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So I painted these two pet portraits, same size, same level of detail, both head-and-shoulders of someone's dog. A stranger commissioned me and I charged $150 and felt nervous about it. Then a friend from college asked me to do her cat and I immediately went "oh for you, $50" and then I painted the cat and it actually came out better than the stranger one. So my friend got the better painting for a third of the price and I keep thinking about that. Like I know we all do the friends and family discount thing and it's fine but it bothers me that my work isn't the same price regardless of who's asking. Or maybe it should be different because the relationship is different? My mom says I'm overthinking it because the friend will tell people and send me more work but also my mom thinks I should charge more for everything so I don't even know anymore. I guess I'm wondering where the line is between being generous with people you love and just devaluing your own time because you feel awkward asking for money from someone you actually know.

I took the prices off my shop page a few months ago. Not as a strategy, I just got tired of feeling like I was shouting numbers at people before they'd even seen the work properly. I put "please enquire" and my email. I expected silence. Instead I get these long emails now. People describing where they'd hang it, what the light is like in their kitchen at certain hours, which beach it reminds them of. Some don't buy. Some buy after three or four emails. The buying feels different when it happens, less transactional, more like they've already lived with the piece a while. The downside is real. Some people disappear the second they hear the number. I lost a sale this morning that way, a woman who'd written me three lovely messages, then just "oh, that's more than I thought" and gone. And I can't tell if I'm filtering for the right people or just making it harder for everyone. Not a tip. Just a strange thing I'm in the middle of.

ok i have to tell someone. did a small market thing today, fully expected to pack everything back into the car, and a woman i have never met in my life stopped, looked at the little harbour piece for what felt like a full minute, and just bought it. cash. said it reminded her of where she grew up. ive been buzzing for an hour and a half, my hands are genuinely a bit shaky typing this

I got a call last week from a woman I didn't know. Said she found my name on a label sewed into an old quilt she bought at a church flea market over in Tuscaloosa. Asked if I wanted it back. I knew exactly which one before she even described it. That blue and yellow improv log cabin I made in '93, right after my youngest left for school. I was so lonesome that year I just sewed and sewed. Sold it for $40 at a craft fair at the county annex, first quilt I ever sold to a stranger. I remember watching the woman walk off with it folded over her arm and thinking I might've made a mistake letting it go. Anyway she mailed it to me and I opened the box and there it was. Still sturdy. Still a little crooked in places. I sat and held it in my lap a good long while before I could do anything else. I don't know what I'm gonna do with it now. Might keep it. Might hang it where I can see it. That quilt been out in the world longer than my own children lived in this house. Lord.

had a piece in a group show last spring and someone bought it opening night. first time a stranger paid four figures for something i made. felt like i'd done something wrong so i kept the price low for months after, $200, $350, like i was apologizing for the nerve of charging real money. finally bumped everything up this fall. not stupid high, just... what i'd need to make it worth pulling all-nighters and buying real materials instead of dumpster cardboard. lost about 40% of my instagram followers in the next three weeks. the algorithm punished me or whatever. but the people who stayed? they're the ones who actually buy. or share. or send a note that isn't "love this, wish i could afford it." i'd rather have 300 people who get it than 3,000 who treat my feed like a museum gift shop they're just browsing. still feels weird every time i type a number into an invoice. like i'm about to get caught.

Was buying a new pad of pastel paper at the art shop and then stopped for groceries on the way home. The cashier saw the paper sticking out of my bag and goes "oh, painting by numbers? my grandma does those." I just said no and smiled. But I've been thinking about it all evening. Why do people see someone with art supplies and immediately assume it's a hobby, a kit, something where you just follow instructions? Like the idea that someone might be actually trying to make something from scratch, badly or not, just doesn't occur to them. And I know it's not a big deal. It's a random comment from a stranger. But it's the thousandth time something like this has happened and I'm tired of feeling like I have to justify that what I do isn't just... coloring inside someone else's lines. Anyway. Put down a portrait tonight that I hated and scraped off with a razor. At least that was my own bad decision, start to finish.

ok so my first ever "opportunity", a small gallery, kinda run down, I was so excited I'd have said yes to anything. and they wanted ME to cover the opening night drinks. like hundreds of dollars for wine for strangers. I did it because I didn't know any better. 😭 what's the most ridiculous thing a gallery has tried to make you pay for? or asked you to provide that made you go... wait what. I need to know I'm not the only one who got played early on

I sold a piece last month for 3,500 SEK. Small collage, maybe 30x40cm, took me about a week of evenings because I kept setting it aside and coming back. The buyer is a friend of a friend, not quite a stranger, not quite someone I know. She said "are you sure that's enough?" and I said yes like a reflex. Then I went home and realised I'd just told someone my time and materials and eye and everything I've learned are worth maybe 60 SEK an hour. I still don't know what the right number would have been. But I know I named it first and that was the mistake. Next time someone asks I'm going to say "what's your budget" and let them set the floor before I open my mouth. I've never done that before and it feels uncomfortable but less uncomfortable than the walk home after underselling yourself.

opened a delivery today and genuinely could not remember ordering it. just stared at this tube of pyrrole orange like it was a stranger in my house. which it is. i don't even like orange. i have never once thought "this painting needs orange." yet here we are. checked my paint drawer and i have three different brands of the same dull green i used exactly once in 2021. my brain saw a color chart at 2am and decided that was the move. the tube is still in the box. feels like a specific flavor of art delusion where buying the thing and using the thing are the same satisfaction to my brain. the paint sits there and i feel like i'm being productive. anyone else's studio budget just... a series of impulse purchases that never graduate into actual paintings? or do some of you have self control

A friend from years ago asked me to paint her daughter's portrait for her 18th. I said yes at €600, already half what I'd charge a stranger for a 50x60cm oil on linen. She's a friend, fine. Then the emails started. "Could you do it from these five photos instead?" "Actually she's wearing a different dress now, can you change the colour?" "Her hair is shorter than that photo shows." "My mother thinks the background should be lighter." I repainted the face from new reference, adjusted the dress twice, scraped and repainted the background. All told I probably spent close to 25 hours on a painting that should have taken maybe 12. At my usual hourly rate for commissioned work that comes out to about €24 an hour. My assistant, who stretches canvases, makes €16. So I earned roughly the same as the person who stretches my canvases, for a job that required twenty years of training. The friend was happy. The daughter cried when she saw it. Beautiful moment. I don't regret it exactly. But I sat down afterwards and did the math and realised I'd basically given her a €1,200 painting plus a free workshop in how to manage an artist. Never again without a contract that says: one reference, one revision, anything beyond that is a new fee. Curious if anyone else has a number attached to the "learning experience" of a commission that ran away from you.

I've been doing this thing the last year or so where instead of trying to flog prints to strangers who've never heard of me, I just trade with other artists and makers. Potter gets a hare linocut, I get a mug. Woodworker gets a heron, I get a stool. That sort of carry-on. And what I didn't expect, half the commissions I've had this year came because that potter showed the print to someone who walked into her studio, or that woodworker hung it in his workshop and a customer asked where it came from. It's the slowest funnel in the world but it keeps working. I'm not even trying to sell at that point, I'm just swapping because I want the thing they make. The other thing is it got me out of my own head about pricing for a bit. Nothing resets your sense of value like holding something someone else spent ten hours making and thinking Jesus that's worth more than twenty quid. Makes you price your own work better too. Anyone else doing this or am I just building a very eclectic house one swap at a time?

A woman from Tokyo found my work through the Mithila Art Institute page, wrote to me on WhatsApp. She wanted a wedding scene, the full thing, the groom's procession, elephants, the bride under her covering, all the detail. I told her 15,000 rupees for that size, which is already low but she was a foreign buyer and I thought maybe she won't pay more. She said yes very quickly. Then she said she will send in US dollars through her friend's account. 250 dollars. I thought okay, 250 dollars, that sounds like a good amount, more than 15,000 I assumed. You know what I did? I did not check. My son usually handles the online payment things but he was out. The money came. I felt happy. Later my son came home and said, Papa, do you know 250 dollars is almost 21,000 rupees? I sat quiet for a long time. She paid me what the work was worth. I undervalued it myself, not even knowing the rate of my own currency. The embarrassment is still with me. Not at her. At myself. I told her 15,000 for a painting that takes three weeks of daily work and she paid me 21,000 anyway because she decided that's what it costs. A stranger in Tokyo had more respect for my labour than I did. Since then I always check the rate before I quote to anyone outside India. But that feeling sits. How many more times have I done this to myself without knowing? 🙏

she means well, she really does. but every time i show her a piece i'm proud of she looks at it, turns it around in her hands, and goes "muy bonito, mijo... pero esto te da de comer?" and like. yes? kind of? not really? some months yes, some months i eat rice and eggs for a week straight. but i sold a platter last week to someone i don't know, a stranger who just liked it enough to pay me for it, and that feeling is worth more than any "real job" i've ever had. she grew up in a different world. i get it. but i wish she could see what i see when i open the kiln and something actually came out right.

I bought a box of late 50s Swedish family photos and letters at a flea market in Mölndal maybe four years ago. Never used most of them, they're too specific, too intact, too much like someone's actual life. But I keep the box under my cutting table anyway. Now it's started to smell like damp cellar and old paper, the good kind. Today I finally opened it and sorted through. Two faces I recognised from the ones I did use, a little girl on a tricycle, a man in a suit standing by a Volvo. The rest are strangers. I don't know why I'm keeping them. Maybe I'm waiting for them to become anonymous enough to cut into. Anyway the box is open now and my whole studio smells like 1959. Not unpleasant but distracting. Might just put it all back and close the lid for another year.

someone bought the piece I made from my brother's old work shirts. the one I almost didn't put in the show because it felt too personal, like hanging my grief on a wall for strangers to walk past. the buyer didn't know any of that. she just said it reminded her of her dad's shed. all the things he kept that didn't make sense to anyone else. I wasn't ready for how that would feel. like the piece got adopted into someone else's story. like it's not just mine anymore. still crying about it honestly. good crying.

I have this old porcelain palette I've been using for maybe twelve years. It's cracked, the well in the corner has a chip that I keep meaning to sand smooth, and the patina of dried paint around the edges is so thick now it's changed the shape. My students look at it like it's a biohazard. But the thing is, I know exactly where every colour lives on it. My hand goes there without my eyes. I could mix a flesh tone in the dark on that palette. And when I try a clean one, a nice new piece of glass, even, I'm suddenly a stranger to myself. The mixes come out wrong. I'm hesitating. There's something about the accumulated stain of years that becomes part of the process. The ghost of a terre verte I mixed three weeks ago still faintly in the white. The smear of lead white that's been there so long it's practically fired on. It's not laziness. It's memory.

My Singer finally laid down and died this morning. Just made a sound I never heard it make before and then nothing. That machine has been with me since 1986, my husband at the time saved up layaway money for six months to get it for me for Christmas. I've sewed every one of my quilts on that thing, wedding quilts and baby quilts and funeral quilts, I hemmed my daughter's prom dress on it and my son's little league pants year after year. I went to the store today feeling like I was cheating on an old friend. New machine is fine, it's got all these computerized buttons and it threads itself and I'm sure I'll get used to it. But I sat down to sew just now and my hands didn't know what to do. The rhythm is all off. I guess that's how it goes. You spend decades learning a thing and the tool becomes part of you, and then one day you have to start over with a stranger. I know it's just a machine. But I had to stop and cry a little before I could even plug this one in. If you've been through this with a tool you loved, I'd be grateful to hear you got past it.