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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 keep almost not posting this because it feels small, but my mom pointed out it's the whole point so here I am. Someone found my work on instagram (which still feels fake to say, like who is out there FINDING my work) and commissioned a little painting of their dog. Not a friend, not a friend of a friend, a total stranger. And the money from it covered my groceries this week, which I know sounds like nothing but it's the first time I've paid for food with art money and I cried in the checkout line at Aldi. Like actually cried. Over frozen vegetables. The dog was a corgi named Mabel and she had this ridiculous grumpy face that I fell in love with. I spent three days on a 8x10 and I keep thinking about how her person is going to hang it in their house somewhere and think of her. Meanwhile my landlord just emailed about rent. Life is so funny like that. One door opening while another one is standing there with its hand out. Eight months into this full-time thing and I'm still mostly terrified but days like today I think it might actually work? Anyway if you've ever wondered whether the small wins count, they do, they're the only ones that have kept me going some weeks.

it went to a woman in Rotterdam who found me through a photo of a detail shot, the corner where his address is still legible under the wash. she didn't ask me to explain it. that's the part I keep turning over. it's the first thing I've sold that has his actual hand in it. a page from a repair manual he'd written his new address on in pencil, 2009, before he moved and before everything. I taped it into the panel and painted around it until it stopped being a document and started being a place. then I put it in a show anyway and priced it like I meant it, which took three tries. packing it up yesterday I had a moment where I thought, I could just keep this. there's no rule that says it has to leave. I taped the box shut instead. mostly I'm fine. slightly unmoored. it turns out there's a difference between making a thing out of what's left and letting a stranger take it home in a box.

Small thing compared to some of the wins here, but a man came up to me while I was sketching the old house on Sajjan Rao Circle last Sunday, watched for maybe twenty minutes, and asked if the sheet was for sale. Not "do you teach" or "my cousin also draws" or the usual. For sale. I quoted a number that I made up on the spot and immediately regretted, too low. He paid it in cash and walked off with it under his arm, and I sat there with an empty plastic folder and a pen and felt completely strange about it. Because now somewhere in Basavanagudi there's a stranger's wall with my wobbly verandah railing on it. That house is going to be gone by next year, the compound wall is already marked. I've given away plenty of sketches. This is the first one that went out into the world without me knowing where it landed. Still deciding whether that's nice or unsettling. Anyway. I am going to start quoting higher numbers, that much I've learned.

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.

I do open studio stuff now, which is a nice way of saying I leave the door to my studio open and hope someone wanders in. Last month a guy came in because he thought it was a garage and stayed 40 minutes. Bought a small oil head study for €180, cash, and told me it was because it looked "unfinished in a way that felt honest." Then he posted it on his own account. Not mine. His. In his hallway with a lamp I would have told him to move. That post did more for me than the last six months of my own grid. I have no idea what to do with that information. I've been trying to build this tidy little funnel of print sales and reels and it turns out what actually moves the needle is standing next to a wet canvas smelling like turpentine while someone talks themselves into it. Which is not scalable and I can't put it in a caption and honestly it makes me want to delete everything and just paint with the door open and stop pretending I understand the internet. Do any of you sell in person and just... not bother with the rest? Or am I about to talk myself out of something that's quietly working

Someone messaged me last week about a piece in the group show. Not the painting, a photo I'd printed small and hung low, out of the way, because it's of my brother's jacket on the back of a chair and honestly I almost didn't include it. She offered 900. Cash, no fuss, said it was "exactly the mood she wanted for her hallway." I said no. Then I sat with the email for two days wondering if that was stupid. Here's the thing I keep circling. If she'd said anything about the jacket, about the wear on the cuff, about the fact that it's still got a thread hanging off it because I never fixed it, I probably would've said yes. She didn't. She said hallway. I don't know if that makes me precious or if it means I'm finally drawing a line somewhere. My friend K thinks I should've taken it, money is money, and she's not wrong either. She sells to hotels and sleeps fine. Anyway the photo's still on my wall. Slightly crooked. It's the only piece I've made that I actually look at.

I spent four months on a piece for a small hall in Brno. Two hundred and forty kilos of scrap, doors from a demolished panel block, a whole wall of bicycle rims. I welded my thumb twice. The opening was the usual, people standing at the edges nodding at it like a horse they aren't sure they want to buy. Then a man in his seventies walked in, didn't look at anything, and cut straight across the middle. Right through what I'd built. He was going to the table with the wine. And I felt this relief, because for four months I'd been arranging the thing so it would be looked at, and he just used it as a shortcut. That's the whole job, I think. I've been making corridors for thirty years and I only noticed it this week. No point. I just wanted to say it out loud somewhere.

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

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.

sold a piece to a stranger in june. big one, took me like three weeks. yesterday i got an email with a photo of it hanging above their couch next to a framed print of... something from ikea i think? and honestly it looked wrong in their house. wrong scale, wrong colors for their walls, nothing matched. and i was weirdly happy about it? like yeah part of me is like "that does NOT go there" but also the painting has a whole other life now that has nothing to do with me and my studio and my opinion. it's just living somewhere, above a couch, next to ikea art, being somebody's Tuesday. that's kind of the whole point of making it in the first place. i don't know if i have a clean way to say it. it's just been on my mind all day. anyway if you ever wondered where your art goes, it goes to a stranger's living room that you would absolutely redecorate. liberating honestly.

six months of stuff was stacked in the corner of the studio. not art, just things. a broken fan, two crates of a friend's old slides, a lamp with the cord cut. i kept meaning to deal with it. dropped the whole lot at the reuse place on saturday. told myself i was done. got home and someone had already taken the lamp. 20 minutes. i don't know why that landed so hard. some stranger wanted the ugly thing i couldn't fix. i keep thinking about who they are and what room it's in now. i've been circling a piece about repair for a year and can't get the obvious version of it to mean anything. turns out you can't fake that from the studio.

I've been painting for twenty-five years and I've never once seen my own work properly hung in a real gallery. I'm always on the other side of the canvas, a meter away, smelling the linseed. Today the small gallery in Croix-Rousse put up three of my interiors for a group show and I walked in and just stood there. The light they'd chosen, the height, the space around the frames. It looked like someone else painted them. Better than I remembered. I think we don't know our own paintings until a stranger hangs them. Anyway. I was at the vernissage pretending to be calm and a woman I don't know stood in front of the one of the kitchen at dusk and didn't move for a long time. She wasn't reading the label. That's the whole thing, honestly. That's the moment you do it for.

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.

I painted over a self portrait in November. Full blackout, then I rebuilt the whole thing in about four hours, wrong on purpose, ugly around the mouth. I posted it at like 1am expecting nothing. It's now the only piece I've sold twice. First print buyer was a guy in Dublin who said it "looked how grief feels in your shoulders." Then a woman in Lyon bought the original. Meanwhile the two pieces I spent six weeks on, glazed and reworked and babied? Crickets. One of them is still leaning against my radiator. I'm not saying everyone should post the worst thing they make. I'm saying I had my "good" work and my true work and I could not tell them apart until strangers did it for me. I was cropping out the hand that shook because I thought the shaking was a flaw. Still don't fully know what to do with that. I keep making careful things and hating them and hating myself a little for making them careful. Also I stopped scheduling posts. I used to sit on a piece for a week "timing" it right. Now it goes up the second it comes off the easel, wet, glare in the corner, whatever. Sales went up. Not a ton. Enough that I noticed.

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.

150. A3, charcoal on toned paper, took me nine hours over two sittings. That was my number because she's a friend from the old days and she was crying in my kitchen when I showed her the first pass and I heard myself say "don't worry about it, 150." She tipped me 30 and brought me coffee twice. The piece is on her wall now and it's good. It's actually good. I'd put it at 700 if a stranger walked in. Probably 900 in a gallery, but that's a fight I'm nowhere near winning yet. What actually gets me is that this is the third one. Same friend group, same "oh you should do one of my mum," same me dropping the number before I've even finished the sentence. I do it because I'm scared they'll say no, and then I'm salty for a week about being asked at all, which is insane because I'm the one who priced it. My teacher-free education did not cover this part. I can put a mouth on a face that makes people go quiet but I cannot say the number without my voice doing a thing. Anyway. If anyone's cracked this, what do you actually say, out loud, in the room, when it's someone you love and the number is five times what you're about to say.

I got my first one because a woman who ran a framing shop liked a piece I'd left there to be framed and asked if I had more. That was it. No submission, no email, no walking in with a portfolio. Just a stranger being nosy about my stuff. Meanwhile I've cold emailed maybe a dozen galleries since and gotten one reply, which was "we'll keep you on file." so tell me how yours actually happened. the messy version, not the advice version.

So I did this commission last month, a little wedding gift thing, couple's pet portrait in watercolor, their dog who passed away. They had a reference photo and I got so attached to the story I underpriced it on purpose, like €120 for what I told myself was "a quick 6 hours." It was not quick. I did a full sketch, hated it, redrew the dog's face three times because watercolor doesn't let you fix a bad eye, you just start over. Real time ended up around 14 hours, plus paper, plus I ruined two sheets. When I did the math afterward I made like €6 an hour. My old café job paid better and I didn't have to cry over a dog's nose shape at 1am. The worst part is they were so happy and the painting came out genuinely good, one of my favorites I've ever done. So now I'm sitting here like, do I charge the next person with a sad story €400 and feel like a monster, or do I keep doing this and slowly fund my own studio out of my own pocket?? I know the answer obviously but I keep needing strangers on the internet to tell me I'm allowed to charge for the hours that actually happened, not the hours I hoped would happen.

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.