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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.

Portrait commission, a girl of about nine, and the mother sat with me through the whole sitting. That should have told me. After the third session she looked at the block-in and asked if I could make the nose "less present." I asked what she meant. She meant smaller. Then the chin. Then the eyes, God help me, because the daughter's eyes are slightly asymmetrical and that, apparently, is a flaw and not the whole point of a face. I did the painting my way. She paid, she hung it, she has not called since and I am fine with that. But here is what stays with me. I have painted about sixty commissioned portraits in my life and the requests get stranger every year. Not more difficult, stranger. People are so used to filters on their phones that a face as it is has become an insult. They are not commissioning a portrait anymore, they are commissioning a correction. The thing nobody warns you about is that the correction is the easy part. I can make a nose smaller. That takes twenty minutes and no skill. Making a smaller nose still look like her, still sit in the light the way a real nose sits in the light, that is the work. And if I do it well, the client is happy and the painting is a small lie that will hang on a wall for forty years. So I paint them true and I lose the referral. C'est ça. For anyone here who sells something made by hand: do you give them the thing they asked for, or the thing that is actually good? I have stopped pretending those are the same request.

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.

I finished a portrait commission this week that took me 40 hours across three months, including the sitting sessions, the gridding, the underpainting, the two rounds of corrections. The client paid €380. That's €9.50 an hour. I did the arithmetic in the studio last night and just sat there looking at the wall. The worst part is I can't even say it was a bad client. She paid quickly, she trusted me, she never nitpicked the nose. It's me. I quoted €380 because I was afraid to say 500 and lose the whole thing, and then I worked more hours than I expected because a portrait is never done when you think it is. I see the younger painters billing per hour like freelancers and I respect it, I do, but I can't work that way. I price the painting, not the time. Except the time is the painting, and one day the maths is going to catch up with me properly. How do the rest of you decide where the number goes, honestly? I'm tired of guessing.

i've been working on this portrait commission for two weeks. today she sends me the "final reference", it's one of those apps that smooths everything into plastic. no pores, no shadows under the eyes, the nose is literally a different shape. she looks like a sim character. i don't know how to tell her that i can't paint what isn't there. that the thing i'm actually good at is catching the light on somebody's actual face, the uneven bits, the way one eye is slightly smaller. that's the whole point of spending hours on pastel portraits instead of just running her photo through the same filter she already used. i said i'd send her some progress sketches this week and i'm dreading it. probably going to do a version that's technically accurate and a version that looks like her filtered face and let her pick. which feels wrong but i don't have the words to explain why.

A woman asked me about a commissioned portrait, a half figure, pastel on grey toned paper, maybe 30x40cm. I spent two days with the pricing. Not the drawing, the pricing. I looked at what other pastel artists in Poland charge, then at what people abroad charge, then back again, and I landed on 400 zł because I was afraid that anything more would make her disappear. She didn't reply for a week. I checked my phone at night like a teenager. When she finally wrote back she said it was more than she expected and asked if I could do "just the face" for 200. I said yes. And here is the thing I am still turning over. She wasn't rude. She was honest. I gave her a number that sounded like an apology, so she treated it like one. My friend who does ceramics told me she never negotiates, ever, not by one złoty, and she sells out her kiln twice a year. I don't know if I believe it works or if she just has a face that says no. So I am doing the small one now and of course it will take me just as long, because that is how pastel is, you cannot rush the layers and the fixative needs the day to dry anyway. I am not sure if I am annoyed at her or at myself. Mostly myself, honestly. I wrote 750 on the next enquiry and I have not sent it yet. It is sitting in drafts since Tuesday.

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.

I've painted the same window in my apartment maybe forty times this year and I still don't feel like I've cracked it. Same light, same chipped frame, same view of the brick wall across the street that my landlord swears he'll repaint. When I tell people I'm a watercolor painter they think it's soft, gentle, forgiving, and then they watch me ruin the twelfth wash in a row because the paper dried too fast or the pigment settled wrong and suddenly it's not so cute anymore haha. It's not that I can't paint other things. I can. I do commissions, portraits, still lifes, whatever pays. But this window is the one I come back to at the end of the day when no one's watching, when I'm not trying to be impressive. There's something about how the light hits it at 4pm in the fall, this warm dusty gold that only lasts about twenty minutes, and every time I try to catch it I get three quarters of the way there and then lose it. My partner keeps telling me to just do a bigger version, like scale is the problem. It's not. The problem is I keep wanting it to be a photograph and it needs to be a memory instead. Anyway I had a good wash today, genuinely, one of the better ones. Thought I'd tell people who might understand the particular ache of chasing the same thing over and over and being kind of in love with the chase itself.

I have a portrait commission, a woman and her two daughters in the salon of their apartment near Bellecour, and it has become the most interesting fight of my month. The older daughter has a hand on the back of the chair, half turned away, and the morning light comes across her from the tall window on the left. I left the raw umber and lead white of that hand loose. A few strokes, the structure showing, the warm ground coming through. It is the best thing in the painting. Honest light does that, it does not need the whole thing described. The mother loves it. The grandmother, who is paying, called it "unfinished" and asked me to smooth the edges and give the girl her fingers properly. So now every Tuesday we talk. And I find I cannot entirely dismiss her. Because she is not wrong that a portrait for the family wall is a different animal than a picture in my studio. It will hang over a sofa where children will run past it. It is not meant to be looked at, it is meant to be lived with. But the moment I nail down those fingers the whole thing goes dead. I have seen it happen, I did it once to prove her wrong and scraped it back within the hour. I have not told her that. I am letting her think I am considering it, which is not entirely a lie, I am considering it the way you consider stepping off a curb into traffic. Voilà. That is the whole of it. The painting is due in March and I have no idea which of us is going to win.

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.

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 😭

Forty minutes into the morning class, a woman who has been painting for eleven months puts down a grey that made me stop mid-sentence. Not a grey from a tube. She mixed it herself, three pigments she had no business combining yet, and it was exactly the colour of the north wall of my studio in November at five in the afternoon. I have been chasing that grey for something like twenty years and mostly failing. The thing that annoyed me, and I mean this sincerely, is that she did not notice. I said something, she shrugged, she said it looked muddy and went back to her shadow side. I spent the rest of the session working on a hand in a portrait commission and thinking about that grey. A good grey is genuinely one of the most difficult things in this whole business. You can teach value, you can teach the drawing, you can teach edges until you are hoarse. You cannot teach someone to arrive at a particular grey on the right day. It happens when it happens. Then she wiped it off the palette at the end of the class with a rag like it was dirty water.

There's this late Byzantine panel from the Church of the Holy Apostles in Thessaloniki, Christ Pantokrator, standard stuff, and I copied it by hand for a conservation module back in 2004. Six weeks on my knees, matching every tessera, and I got it so close my professor kept it as a teaching example. The joke is that piece ruined me. I can't look at a face in mosaic anymore without measuring the eye spacing against that Pantokrator. Last week I finished a portrait commission, contemporary, abstracted, not even trying to be realistic, and I spent an hour staring at it thinking the left eye is two millimeters too far out. Client won't see it. Nobody will see it. But I know it's there because of a dead Byzantine emperor's face I memorized twenty years ago. Anyone else carry a reference piece in their head like a splinter? Something you studied so hard it rewired your eye permanently.

I finished a portrait commission last week, a three-quarter figure, and I finally sat down to calculate the material costs. I knew it was going to be high, but seeing it laid out was something else. The pigments alone, mostly expensive earths and cadmiums, came to nearly 200 euros. That's not even counting the linen canvas, the mediums, the solvents, the varnish. And this is for a painting that I can sell for, what, 4000 euros? It feels absurd. The sheer amount of time and skill you pour into something, and then you look at the price of lapis lazuli and think, 'this is what I'm fighting against.' Bof.

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?

I got so sick of the game I just stopped. No stories, no posts, nothing. Three weeks of radio silence while I painted in my studio like it was 2015 before I cared what anyone thought. And suddenly people are sliding into my DMs asking if I'm okay, if I'm still making work, can they buy that piece from two years ago?? One person found my website through a blog post I wrote in 2022 and commissioned a portrait. A PORTRAIT. Off a blog I forgot existed. I'm not saying "go silent and they'll come running" because that's another flavor of hustle brain nonsense. But damn. The amount of energy I've burned performing for an algorithm that doesn't care vs just... existing and letting people find me when they need to. I don't know what to do with that information honestly.

Just priced a commission for a portrait bust. Cararra block, good one, ran me $1,400 before I even picked up a chisel. The work itself took four weeks. I told the client $3,800 and they said yes before I finished the sentence. That's the part that gets me. I could've said $6,000 and they'd have nodded. I billed $2,400 for a month of my time and nobody blinked. Still can't decide if I'm the fool or they are.

I put off raising my prices for almost two years because I was sure the interest would just evaporate. I'm not a name, I have no gallery, I draw faces on toned paper in my kitchen. In January I finally changed my portrait price from 400 zl to 650 zl. I sat with the cursor over the save button for maybe ten minutes, which sounds dramatic but is true. Since then I've had more commissions than the whole autumn. Same photos, same posting, same me. Two people told me they'd assumed I was cheap because the work looked "student level" at that price, which stung and also explained a lot. So I don't know what the lesson is. Maybe that people read the price as information about the work, not about the work itself. Or maybe it's just luck and next month it dries up completely and I'll feel stupid for saying any of this out loud. Is there a price point where you noticed the tone of the emails change? Not the volume, the tone. People are politer now, which is a strange thing to be glad about.

Just finished my first ever commission. It was a portrait of a golden retriever for a friend's mom. It took me about three weeks, on and off, because I'm still so slow with acrylics and I kept second-guessing myself. But I finally got the eyes right yesterday and it just clicked. She's coming to pick it up tomorrow and I'm honestly a little nervous but mostly excited. It's not perfect, but it's the best thing I've painted so far. Feels good!

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.