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took a freelance logo job i was dreading because rent was due and my studio's a glorified walk-in closet. and it was... fine? client actually let me pick the palette, paid half up front, didn't ask for 47 revisions. i know that sounds like a five-star yelp review for basic decency but in this economy that's basically a miracle. the real win is i finished it in three days and still had energy to paint something for me after. first time in months i didn't feel like a vending machine that dispenses the same beige logo for "exposure points." i even sort of liked the logo by the end. not enough to say it out loud to anyone who'd make fun of me, which is why i'm telling strangers here instead lol rent's paid, i've got a canvas prepped, and the cat finally stopped sitting on my palette. good week.

I had this piece sitting in my studio forever. A birdhouse made from an old fuse box, wired with a single warm bulb inside. I thought $450 was fair, maybe even a little high. Three years. Nobody. Then this woman comes by, loves it, pays asking price no haggling. I was just relieved to have it gone. Then a friend texts me a screenshot from some HBO show. There's my fuse box birdhouse in the background of a scene. She looked it up, the set dresser rented it from a prop house for two grand. For a week. I charged $450 for something that took me years to make and someone else made almost 5x that in a week just for having it on a shelf in a fictional living room. And honestly I don't even know who to be mad at. The system? Myself for not knowing what things are worth? Both? Still trying to figure out what the actual lesson is here. Not sure it's just "charge more."

ok so this is going to sound small but it's not small to me: I paid September's rent with money from paintings. all of it. not half, not "mostly, plus tips" like the last few months. eight months after walking out of the café and I sat on my kitchen floor doing the math twice because I was sure I'd messed up a number somewhere. nope. it was really there. what got me there is stupid and unglamorous. I sold three small gouache pieces at the market two weekends ago, all like 5x7, nothing precious, and then a woman I've never met messaged me about a commission for her sister's kitchen, and between those two things it just... added up. plus I stopped undercharging by 60 dollars on every piece out of pure nervousness, which honestly did most of the work. I know it's not stable, I know October could be nothing, I'm not naive about it. but for one month the thing I do with my hands paid for the roof. my mom cried on the phone and then asked if I was eating. anyway if you're in the messy middle of this, the month where it finally covers it does happen and it feels way better than I expected.

Installed a piece in a former tram depot in Brno last autumn. The fee was 900 euros and the rent for the hall was 900 euros. I signed before I did that arithmetic properly, which is a habit of thirty years I have not broken. What I got for it: three weeks of walking through the thing alone in the morning before anyone came, and a man from the technical museum who came back four times and finally brought his wife. He told me his father drove trams out of that building. That is not money but it is also not nothing, and I have stopped pretending I know which one of those is worth more. The problem is my roof. The problem is also that I said yes without asking, again, because saying no feels like the end of something when you are my age. Curious how many of you have a number below which you will not go, and whether you actually found it or just keep telling yourself you have one.

Hello, I am pursuing an idea to rent out my original artwork locally, and wonder whether anyone has any advice? Anyone ever created any contracts for this?

There was a commission years ago, a wall piece for a hotel lobby. They paid me well enough, I thought. But the scrap dealer I got the steel from held onto the offcuts for me, and a decade later I reassembled them into something that finally worked. Those offcuts sat in my studio paying rent for eleven years while they waited to be art. A museum in Brno asked for it, and I priced it like it was a new piece made in a month. €1,200. I didn't count the storage, the handling, the times I nearly threw it out, the re-welding when I finally understood what I had. Rented the van myself on the way up there, carried it in with their technician, fixed the mounting when their wall wasn't level. They were nice people. I like the museum. But I added it up on the drive home, which was the mistake. That offcut had cost me more in rent than the piece sold for. I still take these deals. That's the part that worries me more than the bad math, that I keep agreeing to them because I'm flattered someone wants the thing at all. Fifty-eight years old and still pricing like a student.

spent six weeks on a commission for this architect guy, redoing the same corner of the same building five times because he couldn't articulate what he wanted, just "more energy" and "less of whatever that is." paid me €400 after all that. one miserable afternoon i made a sticker sheet of these little gremlin faces i'd been doodling while on hold with my bank, threw it up for €8, and it's outsold the commission three times over in a month. not sure what the lesson is. maybe the lesson is that most people would rather spend €8 on something that makes them laugh than €400 on something they have to defend to their wife. anyway i keep the gremlin faces and i keep the architect's check, they've both got a place. but i'm not sure i'd call either one "the work" and that's starting to bug me.

so i mixed up a custom beige for a skin tone study, ran out of canvas, and decided "fuck it" and painted a patch of my landlord's wall to test the value. it's a perfect match. like disturbingly perfect. i stepped back to look at it and i genuinely cannot find it anymore. i know it's there. i've touched it. but my eyes just slide right over it. anyway that's how i found out i'm good at painting the exact most boring color on earth. maybe i should pivot to camouflage for the military instead of whatever i'm doing lol

I am totally lost on how to price my art confidently. What system or equation do you use? I understand the process of raising prices if you are selling consistently and investing in your art career. But I am looking for some guidance to get started.

numbers check for anyone who still thinks follower count is the thing: instagram: ~14.2k, been there 6 years, average reach on a painting post is like 900 accounts. sold 2 originals off it this year. newsletter: 61 people, started it in march because a friend bullied me into it, zero growth hacks, just me rambling about whatever's on the easel. sold 4 pieces off it. same paintings. same prices. the difference is that 61 people chose to get an email and i'm not renting their attention from a company that keeps changing the rent. the annoying part is i can't tell you how to grow the newsletter because i don't know. half the list is people i already knew. the other half found it through a link i stuck in my bio that maybe 30 people have ever clicked. it's not a strategy, it's just a smaller room. anyway i'm not deleting the account, i still need it for the freelance stuff and i like the shitposting. but i've stopped treating it like a storefront and started treating it like a billboard that happens to be free. the store is 61 people in an inbox.

client asked for navy, cream, and blush pink. my entire body recoiled. i paint like a highlighter exploded, i do not do coastal grandma. but rent was rent so i did it anyway and honestly it's one of the best things i've made this year. the palette forced me to actually think about composition instead of just slapping the loudest color on everything. hate that. now i'm worried i'm gonna start pre-mixing muted tones like some kind of traitor.

The courier handed it to me and it was warm. Who knows why. The box had a dent the shape of a person sitting on it, and I thought fine, the ream inside is wrapped. It was not wrapped. Cotton paper absorbs everything it touches and apparently it had been touching a box that spent two days in a warehouse that smells like diesel and damp cardboard. So the top thirty sheets now smell like a truck. Not visibly ruined, just smelling, which is worse, because you can't photograph the problem and you can't prove anything. I have a show in March. I need 40 good prints and I've been working toward them since October. So now I'm doing the thing where I hold each sheet up to the window like a doctor looking at an x-ray, deciding which ones I'm going to pretend are fine. The funny part is I make work about the multiple, about the copy, about how a print is never really the original. So the universe has a sense of humor about me being precious with paper. But there's a difference between the idea of the reproducible and the smell of my studio right now, which is a rented Mazda. I've started leaving them out with a bowl of bicarbonate next to them like it's a sick animal. Tell me if you know a better trick, or tell me I'm being dramatic. Both fine.

Lads, I have a confession. The hare print sold out before Christmas, all forty of them gone, and I'm still in the workshop every night gouging away at the same block like a lunatic. Told myself I was doing a second run. I even bought the paper, a big sheet of Fabriano I sliced down at the kitchen table on Sunday while the young fella ate his Weetabix and judged me silently. But that's a lie. I'm not running an edition. I'm just carving her over and over because I haven't figured out the next thing yet and I can't stand the quiet of a blank block sitting there. You know the way it goes. Every printmaker has the one image that pays the rent and pays the soul and they don't always line up. And when you're between ideas you reach for the thing your hands already know, and you tell yourself it's practice, and it is, sort of, but it's also hiding. My wife asked me the other night how long I was going to keep at the hare and I said grand, not long, and she gave me the look. She knows the look she's getting back. Sitting there with a fresh cup of tea going cold beside me, six hours in, and I'd swear I've made the ears slightly better each time. Which is the problem. They're fine. They were fine the first time. Anyway. I'll stop.

Somebody bought the big charcoal from the March series. The one of my mother's hands. She paid full asking, no haggling, which honestly made it worse because it meant she actually wanted it. I sat in the car after and cried like an idiot, then came home and started a new one same size. Same hands. I don't know how people do this long term. Do you eventually stop feeling like you're amputating something? Because I've sold maybe twenty pieces now and every single time I hand it over I have this split second where I want to say actually no, never mind. You're supposed to be glad. I AM glad. Rent is paid. But there's a version of that drawing that only existed on my wall and now it's in some stranger's dining room and I'll never see it again. Anyway. Making it again. Bigger.

what's the one thing in a gallery contract you read and immediately knew you weren't signing? for me it was exclusivity within the city. i get it, they don't want me selling out of my studio down the street, but i'm not locking myself to one space when rent is due and the other gallery two blocks over actually sells my stuff. ngl i asked them to strike it and they did, which told me more about them than the whole rest of the contract honestly. what's yours? the commission split that gave you pause, the "artist covers shipping" fine print, something weirder? tell me i'm the only one who's crossed stuff out like a toddler with a crayon.

Took a commission for a carved limestone piece last winter. Eight weeks of work on and off. Quoted $4,800 and the client said "that's it?" which I should have read as a warning about myself, not a compliment. I broke it down after delivery. Stone cost $620. Studio overhead, sanding discs, carbide, the rented truck to haul the block, my time at what I actually worked, it came out to about $11 an hour. I've been doing this thirty years. I still price like I'm afraid someone's going to find out I'm not worth it. The client was happy to pay more. I was the one who couldn't ask. Raised my rate last month for the first time in four years. $65 an hour. Feels like robbery. That's the whole problem.

took a logo gig last month because rent was due, told the guy €300 flat. it took me 30 hours. i brought that number up myself. i did the math on my own and then agreed to it. €10 an hour for a thing that's going to be on their truck for a decade. worst part is i knew better. i've done this exact dance like six times. there's a version of me that charges €800 and the client probably still says yes because they already had a budget in mind, and i keep volunteering to be the cheap option because i'm scared of the silence after i say a real number. i keep a running list of freelance rules for myself on my phone. rule #1 is "don't quote before you've slept on it." i texted him back within 40 minutes. i don't even know why i'm surprised anymore

Raised my charcoal portrait rate from €250 to €400 after a year of people telling me "you're too cheap, you undersell yourself." Everyone said do it. Everyone. Lost every single client. All of them. The two commissions I had booked cancelled the next week. Three months now, nothing. I keep checking my DMs like a loser. And the worst part is I know the work is good. It's not impostor syndrome talking, this batch of pieces is some of the best stuff I've ever made. But nobody will pay the price that's actually fair for what goes into them. I'm sitting here genuinely considering dropping back down to €250. And I hate that because everyone warned me this is the trap, this is exactly what they said would happen, that I'd cave. But rent doesn't care about my dignity. €250 for 22 hours of work is €11 an hour. I know that's insane. But it's food money. Anyone else just... hit the wall and folded back to the old number? Or actually waited it out and survived?

Sold two cyanotypes this month. Each one needed a full day of sun, and a day of sun in Porto in January is a small miracle. I waited eleven days between them just for the light to show up. Fourteen hours of actual exposure time across both, plus the coating, the washing in seawater, the drying, the flat files. €160 for the pair. I worked it out at the kitchen table and it came to about €11 an hour, and that's before the paper and the chemistry. The strange part is I'm not even angry. I set those prices. I've had the same number in my head for three years and not once questioned it. The print is a thing I love making more than anything, so I kept pricing it like a hobby that occasionally pays rent. I'm not raising it to €400 tomorrow. I think I'm going to test €85 per print and see who flinches. Even that feels like lying, which tells me exactly how far I am from a fair number.

So I've been full-time for eight months now which means I've been doing all the "okay so I guess I have to market myself" stuff that nobody prepares you for in art school lol. And the thing that actually worked, the thing that got me my first real gallery relationship, was the most humiliating process ever. I spent a weekend sending 40 cold emails. Like, proper ones, with images and links and a real bio. And I got one reply. ONE. And honestly for like two days I was so embarrassed I almost didn't open it because I assumed it was a no too. But it was a yes. A small gallery in a city I'd never been to, but they liked my work and wanted to talk. That one yes turned into a group show, which turned into two commission requests from people who saw the show, which turned into enough money to pay rent for three months without panic-ordering takeout. Anyway I'm not saying cold emailing is the secret sauce, mostly it's just brutal lol. But I think sometimes we hear about the one reply and not the 39 silences. So here's my question I guess: what's the thing you tried that felt stupid or embarrassing or like it wasn't working, and then it kind of... did?