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Sold a 140x140 oil and cold wax piece to a regular collector for €1,100. Then I saw the invoice from the framer. He'd paid €400 for the frame, plus delivery, plus the wall hanging rig. I did the math on my end afterwards: between the stretcher, the oil, the cold wax, the months of drying time sitting in my studio, and the actual painting hours, my rate came out at around €14 an hour. The frame he chose costs more per square meter than my painting does. I'm not saying the price was wrong. He's passed on two smaller pieces since, he's serious, and €1,100 for a painting that size from a mid-career artist in this country is roughly where the market sits. But there's something slightly absurd about a piece that took me a year of thinking and painting being worth less than the aluminium profile holding it up. The real problem is I'm the one who has to be the one saying the number. The framer never flinches. I do, every time. I keep asking myself what the actual number should be, and the honest answer is I don't want to find out by losing the collectors who made this a living in the first place. That's the trap, and I know it's the trap, and I'm still sitting in it.

priced a commission at what i actually need to make per hour for the first time instead of whatever i thought they'd stomach. did the math in front of them too. "materials plus 28 hours at x." fully expected the haggle. they just said cool and sent the deposit. now i'm annoyed because it means i've been lowballing myself for like three years for no reason and the ceiling was never real, it was in my head. classic. idk if this is marketing advice or a confession. i think it's both. if you're freelance stop pricing like you're apologizing for existing. the worst they can do is say no and then you're no worse off than when you didn't ask.

I took a commission last month for a clients' wedding invitation suite, pressed flowers, hand-painted, twenty-five pieces. They wanted original watercolor originals, not prints. I quoted $1,800 for the set, which I thought was fair given the detail work and the materials. I sat down yesterday and actually tracked the hours. Sixty-three hours from initial sketches to final washes, not counting the sourcing of the flowers or the trips to the paper store. That comes to roughly $28.50 an hour. Less than I made as a graduate teaching assistant in 2003. The work is beautiful. The client is thrilled. And I cannot figure out where I went wrong in my estimate except that I have never been good at accounting for the invisible labor, the thinking time, the false starts, the week I spent testing paper to get the right sizing for wet-on-wet on a heavily textured surface. I charged for the painting. I forgot to charge for everything that makes the painting possible. I raised my studio rate by 15 percent this morning. It still feels like I'm guessing.

I did the arithmetic properly last month for the first time in years. Not a guess, a real column of numbers. Three weeks on a half-length figure. Not three weeks of painting, three weeks of everything: the drawing, the underpainting, the scraping back, the four days where I sat in front of it and moved almost nothing. Divide the price by the hours and it came to 14 euros an hour. My daughter earns more than that at a café in the Croix-Rousse and she comes home smelling of coffee instead of lead white. The problem is I still quote by the canvas. A 50 figure is 1,800, a 30 is 900, and that grid was set in about 2011 by a version of me who could work faster and had no idea what her materials actually cost. A tube of good cadmium is 40 euros now. I am not going to sit down and reprice the whole grid, because then I have to tell people the new numbers and I already know what two of them will say. So I raised one thing instead. Half-length, 2,000. Told a new client on Tuesday, she said "d'accord" and asked about the frame. No drama at all. I have been slightly annoyed about this for two days, which is my own fault, not hers. The old clients still get the old price until they ask.

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.

A gallery in Munich took a big 180 by 140 oil and cold wax piece in June. Sold it last week for €9,800, which is a good number for me, I'm not complaining. But I got curious last night and added up the actual studio hours. Not the staring at the wall hours, the hands-on hours, plus prep and varnishing and the two days I spent just getting the surface right. It came out to about €41 an hour. And that's not counting the years behind it, the materials, the studio rent, the gallery's cut which was already off the top. €41 an hour is what a plumber charges in this country and he doesn't have to paint over the work and start again. I don't know what the point is exactly. I think it's that nobody prices the thinking hours. You can't invoice for the Tuesday you just sat with it and didn't touch it, but that Tuesday is in the painting. The gallery would laugh at me if I tried to build that into the price. So we all quietly eat it and pretend the canvas took two weeks. Not going to raise the prices. The market here holds what it holds. Just wanted the number on the table once.

I finally raised my rate after almost a year of being stuck. I paint pet portraits in watercolor (I know, I know, but people really love their dogs) and I was charging €90 for an 8x10. Did the math on one and it was about 14 euros an hour after materials and the days I spent redoing the eyes. Embarrassing. So I went up to €125 and I was SICK about it for a week. Convinced nobody would book. The first person to take me up on it was a repeat client, the one who commissions a portrait every time her dog does something cute, the person I was literally scared to lose. She didn't even blink. Just sent a reference photo. And now I'm annoyed at myself for how long I sat at a number I secretly knew was too low. Fear of pricing yourself out is so loud and the actual evidence was right there the whole time. Anyone else got one of those "I waited way too long to raise it" moments?

Anyone here calculate Hourly/Daily rate? What is the Average Hourly rate for Murals?

Friend of a friend asked me to make something for their new apartment. She's a massage therapist so we agreed on a trade, a piece for a few sessions. Seemed fair at the time. Piece took me about 30 hours all in. She's given me two sessions so far, maybe three hours total. Worth maybe $250 if you're being generous. I don't know what my own hourly rate is but I know 30 hours isn't $250. The weird thing is I don't feel mad about it. I think because it wasn't cash it didn't feel real. Like play money. But I literally traded real time and materials for... a back rub. A good back rub, but still. I told myself I'd never do trades again after this. But I'd probably say yes again if someone offered something I actually wanted. Not sure what that says about me.

Just finished the final invoice for that large mixed-media piece. Spent 3 weeks on it, materials were way more than I budgeted (who knew salvaged lace would get so pricey?), and my hourly rate worked out to something like $8 an hour. I’m almost afraid to raise my prices, but this isn’t sustainable. Feels like I'm stealing from myself.

A friend from years ago asked me to paint her daughter's portrait for her 18th. I said yes at €600, already half what I'd charge a stranger for a 50x60cm oil on linen. She's a friend, fine. Then the emails started. "Could you do it from these five photos instead?" "Actually she's wearing a different dress now, can you change the colour?" "Her hair is shorter than that photo shows." "My mother thinks the background should be lighter." I repainted the face from new reference, adjusted the dress twice, scraped and repainted the background. All told I probably spent close to 25 hours on a painting that should have taken maybe 12. At my usual hourly rate for commissioned work that comes out to about €24 an hour. My assistant, who stretches canvases, makes €16. So I earned roughly the same as the person who stretches my canvases, for a job that required twenty years of training. The friend was happy. The daughter cried when she saw it. Beautiful moment. I don't regret it exactly. But I sat down afterwards and did the math and realised I'd basically given her a €1,200 painting plus a free workshop in how to manage an artist. Never again without a contract that says: one reference, one revision, anything beyond that is a new fee. Curious if anyone else has a number attached to the "learning experience" of a commission that ran away from you.

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?

After years of being afraid of it, I raised my hourly rate from €45 to €65 at the beginning of this year. Not a dramatic jump. Reasonable for someone with my training and experience. I lost three regular clients in the first month. One of them told me I was "becoming expensive for a local painter." The other two just went quiet. And you know what? The commissions I've taken since then have been better. More interesting subjects, less revision demand, people who actually understand what they're asking for when they say "can you make the light softer." The clients who left were the ones who saw me as a service provider, not a painter. They wanted cheap, they got what they wanted somewhere else. I still feel a little guilty about the one who was a friend of a friend. But I did the math and I was earning less per hour than my daughter makes babysitting. That's not sustainable. That's not even dignified. If you raise your prices and nobody leaves, you probably didn't raise them enough. That's what my old teacher told me and I thought it was cynical. Now I think it's just true.

I've been selling small etchings for €180 since 2021. Same size, same paper, same amount of work. Three years of the same number while my studio rent in Berlin went up twice and the price of copper plates nearly doubled. Last month I finally raised them to €240. Not a huge jump. Still probably too low for the time that goes in. But I did it. Then a former professor, someone whose opinion I actually respect, saw the new price list and said, in that careful tone, that the pricing was "ambitious." Asked if I was worried about "pricing myself out" of the market. The market being what, exactly? The market of people who think art should cost as much as a nice dinner? I didn't say what I wanted to say, which is that I know etchers in London charging £400 for a similar plate and nobody calls that ambitious. I just said I'd think about it. Now I'm sitting here wondering if I should have raised them more, or if I'm actually wrong. The math says €240 is still a bad hourly rate when you add up drawing time, plate prep, printing, editioning. But the voice of that professor is stuck in my head.

Sold a piece last month. 4 feet tall, welded steel plate, took me about 90 hours counting design and grinding and the finish. I charged $3,800. Buyer was happy. I should be happy. But I broke it down after. Material was $620 in steel and welding gas. Gallery takes 40%. So I cleared about $1,660 for those 90 hours. Thats $18.44 an hour before taxes. I know guys who frame houses for $35 an hour cash. My nephew does HVAC and clears six figures. I'm not saying I want to do HVAC. But I've been at this 30 years and I still cant figure out how to charge what the work is actually worth without pricing myself out of the market. The gallery tells me $3,800 is already pushing it for a sculptor nobody's heard of outside the region. I look at that hourly rate and it feels like I'm working backwards.

omg you guys i just sent over a quote for a huge mural commission, like WAY bigger than anything i've done before, and i'm sitting here doing the math again and again and honestly my brain is fried. i did the hourly rate calculation i always use, plus material costs which were INSANE for this much paint, but then i added like a 10% 'stress tax' because the thought of executing this on-site is making me sweat. i think i priced it fairly for the scope and my time, but what if they balk? what if they think i'm totally out of my mind? i'm so used to quoting smaller pieces that this feels like a whole new universe. has anyone else ever felt this level of sheer terror after hitting 'send' on a big quote?

So my mom's friend asked me to paint her late dog from a photo. I said yes because of course I did, and I quoted $180 which I thought was reasonable for a friends-and-family thing. It took me 14 hours. That's like $12.85 an hour before materials, and I used good paper and maybe $30 of paint so really I paid for the privilege. Worst part is she keeps telling people I was "so sweet" to do it for her. Sweet. Like I did them a favor instead of doing my actual job. And now two of her friends have asked about portraits of their dogs and I have no idea what to charge because I set the bar at "sweet girl who paints dogs cheap." I know people here do the full "everyone deserves art" thing and I genuinely believe art should be accessible, but I'm one month into full time and I did the math on my real hourly rate across all my work this month and it's depressing. I don't know how to tell this woman I love that the next dog portrait is $350 minimum without sounding like I got greedy. Anyone else stuck in the friends-and-family trap? How did you get out without burning the relationship?

Painted a 120x150 for an old friend's anniversary two years back. She told me, tearfully, she couldn't afford my gallery price and I said of course, don't worry, we'll find something. Named €600, which was about a third of what that size goes for. She spread the word, quietly, and for a year after that I got three more people "from her circle" who all wanted the same deal. Each one I had to find a way to say no to without making her look bad. The painting itself was good, actually maybe the best of that stretch, and part of me still resents it. Not her. Me. I set the number and I treated my own time like it was worth nothing when a friend was on the other end of it. I've started telling younger painters in the academy a simple rule I wish someone had given me: the discount should come out of your profit, not your hourly rate. Figure out your real number first, then decide how much of it you can afford to give away. If you can't afford to give it all away, you can't afford to give it at all. I know it sounds ungenerous. It's actually the only way I stayed generous at all.

There's a hotel in the old town here, small one, maybe fifteen rooms, family-run. The owner saw my work at a group show and asked if I'd do a large piece for their lobby, a view of the Saône at dusk, something calm. I said yes before I'd even thought about money. When we sat down to talk, he told me honestly he had almost no budget. The hotel barely survived COVID, they're still digging out. I said fine, I'll do it, just cover my materials. He looked relieved and ashamed at the same time. So I painted a 120x80 for the cost of oil and linen. About €280. The painting took me maybe sixty hours. I don't need to do the math again, I already did it and it's stupid. But here's the thing, it's in a place where people sit and look at it every morning over breakfast. The light in that lobby at certain hours is actually beautiful and the painting sits in it the way I hoped. I see it sometimes when I walk past. I don't regret it. I'm not saying this is a sustainable strategy. But a painting that lives well somewhere, even for nothing, I don't know. Sometimes that matters more than the hourly rate. And then sometimes I think I'm just telling myself that because I'm bad at business. Anyone else done a free or nearly-free piece that you still don't feel bad about?

The plate itself is not the difficulty. It is a flowering stem of Pulmonaria officinalis, seven or eight blossoms in different stages, and the calyces are maddening because the hairs catch the light and you cannot fake them with a wash. Four weeks at the pace this needs is four weeks where not much else gets done. I said 2,400 euros. Then I heard myself explain, at some length, that this included the colour study and the vellum and that I do not charge extra for revisions within reason. As though the figure needed defending in court. She had not questioned it. She said yes before I had finished the sentence. I have been turning this over all evening. The apologising is the problem, not the number. If I am going to name a price I should name it and stop, the way one puts down a brush. I am not sure I know how to do that yet, but I know the flinching costs me something even when the client pays. What I cannot decide is whether 2,400 for four weeks is generous to her or to me. I have done the arithmetic on hours and it is respectable, but a plate like this one will still be on a wall in fifty years and my hourly rate will not be the thing anyone remembers.