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Years ago, before I had a real website or knew what I was doing with pricing, I ran a little workshop out of my studio. Just a few hours, materials included, you go home with a small piece. I charged €35 because I was scared to ask for more and it covered the tile and the wine. A tourist from Australia came, loved it, posted about it. Next thing I know it's on some blog. Fine. But then her friend emails me asking if I can do a private session for four people at the same price. I said yes because I'm an idiot who hadn't learned to say "that was a group rate." Now eight years later I sometimes still get people who found that old blog post and expect the €35 price. I've raised it to €65 and they look at me like I'm trying to sell them a car. I should have changed the name of the workshop or something. Instead I just have to be the bad guy every time someone shows up with a screenshot from 2016.

I've been spending so much time on short-form video lately, mainly Reels for Instagram. But I see so many people having huge success on YouTube Shorts and I'm wondering if I should pivot? It feels like a totally different beast. The content that does okay on Reels feels too polished for Shorts sometimes, if that makes sense? Has anyone found a good strategy for both, or do you focus on one platform? My engagement is okay on Reels, but nothing like what I see some people getting on Shorts. Maybe I'm just looking at the wrong creators. It's hard to tell what's real and what's just a lucky spike.

Early in my career a gallery in a small city took my work, I was relieved, I said yes to everything. Then they asked me to paint smaller and charge less. Smaller I could understand, but charging less felt like the wrong message. I said no, we parted ways, and I still think it was the right call. But I've wondered since. Sometimes a lower price gets people in the door and you build from there. Sometimes it just trains people to wait for a discount. Have you had a gallery ask you to change your prices, up or down, and did you do it? Regret it either way?

made a little lidded jar last month, hand-built, glaze came out this weird deep green with these red speckles I didn't plan at all. I was so proud of it I almost didn't list it. Kept it on the studio shelf for two weeks just walking past it. then some stranger on instagram messaged me about it and I panicked and said it wasn't for sale. told myself it was a "study piece" which was a lie, it was just mine. anyway she asked again like a week later, real nice about it, and I caved. packed it myself, bubble wrap and all, wrote a stupid little note in spanish that she'll probably google. it left yesterday. still feeling weird about it. but also it's the first time the money felt like a yes and not a compromise. like okay, this is real, people want the thing my hands made. my abuela would've cried. I just texted her a photo of the empty shelf spot instead. she sent back a string of heart emojis and "mi artista." that's it. just wanted to say it somewhere people get it.

Someone at the group show in Berlin bought the whole first edition of that screenprint I keep saying I'm done with. All thirty. Not one, the lot. The curator asked if I'd consider printing more and I said no, which felt like turning down a favour but I meant it. The whole point of the piece is that it's finite, that the edition closes and the image becomes something only a few people get to hold. If I reprint it, the thing collapses into exactly what it's about. It's a small sale, really, the money barely covers the month. But the idea held. That's the part I keep turning over. I spent years making multiples and feeling like that made the work lesser, not serious. And now the scarcity is the work. Shouldn't have taken me this long to see my own medium. Anyway. Thirty prints out in the world with my signature and a number. Feels like releasing birds, honestly.

Okay so I finally caved and paid $60 for a feature from one of those big art accounts that posts "emerging artists" to their 50k followers. Figured it'd be my big break you know, get some eyes on my stuff that aren't just my mom and the same 12 people who like everything I post. The post did get decent likes. My follower count went up maybe 40 people, and I got three follows from accounts that look suspiciously like the same kind of account. And zero actual inquiries about my work. ZERO. Not even a "do you do commissions" message. I spent $60 to get an audience of people who apparently scroll past art the way I scroll past ads. Meanwhile last week I posted a video of me just cutting paper for a frame and that got more actual comments and DMs than anything in months. Like literally cutting paper. Me being mildly annoyed at a crooked mat knife. I'm not saying shoutouts never work for anyone, clearly they do for some people, but I think I finally get that followers aren't the same as people who buy things. The folks who buy my stuff are the ones who've been hanging around my tiny account watching me paint the same window for three months. They feel like they know me. A stranger seeing my work in a feed of 30 other artists is not that. Anyway I'm $60 lighter and slightly humbled. Anyone else had a paid promo flop or is it just me 😭

Myself Ramesh, Mithila painter from Madhubani. All my life I sold through the cooperative or when someone came to the house. Tourists sometimes, or people from the city who heard about the village where the painting women are. My son, he is in Patna for his job, he took photos of maybe eight of my pieces, a fish with the lotus, a Durga, two peacocks, some others. He put them on WhatsApp status and also in some groups he is in. I did not think much of it. Now in the last month I have sent six paintings by courier. To Delhi. To Bangalore. To one address in Dubai even, a man whose mother is from Darbhanga originally and he wanted something for his wall. These people never touched the paper, never saw the pigment. They saw a phone photo and they trusted it. This is strange to me. In my market, the buyer wants to see the line work up close, wants to know the colour is natural, wants to hold it. But my son says this is how it works now. I am grateful, truly, but also I am thinking, what if the photo does not show the real thing? I use geru and rice paste and lamp black, the photo cannot show that. But the buyers are happy when the parcel arrives. I do not understand this new way but I cannot argue with the orders. Anyone else selling traditional craft online and feeling this same confusion?🙂

Every week a gallery or a fellow painter tells me I have to show more of the work in motion. The brush going down, the glazing, the palette. And I get it, people watch that stuff. But there is a reason I stopped filming my hand a few years ago and it's not laziness. When I film myself painting, I paint for the camera. Not consciously. But the hand becomes a performer. The strokes get more theatrical, the pauses disappear, the whole thing becomes a demonstration of painting instead of painting. That's not the same activity. I spent my thirties unlearning performing, I'm not going to spend my fifties picking it back up for a views count. The strange part is the numbers agree with me. My studio shots, the finished work, even the messy shelf where I keep my mediums, those posts do fine. Steady. Modest. The kind of engagement that actually brought me two commissions this year. And when I did post a reel a few months ago, close on the palette, the reach was higher and the inquiries were zero. People want to watch the paint move, they don't want to buy the painting. That tells me something. I'm not saying nobody should show process. Go ahead, it works for plenty of people. I just think some of us are better served by being a bit less available. The mystery of how it gets made used to be part of the value.

I did a craft fair a couple weekends ago and made $64 total, but $40 of it came from two people I stopped being "the seller" with and just talked to like a normal human. One was a woman who asked a technical question about how I get the sky so smooth in acrylics, which turned into a 15 minute conversation about gesso and soft brushes, and she bought two small prints before she left. The other was a guy who told me his mom used to paint and we just stood there talking about her for a while. He bought one. I'm not saying this is some genius insight. But I spent the other five hours half-smiling at people and getting ignored, and the money came out of the two actual conversations. Kind of makes me wonder how much of my online posting is the equivalent of that half-smile at strangers. All these process reels and behind the scenes stuff I do, and it's the one-to-one stuff that actually moves anything. Anyway, back to my day job tomorrow. The fair was fun but I came home with more unsold inventory than I know what to do with lol.

I have this thing with hands. Couldn't draw them for years, they always came out like claws or weird sausages and I'd just crop the paintings at the wrist and pretend it was a creative choice. Ten years of that. Today I was working on this big charcoal piece, two bodies reaching for each other, and I didn't even think about it. Just drew the hands and they were THERE. Like actual hands. I sat back and just stared at them for a while. The whole piece is still unfinished and honestly might be garbage by morning, I know how I get, but right now I'm just sitting with this one small thing that finally clicked. All those bad drawings nobody saw. They were going somewhere. No big point here. Just wanted to say it out loud somewhere people would get it.

Had someone at a craft fair last weekend tell me I'm underselling myself. Very nice lady, bought a small 8x10 of a barn scene, paid $65. Then she stood there and told me I should be charging triple for everything because my work is "gallery quality." And I'm thinking... you just paid $65. You're not wrong exactly, but also you're not the one sitting at a table for six hours hoping to cover the booth fee. I've slowly raised prices over the last couple years. A 16x20 that was $150 in 2022 is $225 now. And I do get that people who love to give pricing advice usually mean well. But the ones who actually pay are the ones who tell me "I love this but can you do $50?" and I have to decide if I want to eat the loss or let it walk. There's a sweet spot somewhere between "paying myself $3 an hour" and "pricing myself into an empty booth." I haven't nailed it. Anyone else feel like pricing is the hardest thing to get right, no matter how good the work gets?

This one still makes me laugh. Years ago, a small gallery in Athens said yes to showing my work, then hit me with a list of costs I'd need to cover, including the wine for opening night. Like I was supposed to hand over cash so people could get drunk looking at my mosaics. I said no, and the show fell through. I know the line between a fair split and getting taken advantage of gets blurry sometimes, especially when you're starting out and just want someone to say yes. So where's the line for you? What's the thing a gallery asked for that made you walk, or should have made you walk?

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. 🥲

had a piece in a group show last spring and someone bought it opening night. first time a stranger paid four figures for something i made. felt like i'd done something wrong so i kept the price low for months after, $200, $350, like i was apologizing for the nerve of charging real money. finally bumped everything up this fall. not stupid high, just... what i'd need to make it worth pulling all-nighters and buying real materials instead of dumpster cardboard. lost about 40% of my instagram followers in the next three weeks. the algorithm punished me or whatever. but the people who stayed? they're the ones who actually buy. or share. or send a note that isn't "love this, wish i could afford it." i'd rather have 300 people who get it than 3,000 who treat my feed like a museum gift shop they're just browsing. still feels weird every time i type a number into an invoice. like i'm about to get caught.

okay so today at the market this guy stood in front of my booth for like ten minutes, studied everything, asked thoughtful questions about the pigment load and the cold press paper, I'm thinking oh nice, a real one. And then he goes "so can I just take a photo of this one instead of buying it? my phone does great in low light" and I laughed because I genuinely thought he was joking. he was not joking. he pulled out his phone and everything. I had to physically step between him and the painting like a bodyguard. That's my job now. I'm a bouncer for a watercolor of a window I've painted forty times. the weird thing is I get wanting the image. I take photos of art at museums all the time. but there was something so... confident about it? like the physical object, the hours of layering washes, the brush I had to rewet and rework because the sky went muddy and I nearly threw it out the window, none of that registered as worth anything. he just wanted the jpeg for free. anyway he left without buying anything and I did NOT cry but I did pack up twenty minutes early and eat a sad croissant. just needed to say it out loud to people who get it.

Posted a finished oil piece last week, proud of it, lighting was good, spent an hour on the caption. 47 likes. Barely a blip. Three days later I threw up a half-finished charcoal study at 2am, no caption, just two words and a period, basically a scrap. 4,000 views and it's still getting saves. People are DMing me about it. I don't know what to do with that. It's not even a good drawing, the hand is wrong, I was tired. But something in the mess of it hit people and the polished thing didn't. I've known this for years and I still chase the wrong thing every single time. The grid wants the raw and I keep giving it the framed. Anyone else find the stuff you almost didn't post is always the stuff that lands?

Middle of a hot afternoon, helmet up, grinding down a seam on a steel piece I'd been fitting for two days. Guy walks into the shop, no knock, just wanders in from the alley. Stands there watching. I figure he's lost or curious, whatever. I keep working. Ten minutes. He watches me run a bead, watches me chip slag, watches me check the fit. Then he says "you know they have machines that do that now. Robots. Could just program it." I said "yeah, and you could just keep walking." He stood there another minute like he expected more of an answer. Then he left. I don't know what gets into people. They see someone doing something with their hands and the first impulse is to tell you why you don't have to. As if the point was efficiency. As if I'm trying to save labor. I'm not trying to save labor. I'm trying to make the thing.

I stopped tagging my exact materials for a while now and the engagement went up. Not a lot, but noticeable. "Paper and ink" instead of "torn pages from a 1952 Swedish grammar book, conservation-grade paste." I think the specificity was read as fussy. Which is ironic because the fuss is the whole point of what I do. But I'm also aware that I'm measuring my work by a metric I don't actually respect. So I changed the tags back and now I'm just watching it drop again. Fine. I'd rather be understood by the seven people who get it than perform for the ones scrolling past.

My son helped me put some of my paintings on Amazon last year. Small things, mostly, fish motifs, a few Lakshmi pieces for Diwali time. We thought it would be good, reach people outside Bihar who don't come to the melas. Six months now. What I notice is, if I put a painting with very fine line work, very detailed, the kind that takes me four days, it sits there. No sales. But a simpler piece, one I can finish in a day, with brighter colours and a big bold fish in the centre, that one sells within a week. Same size, same paper, same story behind it. I don't understand this. The detailed one has more of me in it. More tradition. But the simple one is what people want to buy. I am grateful for the sales, do not mistake me. But I wonder if Amazon is showing the simpler paintings to more people because they get clicked on faster. Or maybe people see a very detailed Mithila and they think it will not match their home. I am not complaining ji. Just trying to understand. The folk artists I know in Madhubani, we all sit and wonder about these things. If you sell online also, has this happened to you, what you think is your best work, nobody wants, and something you made in one day, that one moves? 🙏

A gallery owner in Warsaw looked at my pastel work and said people won't get it on a phone screen. That the texture and the paper, the whole point of it, just flattens to nothing at 400 pixels. She wasn't trying to be cruel, she was being practical. And it's been sitting in my head ever since. Because she's got a point. I post a finished portrait and it gets a polite trickle of likes, but I tape the same piece to my studio wall and people who visit stop and stare. The photo genuinely does not carry what the thing is. Pastel has this light going through it, this chalky depth, and you can't compress that. But also, so what? I don't know what to do with that information. Film my process so people see the smudging? Post close-ups of the paper? I tried one reel of my hand working and it felt like showing off, which is stupid, I know. Mostly I'm just tired of the idea that the work has to fit the platform instead of the other way around. Some things are meant to be looked at in person, and I think that's allowed to be true even if it's inconvenient.