to hide. I've been glazing the sill wrong this whole time, laying it too wet and letting it bloom, and this morning I just... didn't. Left it alone. Painted the shape once and walked away from it. Which for me is a huge deal because my whole problem is I keep going back in. Sitting here looking at it and it's not perfect but the chair leg is actually IN the light now instead of sitting on top of it, if that makes sense?? My partner came home and said "oh that's the good one" and I almost cried at the sink lol. Eight months of no café paycheck and THIS is what I'm celebrating, a chair leg. Anyway nobody in my family really gets why this is a big deal so I'm telling all of you instead.

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.

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.

ok so I need to say this somewhere because my partner is tired of hearing it and honestly they're right. I did a little gouache commission last month, 11x14, a house portrait for a coworker of my mom's (mom's coworker, not even mine, which is its own whole thing). Quoted $260. Felt generous at the time, felt like a real artist number. It took me four sessions. Four. Because the roof had all this dappled light on it and I kept redoing the same three shingles like a maniac. Plus materials, plus the scan and a print of it as a thank you, plus driving it over to her house because "oh don't worry about shipping." By the end it was like $40-something an hour if I don't count the prep drawing I threw away. If I DO count it, it's less. And then she tipped me $20 and I almost cried, which, in fairness, might have been the sleep. The thing that's actually bugging me isn't the $260. It's that I quoted it off the top of my head in a two-second text. Didn't look at anything. Didn't think about size or complexity or the part where a house has like nine hundred windows. Just said a number because saying a bigger number felt rude. Meanwhile I've got a 5x7 in the same style I've been charging $85 for since art school, and those take me maybe two and a half hours now, so per hour they're actually not awful. It's the mid-size ones that are quietly eating me alive. Which I only figured out because I wrote every job down in a notebook this month like a responsible adult, and the notebook is mean. Anyway I think my 11x14 needs to be $400 and I've been sitting on that number for a week like it's a live grenade. Saying it out loud here so it stops being just mine. Nobody warned me that the hard part of full time isn't the painting.

I spent three weeks fighting this gouache piece of my apartment window in the rain, I genuinely could not stand it the entire time, kept almost scraping it off the paper and starting over. Posted the finished thing mostly out of spite and exhaustion. It's the most saved piece on my site this month and two people have asked about prints and one person messaged about commissioning something similar. Meanwhile the window painting I actually love, the one I finished and immediately wanted to frame myself, sits there with like 40 likes lol. I know the whole "the work you hate is the work they love" thing is basically a cliche at this point but it still gets me every time. I have no idea what makes one land and the other flop. Is it the colors? The mood? The fact that it's messier and more honest? I genuinely can't reverse engineer it, I'm just out here throwing paint and praying. Anyone else have a piece they lowkey despise that the audience latched onto?

So I finally worked up the nerve to walk into a gallery in my neighborhood, not the fancy one, a small one that shows local painters, and the owner was actually nice?? She looked at my phone photos for like ten minutes and said "send me a proper email with your site and some prices." That was nine days ago. I still haven't sent it because I keep rewriting the email and I'm scared the window already closed. Someone please tell me the window is not nine days. And more importantly, what's the etiquette here? Do you follow up in a week? Two? Do you wait for them to reach out first? Does it EVER matter if you're slow, or am I just inventing a clock that doesn't exist? My mom says send it today and stop being weird about it which is probably correct but I want to hear what actually worked for you. Did anyone here get a yes from a slow follow-up? Did anyone lose one by dragging their feet? Tell me I'm not the only one who's sat on an email like this. (also hi, first time posting in here, I'm Dani, watercolor and gouache, been full time about 8 months and still learning all the rules nobody tells you)

So I quoted a piece last week, 16x20, four figures, real time on it, and the person goes "that feels steep for watercolor, no?" and I just sat there typing and deleting for like ten minutes. Because here's the thing, that's the exact sentence watercolor gets. Gouache never gets it. Oil never gets it. But watercolor is "just" the medium that comes in a little pan for kids. Which is insane because watercolor is the least forgiving thing I do. There is no covering up. No scraping back to a happy accident. You make one wrong wash at hour nine and you're starting the whole sheet over. I have a stack of failures in my closet that would make you cry. I didn't say any of that, obviously. I wrote something very polite about materials and process and how many hours it takes and how the paper alone is like $40 a sheet before I even touch it. And you know what, they said yes?? They just wanted to understand it. Which I guess is the actual lesson and I hate that the lesson is "explain yourself more." But also I'm kind of tired of explaining myself more. Does anyone else get the "feels steep" thing and how do you answer it without turning into a lecture. Because I keep doing the lecture and then apologizing for the lecture and then giving a discount, haha. The discount is the real problem. I know the discount is the real problem. 🙃

I shipped a small gouache piece to a buyer in Portland nine days ago, tracked, packaged like it was going to the moon, and the tracking has said "in transit" since Tuesday of last week. Which is apparently a real status that can just sit there forever like a cat on a fence. The thing is, it wasn't even an expensive one. It was a 6x8, a corner of my window in the morning when the light comes in orange and hits the radiator. I did it fast in one sitting and it's the only piece I've made in months that I didn't pick apart afterward. Sold it for basically nothing because I wanted it to go somewhere. Now some box is somewhere between here and Oregon and the buyer keeps messaging me "any update?" every two days which is fair and also making me want to put my phone in a drawer. I spent $14 on extra padding at the UPS store. $14! For a box that is now a ghost. Anyway I'm going to go repaint the radiator out of spite. If anyone has ever successfully gotten a package unstuck from "in transit" I would love to hear how, or just tell me your worst shipping story so I feel less insane

ok so this is going to sound small but it's not small to me: I paid September's rent with money from paintings. all of it. not half, not "mostly, plus tips" like the last few months. eight months after walking out of the café and I sat on my kitchen floor doing the math twice because I was sure I'd messed up a number somewhere. nope. it was really there. what got me there is stupid and unglamorous. I sold three small gouache pieces at the market two weekends ago, all like 5x7, nothing precious, and then a woman I've never met messaged me about a commission for her sister's kitchen, and between those two things it just... added up. plus I stopped undercharging by 60 dollars on every piece out of pure nervousness, which honestly did most of the work. I know it's not stable, I know October could be nothing, I'm not naive about it. but for one month the thing I do with my hands paid for the roof. my mom cried on the phone and then asked if I was eating. anyway if you're in the messy middle of this, the month where it finally covers it does happen and it feels way better than I expected.

ok so this is embarrassing but I sold a piece today and I'm pretty sure I undersold it by a lot. my mom's friend saw my window painting on facebook (the one I've done like six times now, the light comes through the blinds at this one angle around 4pm and I keep chasing it) and she messaged me asking if it was for sale. and I said yes without thinking and she asked how much and I literally typed "$40" and hit send before my brain caught up. it's 11x14 on 300lb cold press, that's like a whole sheet, and I sat with that wash for two hours waiting to see if the blue would do the thing. the thing is I know it's wrong, I'm full time now, I quit the café in March and I have rent, but the second someone actually wants to PAY me for the thing I make my whole body is like "oh no it's not that good, take whatever, just be nice about it." I did it at my first market too, sold a little gouache study for $15 because the guy went "oh nice" and I got nervous. my partner says I should make a price list and just send it and not type in the moment. which is smart. but also the moment is where I live apparently haha. idk, does anyone else have a number they're weirdly afraid to say out loud? bc I'll say the price of a coffee without flinching but the second it's my own work I turn into a golden retriever.

there is a certain point in the afternoon when the light through my one window dies and everything on the table turns the same muddy grey. it happens around 3:40 right now. i don't turn the overhead light on. i just keep working in the murk, and honestly some of my best marks get made in that half hour, when i can't actually tell what color i'm dipping into. today i cut up an old gas bill from my brother's apartment. it was in a box of his paperwork that i've been dragging between apartments for six years, opening and closing, never doing anything with. the paper had gone that soft yellow. i tore it into strips and laid it down wet, and the ink bled, and now there's this faint "AMOUNT DUE: 84.11" ghosted under a wash of burnt umber. i don't know if that's good or ghoulish. i have never fully decided. the thing i actually wanted to say: i have a rule that i don't clean the studio on days i make something. so there is a stack of cups by the sink, dried gouache on the floor, and a jacket of his hanging on the back of the door that now permanently smells like fixative and varnish. i wore it last week because it was cold and i haven't washed it since and i don't think i'm going to. half of the work is just refusing to put things away.

ok so this happened tuesday and I'm still weirdly annoyed about it. There's this watercolorist I've followed since like 2019, I have her book, I've basically studied her washes. She reposted one of my gouache pieces to her story. I sat there refreshing like a maniac. 40 new followers in two days, which is more than I usually get in a month, and I was SO sure this was it, this was the breakthrough, I'd finally have to figure out how to do a mailing list properly. Two people emailed me. One of them asked if I could paint a portrait of their dog for $60 because "it's just a small one." The other was a company asking if I'd do a free piece in exchange for exposure. Meanwhile the thing that's actually kept me fed since I quit the café is a 3-person email list (ok slight exaggeration, it's 91 people) where I send a photo of whatever's on the easel and a paragraph about how it's going, and I sell something almost every time. It's ugly and unglamorous and I keep trying to make it prettier than it needs to be. I think I've been chasing the wrong number this whole time and I don't totally know how to stop. Followers feel like a scoreboard. They're not. Anyway if you have a mailing list, what actually goes in it? Because mine is basically a group text at this point and I'm not sure if that's the secret or if I'm just getting lucky with 91 very patient people.

Okay so I'm working on the fourth version of the window piece, the one with the fire escape, and I just made the exact same mistake I made on version two, which is that I stopped to answer a text. My phone buzzed, I put the brush down, I picked my phone up for maybe ninety seconds, and by the time I got back the top wash had already gone past the point where you can lift anything out of it. Watercolor does not care that you were being polite to your mom. The whole upper corner where the light comes through is now this flat dead grey, and I know it's dead because the bottom half, which I did without stopping, is still glowing. Here's the thing I actually want to ask about, and I'm not being cute: how do you all handle the working window on a big flat wash? Because I KNOW the trick is to keep it wet, I learned that in year one of my BFA from a professor who said it like it was obvious, and yet the second something interrupts me my brain decides the paper will wait. I've tried spraying, I've tried doing the whole thing in one held breath, and neither is working. Is the answer just that you don't answer your phone during a wash, like a monk? Because if so I need to hear it from someone who isn't me. Also the grey might be salvageable if I go back in with some white gouache over the top for the glint on the railing. I'm half convinced. I'm also half convinced I'm just going to do it again tomorrow and call it a study.