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First gallery solo show last spring. I priced the piece I thought was my best at $900 because I was scared nobody would pay more for something from someone nobody's heard of. It sat there for eight months. Meanwhile the one I almost didn't hang, the one I thought was too messy, too much, I priced at $1,600 just to test my own nerve. Sold in a week to a woman who said it made her cry. I keep replaying that. Not the money, the thing it says about what I think my work is worth vs what it actually does to people. I undersold the one I loved because I was ashamed of loving it that much. The safe price was the insult, not the other way around. Bumped my base rate for the new series. Told myself $1,200 minimum and I'm still twitchy about it. Somebody tell me it gets less terrifying or just lie to me, either works.

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.

i raised my prices in march. 450 to 850 on the mid size canvases, the 60x80 ones. sold one in nine days to a guy who runs a bike shop, paid full, didn't haggle, thanked me for my time. i thought ok. this is the part where it clicks. raised again in june to 1400 on the same size. crickets. not "too expensive" crickets, just silence. three inquiries since then that all went "love your work!! do you have anything smaller?" which i now understand is code for a different number entirely. what's annoying is i know the advice is right. the 850 sale proved there's demand above where i was. but i can't tell if 1400 is a real ceiling or if i just killed the discovery thing by fiddling with it. i'm not consistent, i post when i finish something, sometimes twice a week sometimes twice a month. so the raise landed on a feed that already forgets i exist between paintings. the other theory, and i hate this one, is that 850 was the "i can justify this on a card" number and 1400 is the "this needs a conversation with my partner" number. completely different buyer, not just a different price. anyway i'm painting the big one for the show in october and telling myself the answer lives in there. it does not live in there. it lives in a spreadsheet i refuse to open.

I've been doing the fall craft fair in my town for three years now and I always did the thing where you write "reasonable offers" or just leave the small tags off half of it because I hate the moment someone asks and I have to say a number out loud. This year I priced everything properly. No "DM for pricing." Little handwritten tags on the back of each one with actual numbers. My 8x10s at $65, the 16x20 landscape at $240, and the two I was scared to price at $400. What happened is I sold less. Four pieces instead of the six I moved last year. But I also spent the whole day talking to people about the paintings instead of apologizing for them, and one woman told me the $400 one was worth more than that and I should be charging by size and not by how nervous I am. She didn't buy it. But she was right and now I can't stop thinking about it. The other thing, and this is the part that bugs me. A guy picked up the $240 one, said "nice," put it down, came back twice, and bought it. I don't think he would've come back twice if I'd had a "make me an offer" sign up. Maybe? I don't know. I'm not good at this part. Anyway if you're like me and you price low because it feels rude to ask, that's the conversation I'm having with myself this week.

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.

i raised my prices. i know it's what you're supposed to do, and honestly i believed it. the 850 painting sold in nine days, so i figured i'd been leaving money on the table and bumped everything about 40%. that was two months ago. sold one small one since, to a friend, at a discount she didn't ask for and i offered out of panic. the annoying part is the work didn't get worse. it got better. i finally figured out how to get that flat saturated orange to sit on top of a purple underpainting without turning into mud, which took me like four separate failed canvases to learn, and nobody cares because nobody's looking. so now i have nine finished pieces stacked against the wall in the studio, which is also my kitchen, and a pricing spreadsheet that i keep opening like it's going to say something different this time. it does not. not asking what to do about pricing, i've read all the threads. more like, is this just the shape of it now. you do the thing, you price it like a professional, and then you wait in a room with your own work.

Raised my prices two months ago. Not by much, from 350 to 450 for a portrait. I had this whole spreadsheet argument with myself about it. The logic was fine. Someone actually bought one at the new price last week and I still felt guilty about it, like I'd overcharged a friend. But here's the thing nobody warns you about. The silence. Before, I'd post a finished portrait and get the usual little hum of interest. Now I post the same quality work and it's just... quiet. I know it's partly the season and partly the algorithm being moody. But I can't shake the feeling that the quiet is people deciding 450 is too much. The other part of me, the part I'm trying to trust more, says it's just that higher prices filter out the people who were never going to pay anyway. One buyer who treats it as a real purchase beats ten people who say "oh I love your work" and mean it as a compliment to themselves. I don't know. I keep going back and forth. Any of you who've raised prices and sat through that quiet stretch before it paid off, tell me it got better. Or tell me you dropped back down and it was the right call. I need someone else's spreadsheet.

So I finally did the thing everyone says you should do and put the price right in the caption, not "DM for price," just there, 450 zł for the A3 pastel portrait, framed, shipping in Poland included. I sat on that edit for two days before posting it, which is embarrassing to type out. Anyway. Four people asked about it before I did that. After I put the number up, three people asked and then two of them went quiet the moment I answered. Not rude, just gone. And weirdly I felt better? Because I stopped having to perform the little dance where someone says "so beautiful" and I say "thank you so much" and we both pretend nobody is thinking about money. One woman did buy. Paid full price, no haggling, and then told me she'd assumed I'd charge more. I don't know what to do with that information, honestly. I've been undercharging for two years partly because I was afraid, and now I'm scared I've taught everyone the wrong price. Is it normal that the silence after the number is worse than a no? I can handle a no. The quiet is what gets me.

Okay so I finally did the thing I'd been avoiding for months and went through every commission I took last year. Added up all the hours, all the money, all the materials. Average came out to like €11 an hour and that's just... not a living wage where I live. And I already knew it was bad, but seeing it in a little spreadsheet made me feel genuinely sick for a day. So I raised my prices. Not wildly, like 25% on the mid-range stuff and more on the bigger pieces. And immediately two people who'd been "definitely going to commission me soon" for months just went quiet. Poof. Never heard from them again. One of them had even sent me a moodboard and asked me to hold a date for them. And I keep going back and forth, like did I price myself out of the people who actually wanted my work? Or were they never going to pay me fairly anyway? I think I know the answer. But it's hard when the quiet is so loud, you know? The worst part is the people who DID book in at the new prices have been my favorite clients ever. Which feels like it should be the lesson. But I still spent an hour last night being mad at myself for losing the other two. Anyway. If you've done the spreadsheet math and kept your prices the same after, I'd genuinely love to know what stops you from raising them, because I get it more than I want to. 🙂

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?

So I had this conversation with a gallery owner last week. Small place, mostly sells to people who want "art that goes with the sofa" kind of thing. She was genuinely interested in my work, wanted to take a few pieces on consignment. But she kept pushing me to price them higher than I wanted, not in a greedy way, more like she thought I was undervaluing myself. And I couldn't explain it properly to her. It's not that I think my work is worthless. It's that I paint these old Bangalore houses that are being torn down, and I know the people who used to live in them. Some of them still come and watch me draw. So when I put a price on it, it feels like I'm putting a price on someone's childhood, you know? She said "then don't sell them, just show them." But I do need to sell. I just don't want to pretend it's the same as selling a print of a nice landscape. Anyway, I priced them lower than she wanted and she took three. Two sold in a week. Which I don't know if that proves anything or nothing.

Sold the last of a hare edition at a market in Kinvara on Saturday and I'm still annoyed about it, and not in the way you'd think. I priced them at €25. Hand-carved, hand-pulled, six weeks of an evenings' work in the block before a single one of them existed. And they went, grand, they went fast, and that's the problem. Fella bought two, told me I was "very reasonable," and I could feel the whole stall behind me wince. Here's the thing I keep doing and I know I keep doing it: I price for the person I'm afraid of. The one who'd look at a print and go "sure I could get a poster for a fiver." I never meet that person. The people who actually buy are the ones who want the thing that took six weeks, and the low price is telling them something about it that isn't true. The ones I've had at €45 sat there a bit longer and then sold to someone who looked at the back of them and asked how the block was cut. Different conversation entirely. Better one. I'm not going to pretend I've solved it. Next market I'll probably do the same thing again because a bad day with nothing sold is worse than a bad price. But I've a hedgerow block on the press at the moment and I've decided that one starts at €45 and I'll sit on my hands. Anyway. If you're a maker, what's the number you're afraid to say out loud? Mine was 45 for a long time and it's a stupid thing to be afraid of.

I have a screenprint edition of 40 sitting here, three colors, on Fabriano Rosaspina, and I put 45 euro on each one. The math is not the problem. Paper, ink, the screens, the hours pulling them, all of that I can count. The problem is the 40. If I print 40 and sell 12, I have 28 in a flat file and I've effectively priced the 12 at 150 each, only nobody paid that and I can't say it out loud. There's a whole historical logic to this, the print as the democratic multiple, the cheap image for the many. I believe in it. I also believe the rent in Kreuzberg does not care about my beliefs. So I keep the price low to honor the idea and then I quietly resent every person who buys one, which is a strange way to run a practice. What I actually want to know is whether any of you price the edition as a whole and not the single sheet. Like, the edition is one object with 40 faces, and the price should carry the unsold ones. I've never seen anybody say this in a way I could use. Maybe because it sounds like an excuse. 45 feels either honest or cowardly and I genuinely cannot tell which. It's been three weeks.

Fellow mosaicist cut my rates a while back. She told me there was no way to sell "real art" in this economy unless you priced to move, and honestly I listened for longer than I should have. Dropped a 60x80 piece from €1,400 to €900 thinking I was being smart. Then a client comes to pickup, a hotel owner who'd commissioned it. Looks at the invoice, looks at me, and says flat out: "You undersold yourself. That's an insult to the person buying it too." He paid me the full €1,400 on the spot and told me not to do it again. Thing is, he was right and I knew it. That piece was six weeks of work, smalti I'd imported from Venice, and I'd priced it like a print from IKEA. The friends-fear of pricing yourself out is real but the other direction is real too. When you don't value the work, the buyer reads it as low quality, not a bargain. Raised my floor back to €1,400 for anything with smalti in it. Lost one regular customer since. Still sleep fine. That hotel owner taught me more in one sentence than any pricing workshop ever did.

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.

Gallery show five years back. They wanted exclusive rights to sell my work for the run of the show. I was younger and dumber so I said fine. They took the pieces at 60% of what they were going to price them at. So if they sold a piece for $10,000 I got $6,000 before expenses. That part I understood. What I didn't realize until later was they were pricing my work at 2.5x what I'd ever sold anything for before. So I'm thinking I'm getting 60% of a fair price. They were pricing it at whatever they thought they could get and I got 60% of that. One piece sold. A welded steel figure I spent three months on. They priced it at $14,000. I got $8,400 minus the crate and shipping which they billed back to me. I netted about $7,200 on a three-month piece. At the time I thought that was great. Now I think about the guy who paid $14,000 and wonder what he'd think if he knew I got half that. Still not sure what the right deal is. But I won't do 60/40 again without a say in the retail price.

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.

I finally priced a new commission the honest way, hour by hour, and it came out to €9.80 an hour before materials. I'm 44, I've been doing this for almost twenty years, and I'm still making less than the person who serves me coffee. That number sat there on the page and I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. The problem is I price the whole piece, not my time. A seated figure, half-length, oil on linen, maybe 55x46. I know exactly what it takes because I've done it a hundred times. But when I think what the client will reasonably pay for that size, my brain gives me a figure and then I divide by the weeks and suddenly I'm ashamed of myself. I raised it anyway, this time. Charged what the work actually costs. The client paused on the phone, that long silence that means I finally said a number too high, and I almost folded on the spot. Then she said fine, let's go. So now I'm terrified I've priced myself out of the next three, and quietly furious that I ever treated that fear as reasonable.

Myself Ramesh, I was finishing a large piece for a client in Delhi. It depicted the marriage of Shiva and Parvati, very detailed work with natural colours on handmade paper. For weeks, my eyes were glued to the fine lines, the tiny figures. When it was done, the client asked for the final price. I calculated everything – the cost of the paper, the pigments which are becoming costly now, my time spent over many days and nights. When I told him the figure, my own hands started to shake a little. It was a good price, a fair price for the work, but still, it felt very high for me. We are not used to such figures in Madhubani, you see. He paid without any question, thankfully. But I am still thinking about it.

I used to do this thing where I'd tell people "pay what you can afford" because I genuinely believed in making art accessible and also I hate conflict LOL. But here's what kept happening: Someone who clearly had money would pay me $20 for a charcoal portrait that took me 6 hours. And I'd smile and say thank you because I SAID they could name the price and I didn't want to be a hypocrite. Meanwhile I had a single mom pay me $150 for a small drawing because she said "I know what labor costs and I want you to keep making work." The sliding scale only works if people are honest. And I realized I was letting the people who COULD pay more off the hook because I was scared to just... state my price like a real businessperson. Now I just say what it costs. If someone genuinely can't afford it I'll trade or work something out one on one. But I stopped making my pricing a charity auction where the rich get the discount. Anyone else do the "honor system" thing and regret it?