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my mom keeps taking photos of my paintings to her church fundraiser and telling people they can "have one for a donation" and i found out because one of her friends texted me asking if i could do a custom piece for her grandkid's nursery for $40. FORTY. DOLLARS. for a custom watercolor portrait of a toddler. that's like a week of work and $60 in materials if i do it right. i love my mom so much but she has zero concept of what this costs and every time i try to explain she goes "oh honey, it's just for fun, it gets your name out there!" and honestly i think she genuinely believes exposure is a currency. which like. it isn't. i paid $400 for my last batch of paper alone. i told her today that if anyone asks at the bake sale she should tell them my prices start at $150 and she got all quiet and said "well that feels steep for people at church" and i almost lost it. i love her. she means so well. but i cannot keep getting "$40 for a portrait" texts from strangers who think i'm a hobbyist because my own mother is out here pricing me like a lemonade stand. how do you tell your mom she's undercutting your entire livelihood without making her cry. i am losing my mind.

I've been trying to paint that scratched-up yellow Formica table my mom had in the 90s for like three years now. The one where I did homework and she paid bills and we ate cereal at 10pm because nobody felt like cooking. Every attempt came out stiff or too sentimental. Last night I just went at it loose, no sketching, just blocked in the yellow and let the scratches happen with a dry brush. Painted the little chip by the corner where my brother threw a toy truck. Put a salt shaker on it because she always left one out. And it's just. Right. My husband came in and said "that's your mom's kitchen" without me telling him what it was. I don't know why that hit me so hard. Maybe because I feel like I finally painted something only I could paint. Anyway just wanted to share with people who get it. 🥲

Ok so back in maybe March my mom's friend Carol asked if I'd do a little watercolor of her parents' old farmhouse, the one they sold in like 2004, and I said sure thinking it'd take me a weekend. It took eleven days. Not because it was hard exactly but because I kept redoing the roof shingles and then the tree line behind it and then the sky, which I painted four separate times and none of them were right and one of them was genuinely bad. I charged her $150. I don't even know why, she didn't ask for a discount, I just heard myself say it out loud on the phone and then couldn't walk it back. Eleven days. My Arches paper alone is like $6 a sheet and I went through five because of the sky situation. And the thing is she cried when I gave it to her, like actually cried at her kitchen table, so part of me is like, ok, that's worth something, that's not nothing. But I also sat in my car afterward doing the math on my phone and felt sick. I'm not even asking what I should have charged, I know what I should have charged. I think I'm asking how you stop doing this. Because I have another one of these coming, my aunt already asked, and I can feel myself about to say a number that's too low just to make the silence stop.

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.

Okay so I took a commission to paint a memorial portrait and the whole week leading up to it I was like... this is a real person's actual loved one, what if I ruin the one thing they wanted to keep. I've done a million washes and landscapes and that same stupid window, but a face has to actually look like someone. That's a different kind of pressure. But I got the photos and it was this older man who apparently kept every bird feeder in his neighborhood full, and his daughter wrote me the sweetest email about him and I just... cried in my studio for a minute and then got to work. I did the underdrawing three times before the proportions felt right. Started the wash at like 10pm on a Tuesday and didn't look up until 3am. His eyes took me four attempts. The daughter wanted him mid-laugh and I must have painted and scraped that mouth area so many times the paper started to complain. It dried last night and I stood there just staring at it for a really long time. It's him. It's actually him, I got the laugh right. I sent her the photo and she said her mom cried, and then I cried again, and honestly I think this is the most scared I've ever been while working and also the most right it's ever felt. I've been so worried that going full-time meant I'd end up just grinding out work I don't care about. But this one mattered. That's the whole point right??

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?

I love my mom so much, she's my biggest cheerleader, she framed my first shitty little landscape and hung it in the kitchen for years. But she called me today and was like "oh my friend Linda just bought this beige couch and I told her you could paint her something nice to go over it, nothing too weird, you know, something with flowers maybe?" And I just. Stood there holding my phone. Because first of all I haven't painted a floral in two years and I don't want to and second of all the thing I'm actually working on right now is this huge moody piece of my partner's back in low grey light and it's the best thing I've ever done and nobody in my family has seen it because they don't really look at my work they just want me to make things that match their beige couch. I said "I'll think about it" and I won't and now I feel guilty and also annoyed and also like a snob. Why is it so hard for people to understand that "you're so talented, you should paint me something!" is not actually a compliment?? It's like being asked to write a poem for someone's birthday party theme. I don't paint beige couch flowers Linda I'm sorry.

Okay so I'm on the phone with my mom tonight, right, and she asks what I did today. And I genuinely could not give her a straight answer. Because the honest version is: I spent four hours on one 4x6 inch study of the same corner of my bedroom, repainted the shadow behind the radiator like six times, ate a sandwich standing up while staring at it, and then scraped it all off and started over. And I said "painted" and she said "for eight hours?!" and I heard the pause where she's doing the math on rent and groceries. And I love her so much but man. How do you explain to someone that a wash you'll never sell took four hours and that time wasn't wasted? That the whole afternoon was just my hand learning how wet to make the paper so a shadow sits right. Like nobody clocks the hours that go into the invisible stuff. The actual painting is 20 minutes. The other 7 hours and 40 minutes is just... convincing the paint to do what I already saw in my head. Anyway I'm not mad at her, I'm mad that I couldn't say it in a way that didn't sound like "I stared at a wet piece of paper for eight hours." Cause honestly. That's also kind of what it is. 😭 Anyone else have the "so what did you DO today" conversation with a family member and just absolutely whiff it?

friend from years back asked for a piece for her mom's 70th. i gave her the friends and family rate without even being asked, which was $350 for something that took me about two weeks of evenings. she was happy, said it was perfect, her mom cried. i did the math later, just out of spite toward myself. materials were maybe 60. so $290 for something like 40 hours of actual work. $7.25 an hour. that's minimum wage where i grew up. the thing is, she would have paid my real rate. i know that. she never even blinked at the 350. and i still haven't told her because now it's weird, and the piece is hanging on her mom's wall and i can't look at it for what i actually should have charged. i keep doing this. i set the price in my head based on what i think i'm worth, not what the work is. and then i resent it quietly for months instead of just saying the number out loud. anyone else build the resentment in first and the courage second?

I've been fighting this piece since March. Charcoal on paper, 40x60, my mother at 29, which is two years younger than I am now. I used a photo I hadn't looked at in probably a decade, one where she's laughing with her whole face and you can't tell anything was wrong yet. Drew it four times. Burned the second one, actually put it in the fire pit out back, which felt dramatic and then felt correct. The thing that finally did it was stopping trying to make her look like the photo and just drawing the mouth from memory. Her real mouth, the one she got when she was tired. Not the smile. I cried a little, which is embarrassing to type but there it is. It's hanging now. Cheap black frame from the craft store, nothing fancy. And every night I get up around 3 to pee and walk right past her face in the dark and I still don't know if it's good. But it's UP. It's on a wall, in my house, where people will see it. Some work you make to show people and some work you make to put something down. This one was the second kind and I'm only now figuring out that counts as a win too.

honestly this is such a stupid thing to be bothered by but we were on the phone last night, she's asking how the work is going, and then she goes "so what do you actually do all day though? like hour by hour" and I just. sat there. because the answer is I spent four hours on monday watching a single wash dry and re-doing it three times because the first two went chalky on me, and then I ate lunch standing up, and then I stared at the same window (the one from my apartment, the one I keep painting) and decided the light was wrong and did nothing for the rest of the afternoon. that IS the job. and I couldn't say that to her because it sounds like nothing!! it sounds like I'm lying to her!! so I said "a lot of prep and color mixing" which is technically true and also a total dodge. the thing is she's not even being mean, she genuinely wants to understand, she's just got a whole lifetime of "work = you go somewhere and someone tells you what to do" and I quit the café eight months ago and I think she's still quietly worried, and every time I fumble the answer I'm basically confirming the worry. anyway. called her back and explained the wash thing properly and she said "oh, like waiting for paint to dry, that's actually kind of nice" and I almost cried. she gets it more than I gave her credit for.

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.

found a roll of undeveloped film at the bottom of a drawer my mom gave me. finally got it developed. 24 frames, all trips to the same relatives' house, xmas 1987. nobody in a single photo is smiling. not one. my dad took them all and he isn't in any of them. i keep going back to the one of my mom holding a casserole dish and she looks like she's about to drop it on someone's head. i don't know what i expected. some part of me hoped for something warm in there. instead it's just these people in a dim living room all waiting for it to be over. i've been staring at one frame for two days trying to decide if i can use it. the light is actually good, which makes it worse somehow. anyone else ever dig up old photos and find out the past was exactly as grim as you remembered? sometimes i think i make work just to argue with it.

I finally sent the email I'd been drafting for like three weeks. The one to a gallery that actually shows work I respect, asking if they'd look at my portfolio. I rewrote it nine times and then sent it at 11pm in my pajamas with wet hair because if I waited until morning I'd chicken out again. And then I sat there staring at the sent folder like... okay so now what. Cried a little bit. Called my mom. She said "what's the worst they can say, no?" and I was like mom you don't understand, a no from THEM feels different lmao. I know it's such a tiny step, they probably won't even reply. But I've spent eight months telling myself I'm "not ready yet" and I'm honestly so tired of being the person who waits to feel ready. The watercolors are good. I know they're good. I just needed to let someone else have the chance to say so. Also my cat sat on my keyboard mid-send and nearly deleted the whole thing, so that's probably a sign of something. Anyway. If you're also sitting on an email you're terrified to send, send it. Worst case you're exactly where you are now, just one braver step ahead.

So I painted these two pet portraits, same size, same level of detail, both head-and-shoulders of someone's dog. A stranger commissioned me and I charged $150 and felt nervous about it. Then a friend from college asked me to do her cat and I immediately went "oh for you, $50" and then I painted the cat and it actually came out better than the stranger one. So my friend got the better painting for a third of the price and I keep thinking about that. Like I know we all do the friends and family discount thing and it's fine but it bothers me that my work isn't the same price regardless of who's asking. Or maybe it should be different because the relationship is different? My mom says I'm overthinking it because the friend will tell people and send me more work but also my mom thinks I should charge more for everything so I don't even know anymore. I guess I'm wondering where the line is between being generous with people you love and just devaluing your own time because you feel awkward asking for money from someone you actually know.

okay so there's this window in my apartment that gets this specific soft afternoon light around 3pm and I've been trying to catch it for like... months now. This month alone I've done 14 studies of it. 14. Same window, same view of the neighbor's slightly sad little balcony, different light every time. My partner thinks I've lost it. Maybe I have. But here's the thing – every single time I think I've figured out how to paint that quality of light, the next day it's different and I realize I was wrong. The color temperature shifts, or there's a haze, or the whole thing goes golden for like twenty minutes before it's gone. Watercolor is SO unforgiving about this because you can't just paint over it, you have to get it right while it's wet or you lose it forever. And I keep losing it. My mom called yesterday and asked if I'd sold any of them yet and I was like Mom I can't sell them they're all failures. She didn't get it. But I think there's something in the repetition, you know? Like each one teaches me something the last one couldn't. I'm not chasing a perfect painting, I'm chasing understanding how light actually works. Anyway I laid them all out on the floor last night to compare and honestly it's kind of beautiful seeing them together even if none of them are The One. Might keep going until I run out of paper or winter comes and the light changes completely. Then I guess I'll start over.

ok so the commission I've been excited about all month, the one where the woman found me through a friend of my mom's and said she loved the window paintings and wanted one of HER kitchen window, which, honestly, that's the nicest thing anyone has ever asked me to do, she wanted a 12x16 of her kitchen window, and I quoted her $420. and I keep doing the math on it in the shower. paper and gouache and the cold press block and the fact that I'll paint this window a minimum of three times before I get the light right, and I'm not fast, I don't want to be fast, that's the whole point of the medium, so realistically it's like 14 hours plus the matting plus the shipping tube and I'm at what, $23 an hour before the cost of anything I burned through getting it wrong. my partner said "so raise it" like that was a thing you could just DO. two days ago I quoted it. you can't just email someone and go hi actually, ignore my number, here's a bigger one. or can you?? has anyone done that and lived?? because I've heard you can and every time I consider it I hear my mom's voice saying well they're being so nice about it and I fold immediately. the thing is I KNOW my hourly is garbage, I did the math, I did it twice. but knowing it is somehow completely disconnected from being able to say a bigger number out loud to a person who's being nice to me. I can say $420 out loud fine. it rolls right out. it's the next number that gets stuck. anyway it's 11pm and I'm going to go paint her window badly for the third time, which is apparently what $420 buys. 🙂

ok so I finally did the thing where you actually track your hours on a commission and I want to scream. Wedding gift commission, a watercolor of their venue. Charged €220. Three weeks of work but I kept telling myself "oh it's fine I'm just doing the sketch today" and then "the sketch took all day but the painting will be quicker now" and then the painting took five separate days because I repainted the sky three times, once because the bride's mom asked if I could "make it look more golden hour" and I sat there doing it for free. Did the math last night. €220 divided by 46 hours because I ACTUALLY counted. That's €4.78 an hour. My local coffee shop pays €13. The thing is I loved painting it. The venue had this insane wisteria over the arch and I got the light right on the third try and the bride cried when she picked it up, actual tears, and her mom hugged me. And I still feel insane for pricing it at €220 when I know exactly what it cost me. Like I'm running a business where I pay myself less than minimum wage to make people cry in a good way. I'm raising my next one to €380 and I'm terrified nobody will say yes. The fear of pricing myself out is worse than the math, somehow. Is everyone just... faking it until the numbers stop feeling embarrassing??

so i get my Arches block out, right, the 140lb cold press, the good one, the one i ration, and i go to paint this window study i've done like nine times now, and the sizing is just... wrong. like the wash sits on top of the paper and beads up instead of sinking in. i'm sitting there tilting the board like i'm panning for gold and the whole sky i just laid down runs off the edge onto my table. turns out it's a bad batch. i googled it at 11pm like a crazy person and other people are saying the same thing about this run. $40 a block and it's basically coated in something. i've been fighting it for three days thinking i forgot how to paint. i genuinely started questioning my whole degree. my BFA. four years. defeated by a sheet of paper. and the worst part is i can't even be mad at myself which is my favorite hobby. i have to be mad at a factory. anyway i've got two sheets of Fabriano left and if the light holds i'm redoing the sky tonight. mom says return it but i bought it in like March so the receipt is a ghost. if anyone else got a bad block from that batch tell me i'm not insane

I counted today while I was cleaning out my flat files and it's 47. Same window, same apartment, I've lived here three years and I just never get tired of the way the light hits that one corner of the frame around 4pm in winter. Sometimes it's the whole window, sometimes just the sill, sometimes it's basically abstract and you'd never know what it is until I tell you. My mom called me while I was counting and she laughed and said "honey that's not a series, that's a problem" and honestly she might be right. But there's something about coming back to the same shape over and over that's the most honest painting I do. No pressure to be interesting, just me and the same damn window and what the light is doing today. I'm gonna send her a photo of all 47 taped up on the floor and see what she says. Part of me wants to keep going until it's 100. Part of me thinks that's insane. Anyone else have the one subject they just never quit?