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I quoted 6,500 for a carved limestone garden piece. About 40 inches, one block, some undercutting on the base. Six weeks of work if nothing goes wrong, which it will. He said fine, when can you start. That's the part that's been sitting with me. I spent two days on that number. Went back and forth, trimmed it, told myself 6,500 was already pushing it for the area. He didn't ask a single question about it. I've been undercharging for years and I know exactly why. The first ten years I was just glad to be paid at all. That number got stuck in my head and I never moved it. Stone is slow. A block that looks fine on the outside can have a seam running through it and then you've lost a week and there's no one to bill. My old teacher used to say if they don't flinch, you left money on the table. He said it like a joke. It isn't one. So the question I'm chewing on is where the real floor is. I don't think it's a formula. I think it's whatever number makes you not resent the piece by the time you're finishing it. I've resented plenty.

did the thing everyone on here tells you not to do and raised my prices 20% in january. told myself i'd lose half the list, panicked about it for a week, then sent it. two people grumbled. one of them still bought. everybody else just... paid it. same turnaround, same three coats of cheap phthalo. which means the prices were too low for like three years and i didn't notice because everybody kept paying without blinking. that's the part that stings, not the raise. i was undercharging myself into a little depression about money and reading it as humility. anyway, invoicing still makes me want to lie down.

I did a small interior study for a friend of a friend last month. Small, 40×50, done from a photograph they sent. Nine hours of work including the drawing stage. I charged €90 and I was embarrassed to ask for even that. Here's the part I don't like admitting. I kept my atelier training in materials and glazing, the whole slow method, because I told myself that's what made it a real painting and not just a painted thing. And it did. But it also means my working speed hasn't changed since I was a student. I cannot paint fast and I've never wanted to. So every time I undercharge I'm not just losing money, I'm subsidizing someone's nice wall with hours I'll never get back. The friend-of-a-friend was delighted. Said it looked like a photograph, which nearly made me choke. But that's the thing, right. The people who would value what I actually do are not the people I keep giving the discount to. I raised my teaching rate last year and nobody blinked. I still haven't dared raise my painting prices the same way. €9 an hour before materials. I'd have done better stacking shelves in a supermarket and it would have been more honest about what the work is worth to me.

Now I want to tell y'all something and I don't want it to sound like I'm fussing, because I'm not. But I sold a quilt back in March, a full-size, pieced from my late aunt's dresses and a few of my own, and I charged $850 for it. Felt proud handing it over. Felt right. Then last week I got curious and did the arithmetic. Cutting, piecing, quilting by hand, binding. One hundred and nine hours, and that's not counting the two trips to the fabric shop or the night I sat up ripping out a seam I'd done wrong. Comes out to about $7.80 an hour. Less than I made at the phone company thirty years ago. I'm not sorry I sold it. The woman who bought it lost her own mother and she cried when she unfolded it, and that quilt is where it needs to be. But I've been quilting since I was nine years old and I have been undercharging my whole life, and I think part of me believed that if I named a real price folks would decide it wasn't worth it and I'd find out I'd been wrong about all of it. Anyhow. I'm working on a new one now, red and cream and a little off-kilter, and I believe I'm going to put a fair number on it this time. Haven't said the number out loud yet, so don't ask me. 🙂

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.

Did a forged and welded stair rail last spring. Twelve feet, fourteen balusters, hand-scrolled top and bottom. Quoted $9,500 installed. Client never blinked, which should have told me something. Steel went up between the quote and the buy. Not a little. The tube alone came in at $2,100 when I'd figured $1,300. I have a habit of not putting an escalation clause in the small jobs because I think it makes me look like a shyster. So I ate $800 out of my own pocket and told nobody. What actually chewed the job was the finish. They wanted a waxed black, and the wax has to go on warm in a ventilated space, so that's a full extra day with the shop doors open in March, torches running. I don't bill days like that. I bill the piece. That's the mistake. The piece is the easy part. The day after is what's expensive. The honest number was closer to $11,000. I'd have been paid it. They had the money and they liked the work. I'm 61 and I've been doing this thirty-plus years and I still undercharge on anything with a finish schedule, because in my head the finish is just "the last thing." It isn't. It's half the labor and it's the half that fails if you rush it. The rail is still dead straight two winters on, so I got that part right.

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.

I put 900 zł on a 10x14 pastel portrait last month. First time I ever said a number out loud without adding "but we can work something out" after it. My hands were shaking a bit, which is embarrassing to type. For context, pastel is fast compared to oils but it is not fast. Toned paper, the layering, the fixing between passes, the part where I sit with it two days and decide the jaw is wrong and start the whole lower half again. Eleven, twelve hours if it goes well. Then I did the actual math and it came to about 75 zł an hour, before paper and the fixative that costs more than I want to admit because I buy the good one. And here is the thing I keep turning over. I did not raise it because I suddenly decided I am worth it. I raised it because I had four commissions stacked in one week and I was not sleeping, and I thought if I say the real number maybe two people go away and I can breathe. Nobody went away. All four said yes, quickly, no haggling. One asked if she could pay extra for a bigger size. So now I am sitting here slightly annoyed at myself, which is a strange feeling to have about your own pricing. All those months of undercharging and calling it being realistic. I have another one to quote tomorrow and I have already written 1,300 zł on the scrap paper, and I keep looking at it like it is a typo. If anyone has gone through the jump from "please like me" pricing to the other thing, I would genuinely like to hear how the first few went, because the number itself was the easy part. Saying it without flinching is the rest of it.

Sold a large piece last month, 140cm square, oil and cold wax, three weeks of solid days in the studio. €1,400. I did the math after because I couldn't not. Between the good linen, the cold wax, the pigment, the turpentine, and what I'd have paid anyone doing the carpentry on the stretcher frame, materials alone ran close to €380. That's before a single hour of my time. Stack the hours on top and I'm somewhere around €7 an hour for the year of this trade I've been inside since 1992. Then yesterday a woman from the opening asks, very bright, what I'd charge for one of my "quicker, smaller ones." As if the speed is the variable. As if the three weeks is where the cost went. I said the same price per square metre and she laughed like I'd made a joke. She hadn't understood it was the price. I don't know if I'm undercharging or the whole enterprise is just bad math by design. Probably both. I've been afraid to raise prices for four years because the gallery says the market here is what it is, and the market is what it is partly because we all keep saying that to each other.

sold a 12×16 acrylic to a friend of a friend for $75 last month. nine hours on it. do the math, it's brutal, whatever, i've made worse trades. the part that's eating me is not the money. it's that she asked if i could "do something a little more colorful" and i said yes and then went home and repainted the entire thing in the palette i always use. same colors. vibrated my way into the exact same piece i already made. so i undercharged AND i folded on my own taste at the same time. which is the more embarrassing way to lose money? i think it's the second one.

I did the math last night because I couldn't sleep and I think I'm genuinely losing money on every piece I sell. Like a small drawing takes me 4-6 hours minimum, the big ones are 15-20 easy. I use good paper, good charcoal, fixative, all that adds up. $80 for something I spent 8 hours on is $10 an hour. I make more bartending one shift than I do from a whole week of selling work. But here's the thing, I'm terrified to raise them. Every time I think about listing a drawing for $200 I get this voice in my head like who do you think you are. You're self taught. Nobody knows your name. You're not even in a gallery. $200 for a piece of paper from someone's apartment? Please. And then I see artists with less skill (sorry, I said it) charging $500 for stuff that's technically weaker and I get so mad. But also jealous. But also I still won't raise my prices. My therapist says this is about worthiness or whatever and I told her maybe it's just about rent and being realistic lol. But I think about it constantly. Every time I hand over a drawing and take the money I feel a little sick. Anyone else stuck in the "I know I'm undercharging and I can't stop" loop? How do you break it without feeling like a fraud?

A college friend asked me to paint her parents' house in Malleswaram before they sell it. Old tile roof, that green gate, the whole thing. I said four thousand. In my head I was being generous because we go back eighteen years and she's been kind to me. It took me four sittings on location plus two days finishing at home. Paper, the travel, the auto fares, and I redid the roof twice because the light changed and I got stubborn about it. Last week I was at a group show and a painter I know, roughly my level, nothing fancy, was quoting eighteen thousand for the same size house portrait. Same paper. Same city. Same kind of work. I'm not angry at her. I'm angry that I did the sum in my head as "what would she be comfortable paying" and not "what is this worth." Thirty-odd hours of my life went into that painting and I priced it like a favour, which it wasn't, because a favour is something you give free. The thing is I have three more enquiries waiting and I don't know if I can say twelve thousand out loud without my voice doing something strange. That number feels made up. It isn't, obviously. It's just that I've been undercharging for so long that the correct price sounds like a lie.

ok so I've been undercharging for literally years. selling my little handbuilt cups for €25, small wall pieces for €60, telling myself I can't ask for more because I'm still learning and who am I etc etc. finally just... raised everything. cups at €35 now, wall pieces at €80. I did the math on a single piece the other day, €25 cup, took me about 2 hours from wedging to glaze, plus firing costs, plus the ones that crack or warp in the bisque. I was basically paying myself €6 an hour and pretending that was fine. raised prices on my online shop and at the last market. nobody said a word. same people buying, same compliments. one woman even said "oh that's all?" about a piece I was nervous to price. now I'm mad I didn't do it a year ago. what are we even doing out here, giving away our time for free?

I was so scared to do it. Had this 30x40 oil I'd been sitting on for months, couldn't sell it at $800. I was convinced I was asking too much already, like who do I think I am. Friend basically forced me to relist it at $1150 just to see what would happen. I thought she was insane. It sold in four days. To someone who had scrolled past it at the lower price twice. Now I'm looking at my whole inventory like... was I the problem? Was it always about the price looking too cheap so people assumed it wasn't valuable? Because that's a gut punch. I've been undercharging for YEARS thinking I was being honest about where I'm at, and apparently I was just signaling that my work isn't worth taking seriously. I don't know how to feel about it. Happy for the money obviously. But also pissed at the whole system. And a little embarrassed.

For seven years I billed other people's buildings. Architects send invoices for work that's already done, measured, approved, nothing emotional about it. Today I sent an invoice for my own painting. A small one, a balcony sketch of a house on Sampige Road that's going to be rubble by next monsoon, but someone wanted it enough to pay for it. The whole morning I kept going back and forth on the number. Undercharged myself twice, then sat there embarrassed and corrected it. My husband found me staring at the PDF and just said "send it na." So I did. It's funny because the actual hard part wasn't the painting. It was deciding that my work had a price at all. Architects know exactly what an hour of their time costs. Painters apparently have to relearn it every single time. Anyway. The money barely covers the paints. Doesn't matter. First one's out. Here's to the next few. And to Sampige Road houses getting a little something before they're gone.

the freelance logo job I took to pay rent is due tomorrow and instead I've spent the last three hours sorting my paint tubes by "vibes" which is just code for color families I made up. there's a pile for "weird browns" and a pile for "aggressive greens" and neither of them is helping me finish this logo. the logo is fine. the logo has been fine since Tuesday. I just refuse to close it. anyway the green section of my wall is looking incredible if anyone needs inspiration, absolutely free of charge, unlike my rates which I keep accidentally undercharging.