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I finally did it. Went from €80 to €95 for a full day workshop, materials included, seawater hauling not. Two people who'd been coming every month for over a year just stopped replying. Not even a "that's too much now" or a goodbye. Just silence. I know €95 for a day of my time, my chemicals, my paper, the space, the clean-up, I know that's not a lot. I know that. But it felt like a lot to say out loud. And now I'm sitting here wondering if I should have stayed quiet and kept them. The worst part is I don't even think €15 is what stopped them. I think it was the act of me naming it. Like me raising my price broke something they'd assumed about me, that I'd always be the cheap option, the artist who does it for love. And I am doing it for love. That's exactly the problem.

So I finally did it. Added 150zł to my base price for a head-and-shoulders pastel portrait. 150. That's like... 35 euro. And I've been sitting here all evening convincing myself I'll never get another commission again. Thing is, I was still charging what I charged when I was visibly worse. I look at my old posts and I cringe. But the fear that people were only tolerating the price because they felt sorry for me, that's hard to shake. Like the new price will make them look at my work properly and go "oh, no, not for that." I know it's not rational. I know my materials cost alone has gone up. I just didn't expect to feel this weird about it. Did anyone else feel like a fraud the first time they raised their rates? Does it go away?

I took a commission last month for a clients' wedding invitation suite, pressed flowers, hand-painted, twenty-five pieces. They wanted original watercolor originals, not prints. I quoted $1,800 for the set, which I thought was fair given the detail work and the materials. I sat down yesterday and actually tracked the hours. Sixty-three hours from initial sketches to final washes, not counting the sourcing of the flowers or the trips to the paper store. That comes to roughly $28.50 an hour. Less than I made as a graduate teaching assistant in 2003. The work is beautiful. The client is thrilled. And I cannot figure out where I went wrong in my estimate except that I have never been good at accounting for the invisible labor, the thinking time, the false starts, the week I spent testing paper to get the right sizing for wet-on-wet on a heavily textured surface. I charged for the painting. I forgot to charge for everything that makes the painting possible. I raised my studio rate by 15 percent this morning. It still feels like I'm guessing.

After years of being afraid of it, I raised my hourly rate from €45 to €65 at the beginning of this year. Not a dramatic jump. Reasonable for someone with my training and experience. I lost three regular clients in the first month. One of them told me I was "becoming expensive for a local painter." The other two just went quiet. And you know what? The commissions I've taken since then have been better. More interesting subjects, less revision demand, people who actually understand what they're asking for when they say "can you make the light softer." The clients who left were the ones who saw me as a service provider, not a painter. They wanted cheap, they got what they wanted somewhere else. I still feel a little guilty about the one who was a friend of a friend. But I did the math and I was earning less per hour than my daughter makes babysitting. That's not sustainable. That's not even dignified. If you raise your prices and nobody leaves, you probably didn't raise them enough. That's what my old teacher told me and I thought it was cynical. Now I think it's just true.

I took a commission back in February for a 16x20 landscape, a friend of a friend wanted a specific view from their vacation photos. I quoted $200 which is usually fair for that size and my level. What I didn't account for was the two weeks I spent staring at those reference photos, trying to figure out how to handle the lighting, sketching thumbnails in my head while I was folding laundry, completely rethinking the composition twice before I even touched a brush. By the time I actually started painting I had probably put in 6-8 hours of just... mental labor. And I didn't charge for any of it. Finished it in about 10 hours of actual painting time so the math works out to like $12/hour before supplies. I know you can't really bill for "thinking about it" but also, that was work, you know? It was work. I'm trying to figure out how to price differently next time without feeling like I'm nickel-and-diming someone. Maybe just raise the flat rate enough to cover it and stop overthinking.

A gallery reached out last year about a piece I had in a group show. Wanted to know my price for a commission in that range. I said $400. They said great, we'll list it at $1800. That's when it hit me. I wasn't pricing my work, I was pricing my materials and time like I was still doing fabrication for other people. I'd welded it myself, designed it, sandblasted it, patinated it, figured out the base so it wouldn't tip in wind. Three weeks start to finish. $400. I told my daughter about it and she just stared at me. She said dad you're not a contractor. She was right. I raised my studio rate after that but I still catch myself lowballing. There's a voice in my head that says who's going to pay that for something you made. Thirty years in and it's still there.

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.

Just finished the final invoice for that large mixed-media piece. Spent 3 weeks on it, materials were way more than I budgeted (who knew salvaged lace would get so pricey?), and my hourly rate worked out to something like $8 an hour. I’m almost afraid to raise my prices, but this isn’t sustainable. Feels like I'm stealing from myself.

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.