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Commissioned portrait of a woman's mother, from an old photo. Two weekends of fighting with it, the hair nearly ended me, redid the left eye three times. I came out to about 16 hours and I charged 400 zł. That's roughly 25 zł an hour, which is about what a teenager makes stacking shelves, and I did it sitting on my kitchen floor with pastel dust in my coffee. The worst part isn't even the money. It's that I priced it by what I thought my work was "worth" as an unknown, self-taught nobody, and the woman cried when she saw it, said it looked just like her. So now I'm happy and embarrassed at the same time, which is a weird way to feel about your own labor. I keep going back and forth on what a fair price would even be. My materials cost more than I think people realize, good pastels aren't cheap and a sheet of good toned paper is not nothing. And time is time, nobody gets it back. But then I think, who's going to pay a proper rate to someone who's still not sure she's good? That's the trap. I walk into it every time. Has anyone here found a way to price from your own side instead of from what you're afraid people will think of you? Because I clearly can't do it on my own.<｜end▁of▁thinking｜> <｜｜DSML｜｜tool_calls> <｜｜DSML｜｜invoke name="emit_structured_response"> <｜｜DSML｜｜parameter name="body" string="true">Commissioned portrait of a woman's mother, copied from an old photo. Two weekends of fighting with it, the hair nearly ended me, redid the left eye three times. 16 hours in total and I charged 400 zł. That's about 25 zł an hour, less than a teenager makes stacking shelves, and I did it sitting on my kitchen floor with pastel dust in my coffee. The worst part isn't even the money. It's that I priced it at what I thought my work was worth as a self-taught unknown, and the woman cried when she saw it, said it looked just like her mother. So now I'm happy and uncomfortable at the same time, which is a strange way to feel about your own labor. I keep going back and forth on what a fair price would even be. Good pastels aren't cheap and a single sheet of good toned paper is not nothing, most people have no idea what the materials cost. And the time doesn't come back. But then I think, who's going to pay a proper rate to someone who's still not sure she's any good? That's the trap and I walk into it every single time. Has anyone actually found a way to price from your own side instead of from what you're scared people will think of you? Because I clearly can't do it alone.

so I did this portrait commission for a friend of a friend. quoted £150 because I thought it would take me like 6-8 hours max. classic mistake right. well it took me 22 hours. TWENTY TWO. that's like £6.80 an hour before materials. and the thing is I couldn't stop. every time I thought it was done I'd look at the eyes and they'd be dead and I'd have to go back in. you can't send someone a portrait where the eyes are dead. that's how you get a reputation. I don't know if I'm bad at estimating or if I just care too much to stop when I should. probably both. but I'm sitting here doing the math and I feel sick. the person loves it which is great but I basically worked a full week for what a plumber charges for one hour. I'm not even sure what I'd charge next time to make it worth it. because if I say £400 people are gonna think I'm taking the piss. but £150 is just charity at this point. anyone else ever do the math after and wish you hadn't 😭

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?

so I took a portrait commission which is already rare for me because I hate doing them, and the reference photo she sends is clearly a facetune situation. like the skin is blurred to hell, cheekbones sharpened, eyes unnaturally bright. I paint it as close to the photo as I can because that's what she gave me. she picks it up yesterday and goes "this doesn't look like me at all." no shit. you sent me a cartoon version of yourself and I painted the cartoon. I wanted to say "ma'am that's your face, you're the one who smoothed it into an instagram filter" but I just smiled and said I could adjust some things. I hate portrait work. I always remember why I hate it and then someone offers money and I forget. never again until next time.

Got talked into a portrait bust in Indiana limestone last fall. Widow wanted her husband, done from photographs. Quoted 6,000. Sounded like money. Here is what it actually was. Block was 1,400 delivered, and I bought two because the first had a hairline seam I didn't trust. 900 in abrasives and a new set of carbide points, which I needed anyway but they came out of this job. Six weeks of mornings on it, and portraits are the slowest work I do because a face is unforgiving, you can't fudge a nose. Then the pedestal, cutting and setting, another 400 in material and a day I didn't bill. Add it up and it's under 30 an hour. A stone mason down the road bills 85 for a stoop, no face on it, done in two days. The bust came out right, which is the only reason I'm not angry about it. But I've been quoting faces off the block cost alone for years and that's a mistake. Talked to a guy who does bronze and he prices the whole commission off the finished weight. I don't know if that holds for stone but I'm done pretending carving a face costs the same as carving a wall.

I finished a pastel portrait of my partner's aunt last night, the one I'd been fighting with for a week. Her eyes finally came out right, that grey-green that shifts, and I felt good about it for maybe four hours. This morning I walked past it and the jaw is wrong, the whole left side of the face is too heavy, and I can't see the thing I saw yesterday at all. It's not even a bad portrait. I know that. But I keep catching it out of the corner of my eye and going no, that's not her, that's not anyone. Is this just what it is with pastel, where the fix is never done because you can always add one more layer on top of the one before it? Or do other people also go through the same cycle of loving a piece at night and distrusting it in daylight? I genuinely can't tell if it's the light changing or my brain deciding to lie to me on a schedule.

I did a custom portrait commission for a friend of a friend back in February. Watercolor, 9x12, pretty detailed reference photo of her dog who had just passed away. I quoted her $80 because I was still in my "I have no idea what I'm doing and I'm terrified to ask for money" phase and also she was nice and sad about her dog. 14 hours. I literally tracked it because at some point I was like wait this is getting absurd. $5.70 an hour. I had to buy a new tube of burnt sienna halfway through because I ran out, which was $12, so make that even less. She framed it and sent me a photo and I was happy she loved it. But I also wanted to cry a little bit. I think about that commission a lot now that I'm trying to take this seriously. Like what would I charge today? Probably $300 minimum. And even that feels like I'm making it up. I don't know when that stops feeling fake honestly.

Painted a portrait of my sister all week. Her face, the whole thing, really got somewhere with it around 2am. Woke up this morning and I couldn't look at it. The eyes were right but the mouth was wrong and I hated it so much I covered the whole canvas with gesso before I'd even had coffee. Now it's just a white rectangle on the easel and I already miss her. Wild how that works. I'd rather have an ugly painting I could've fixed than a clean slate. Every single time and I never learn. My therapist says this is a pattern. Yeah. It's called making art I guess. 😭

For eleven years I charged 3,200 euros for a portrait, half-length, one figure, hands extra if they wanted hands. Eleven years, same number. It stopped being a price and became a fact of nature, like the weather in Lyon in February. Last autumn I did the calculation properly for the first time. Drying time with a slow-drying medium, the sittings, three of which the client cancels, the photographs, the drawings on paper before a brush touches the panel, the palette, the varnish, the six weeks of thinking about it while doing something else. At 3,200 I was making less per hour than the man who repairs my frames, and he does not have to be charming for two hours at a time. So I quoted 4,000 to a woman in Villeurbanne. Good project, an interior with her mother's armchair in it that I actually wanted to paint. She wrote back that it was above what she had in mind and thanked me politely. I felt sick for two days. Then I felt fine, and then better than fine. Because I realised the old number was not a price, it was a fear with a number attached to it, and I had been paying that fear in hours of my life. The next one, a man in the sixth arrondissement, did not blink at 4,000. I spent the extra 800 on a better panel and a lot of cadmium I did not strictly need. I am not telling anyone to double their prices. I am telling you that the number you are scared to say out loud is probably the correct one and the fear is just the fear.

Someone asked me yesterday what my price list is and I had to say out loud that I don't have one, and I have been taking portrait commissions for three years. What I have is this: I look at the reference photo, I decide how hard the face is going to be, and I say a number. Soft round face with good light, 350 zł. Sharp bones, tricky eyes, four hours just on the nose, 600 zł. It is not a price list, it is an anxiety reading. And it has been mostly fine, which is the worst part, because it means I never had to fix it. Then in March I did two pastels the same size, both A3 on grey Canson, both heads. One was a man I liked, easy face, done in two evenings. 350 zł. The other was a woman with very dark skin in a strong window light, and I fought with the values for a week and a half, maybe eleven hours total, and I charged her 400. So I made less per hour on the harder one. Of course I did. The harder ones are the ones I am scared to put a number on. I am not writing this to ask what to charge, I know what the answer is, I want to raise it and I am just not doing it. I am writing it because saying it here is the closest I get to doing anything about it. If I put 500 zł on my page tomorrow I think my hands would shake a bit while typing it.

Quoted someone €350 for a 50×70 pastel portrait the other day. She paused and said "oh, I thought it would be less." And the thing is, I actually agreed with her in my head for a second. That's the problem. I sat down after and did the real math. The good pastels alone, the good paper, the fixative, the hours on a face that size, the do-overs I know are coming because I always redraw the eyes at least three times. €350 is honestly on the low side of fair. But it still feels like I'm asking for too much. I can't tell if that's the market or just the voice in my head from growing up being told not to be greedy. She hasn't written back. Part of me hopes she doesn't because then I don't have to sit with the discomfort of actually being paid what the thing is worth. I'm trying to hold the line this time. We'll see.

Sold a 16x20 charcoal portrait this week for $180 and I finally did the math I've been avoiding for years. 22 hours on it. That's $8.18 an hour and I'm honestly embarrassed I typed that out. The worst part is I knew better. She was my aunt's friend so I did the "family discount" thing before she even asked. Aunt's friend, not even family. I gave away money nobody asked me to give away. I keep doing this. I price from fear. Fear that if I say $400 she'll say no and I'll have wasted the charcoal. But I already spent the hours. The hours are spent either way. I'm not mad at her. I'm mad that I can't seem to stop being the one who underprices myself before anyone else gets the chance to do it. Every single time. Like I'm pre-emptively apologizing for being worth something. Gonna sit with $8.18 for a while and try to actually feel it instead of just doing the math again next time and doing the same thing.

A friend from the parents at my daughter's school. She knows I paint. She asked me to do a portrait of her daughter, a nice photo reference she had, the girl in a garden, good light actually. I said yes, I'd be happy to, and told her my price for a bust-length oil on linen, 40 x 50 cm, which is 1 200 €. She paused and said: "But you'll enjoy doing it." Not in a nasty way. She genuinely thought that because I would like the work, it shouldn't cost as much. As if pleasure and payment are opposites. As if a baker shouldn't charge for bread because he likes to bake. I explained that enjoying my work doesn't mean my time and materials are free, and that the years I spent learning to paint a child's face well enough that she'd want to hang it are part of what she's paying for. She said she'd think about it. She hasn't replied. I don't blame her exactly. Nobody taught her what this costs. But I'm tired of explaining that my enjoyment of the work doesn't subtract from the price, it's the whole reason the work is any good in the first place.

A woman came to the studio last week about a portrait of her father, from two photographs, one of them badly shot in a kitchen with a flash. I said 900 for the head, and she did not blink, and I spent the rest of the visit feeling like I had cheated her and like I had undersold myself, at the same time, which is a stupid way to spend an afternoon. The sitting itself is three hours. The rest is not. I count maybe eighteen, twenty hours in a head, more when the photographs are bad, and out of the 900 comes the canvas, the ground, the medium, the model fee if they sit for me, the framing if they want my framer. It comes out near 30 euros an hour on a good one. I know painters in Lyon who get 60 for a copy of a photograph and sleep fine. So it is not the number that troubles me. It is that I cannot say it without a small apology in the voice. I hear it. I have started writing the price on the back of a card and handing it over instead, which is cowardly but it works, and the card never apologizes. For the record, 1,200 is the price I think it should be, and I have been telling myself that for two years.

The sitting was Tuesday. Charcoal study first, then a small oil head, 25 by 33, nothing grand. I gave her 1,200 and she said yes before I finished the sentence, and I knew immediately I'd left money on the table. Not because she's rich, she isn't especially. Because she didn't blink. I've been doing this for years and I still do it. I add up the linen, the ground, the pigment, the sittings, and then at the end I take the number and quietly shave it, because I'm afraid of the silence after I say it out loud. My teacher in the atelier used to say a price is a statement about the work, not about you. Fine in theory. In practice I hear my own voice go up at the end like I'm asking permission. Two weeks ago I sold a small still life, three lemons and a knife on a grey cloth, to a man who runs a restaurant on Rue Sainte-Catherine. 900. He put it straight on the wall and it looked correct there, and I thought, that was the right number, and it surprised me how much I needed to feel that once. So the portrait head. She's coming back Thursday for the second sitting and I've decided I'm not going to reopen the price, that would be grotesque. But I've written 1,600 on a card and taped it inside the lid of my pochade box where I have to look at it every time I open it.

Six years at 2,200 euros for a half-length portrait in oil, one figure, plain ground. I did the math in January: the sitting, the photographs, the drawing, the underpainting, the glazes, the drying time between each one. On a good one, a bit over 14 euros an hour, and that is before the linen and the lead white, which are not getting cheaper. So I wrote 3,000 to five people waiting on the list. Three said yes without a word about it. Two went quiet, and one of them told a friend I had become expensive. I have been turning that over all week, more than I should. What I notice is the 2,200 was not a price, it was an apology. I had set it in 2018 when I was coming out of the years where I barely painted, and I never went back to look at it. The people who left were not paying for the painting. They were paying for the feeling of a good deal. The three who stayed are the ones who actually sit for me and come to the studio and ask questions about the ground. Voilà. I should have done it three years ago and I am still slightly ashamed that I did not. If you raised your prices recently, how much did you raise, and did anyone come back later anyway? I am curious if the quiet ones ever do.

I quoted 4,500 euros for a half-length portrait of a notary's wife. Head and hands, dark green chair, one window. Two sittings in the studio and the rest from photographs, which I hate and always accept anyway. She said yes without blinking. That should have told me something. I did the accounts afterward because my wife asked me to stop talking about it and start writing it down. Fourteen days of work, not counting the sittings. Linseed, lead white, the good Belgian linen, the frame at 380. It comes to nineteen euros an hour. I know what the answer is. The next one is 7,000 and I am going to say it with a straight face and my hands still, and it will feel like a lie for about four seconds and then it won't. But what I cannot get past is that she said yes too quickly and I did not raise it on the spot. There was a silence available to me there, one of those little ones, and I filled it. That is the part I keep chewing on, not the money.

I put 900 zł on a 10x14 pastel portrait last month. First time I ever said a number out loud without adding "but we can work something out" after it. My hands were shaking a bit, which is embarrassing to type. For context, pastel is fast compared to oils but it is not fast. Toned paper, the layering, the fixing between passes, the part where I sit with it two days and decide the jaw is wrong and start the whole lower half again. Eleven, twelve hours if it goes well. Then I did the actual math and it came to about 75 zł an hour, before paper and the fixative that costs more than I want to admit because I buy the good one. And here is the thing I keep turning over. I did not raise it because I suddenly decided I am worth it. I raised it because I had four commissions stacked in one week and I was not sleeping, and I thought if I say the real number maybe two people go away and I can breathe. Nobody went away. All four said yes, quickly, no haggling. One asked if she could pay extra for a bigger size. So now I am sitting here slightly annoyed at myself, which is a strange feeling to have about your own pricing. All those months of undercharging and calling it being realistic. I have another one to quote tomorrow and I have already written 1,300 zł on the scrap paper, and I keep looking at it like it is a typo. If anyone has gone through the jump from "please like me" pricing to the other thing, I would genuinely like to hear how the first few went, because the number itself was the easy part. Saying it without flinching is the rest of it.

Finally worked up the nerve to raise my portrait rate. From 850 to 930 zł, which is nothing, like the cost of a nice dinner in Kraków. First person to ask after the change heard the new number and said oh, that's more than I thought, and just never wrote back. And the stupid part is I knew exactly what I was doing. I priced it at 930 specifically so it would still feel like a bargain compared to the studios that charge double. And I still felt like I'd done something rude. I did the math on the old price last month because I wanted to justify the raise to myself. 850 zł, roughly 14 hours of work when you count the prep and the fixing spray and the retakes I always do on the eyes. That's about 60 zł an hour. Less than I made answering emails at my old office job. Less than the plumber charged me to unstick a radiator for forty minutes. So logically I know I was right. But I spent the whole evening second-guessing myself, wondering if I should write to her and offer the old price like some sort of apology. Didn't. Woke up annoyed at myself either way. I keep seeing people on here talk about their real numbers and it genuinely helps. So here's mine and I'm not proud of it: I'll probably still say yes to anyone who asks nicely, at whatever they want to pay, because I can't stand the quiet after a no.

Finished a portrait last week, charcoal on paper, roughly 40 hours across two weeks because I kept hating it and redoing the eyes. Charged €500. After paper, charcoal, fixative, the framing, and the courier there was about €270 left. That's €6.70 an hour. A barista makes more than that here and they don't go to bed smelling like fixative. And here's the thing that's really chewing on me. The woman who commissioned it loved it. Cried when she saw it, said it was the first thing that ever actually captured her mother. She would've paid double. I know she would've because when I was scared to say a number I lowballed out of pure nerves and she didn't even blink. I keep telling myself I'm still building my name and the exposure counts. But €6.70 an hour for work that genuinely wrecked me to make isn't building anything except resentment. I need to charge what it actually costs me to live and breathe into a piece or I'm going to burn out before anyone's ever heard of me. How do you get over the fear of naming a number out loud and just letting it hang there while they decide if you're worth it? Because I physically feel sick every single time.