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I just finished a 50x65cm interior piece for a client in Paris. Painted it over about six weeks, it came out well, one of those where everything clicked. She paid my price without blinking, €1800. Pleased with that part. Then she asked me to deliver it framed. And I thought yes, fine, I'll take care of it, I know a good framer. The frame cost €520. The glass alone was nearly €200. I ate that cost because I'd already quoted her a flat price and felt stupid going back. So my real rate for the painting dropped to €1280. And that's before the canvas, the oil, my time. I'm not sure what the solution is except to state it upfront: "Prix hors encadrement" and mean it. Or add a framing fee that's transparent. But I know myself, I'll forget to say it next time too, because I'm thinking about the painting and not the business of the painting. And then I'll be pissed off again. Anyone else have this? The hidden costs that feel too small to mention but add up to a real bite.

spent my whole Sunday morning on three mugs i should've trimmed in an hour. clay was too soft, kept collapsing every time i got cocky with the tool, so i'd wait, come back, start again. by the third one i just put on a podcast and gave in to the pace. the one good thing is i've learned to read the leather-hard better now. you feel it in the first pass, that little give. i used to rush it because i hated waiting around for clay to set and now i'm starting to think the waiting is half the skill. anyway the mugs look fine. wonky but fine, which is basically my whole brand. the kiln will have the final word thursday. 🫠

Most of the questions here are about getting in. I would like to ask about the warning signs. I'll go first, and it is not flattering to me. Fifteen years ago a small gallery took four of my watercolours for a group exhibition. The owner wanted a 50% commission, wanted the frames changed to match his other stock, and asked me to drop my prices "for the room." I told myself it was a learning experience and signed anyway. He sold one, paid me four months late, and used a scan of my Fritillaria on the cover of a brochure for a completely different show without asking. I should have walked at the framing conversation. That was the moment, and I knew it while it was happening. So, the question: what is the earliest red flag you have seen in a gallery, and did you ignore it or walk away? One that turned out fine is just as interesting to me as one that went badly. I would like to know what a warning sign actually looks like from the inside, before the benefit of hindsight. I am not asking anyone to name names, and I would rather you did not. I am asking what the sign was.

I spent six hours yesterday printing the same screen 85 times and somewhere around batch four I started having full conversations with myself out loud. The kind where you catch yourself and think, who am I talking to. Everyone warns you about the technical disasters. Misregistration, bad pull, ink drying on the mesh. Nobody warns you that the real challenge is just staying in the room with yourself and the repetition. It's almost monastic. Or maybe just lonely. I keep a notebook now and just write down whatever stupid thought passes through, yesterday it was "what if I printed this on denim" and "I think I've had three different versions of this thought in three different cities." Anyway. 85 prints, one registration error. I'll take it. But my god the silence gets loud.

so I finally did it. the small hare linocut, the one I've been pulling for years, the 8x10 hand-burnished job on that Japanese paper, went from 45 to 65 at the market last Saturday. sat with it for about a year and a half before I moved on it, kept telling myself the paper had gone up, the ink had gone up, the whole lot had gone up, and I still felt like a chancer writing the new number on the card. here's the thing nobody warns you about. two of the women who buy one off me every Christmas, the ones who've been buying them since I was set up beside the fish van, they both looked at the tag and then looked at me and one of them goes "ah, is that the price now?" and I heard myself start explaining. explaining. to a woman who's watched me sell these for the price of two pints since her kids were small. I gave her the whole speech about the paper and she nodded along and bought one anyway but I've been turning it over all week. sold eleven of them regardless. so it wasn't the price that was the problem, it was me standing there like I owed everybody an apology for it. my wife says I do this every time, that I'd rather be liked than paid, which is grand coming from someone who's never had to put a number on her own work. I know lads charging 120 for the same size print and I know lads charging 30 and the ones charging 30 are the ones who'll pack it in next year. I'm not going back. anyway. the two Christmas women will come round, or they won't. curious what ye do about the regulars when the price moves, do ye warn them first or let them find out at the table like I did.

There's a heron block on the bench since last week and I'm after getting to the bit nobody warns you about, which is the part where the legs meet the body. Sounds simple. It is not. Get it wrong and you've got a bird standing in a bucket. Anyroad, I carved it, pulled a proof, and the whole thing reads like a heron in wellingtons for the winter. The shoulders are too heavy where I tried to be clever with the shading and now he looks like he's been at the spuds all his life. The thing is, I know what's wrong and I know roughly how to fix it, and I still sat looking at it for two hours with a mug of tea gone cold instead of just doing it. Eventually the small lad came in looking for his crayons, saw it, and said "he's fierce fat isn't he." Out of the mouths. He's not wrong either. So it's back to the block tomorrow, take the shoulders down and stop being precious about it. That's the whole job really, being willing to cut away the bit you were pleased with. Put it up on the wall for the night so I don't have to look at him anymore. The dog's not a bit impressed either.

ok so I need to say this somewhere because my partner is tired of hearing it and honestly they're right. I did a little gouache commission last month, 11x14, a house portrait for a coworker of my mom's (mom's coworker, not even mine, which is its own whole thing). Quoted $260. Felt generous at the time, felt like a real artist number. It took me four sessions. Four. Because the roof had all this dappled light on it and I kept redoing the same three shingles like a maniac. Plus materials, plus the scan and a print of it as a thank you, plus driving it over to her house because "oh don't worry about shipping." By the end it was like $40-something an hour if I don't count the prep drawing I threw away. If I DO count it, it's less. And then she tipped me $20 and I almost cried, which, in fairness, might have been the sleep. The thing that's actually bugging me isn't the $260. It's that I quoted it off the top of my head in a two-second text. Didn't look at anything. Didn't think about size or complexity or the part where a house has like nine hundred windows. Just said a number because saying a bigger number felt rude. Meanwhile I've got a 5x7 in the same style I've been charging $85 for since art school, and those take me maybe two and a half hours now, so per hour they're actually not awful. It's the mid-size ones that are quietly eating me alive. Which I only figured out because I wrote every job down in a notebook this month like a responsible adult, and the notebook is mean. Anyway I think my 11x14 needs to be $400 and I've been sitting on that number for a week like it's a live grenade. Saying it out loud here so it stops being just mine. Nobody warned me that the hard part of full time isn't the painting.

I'm not joking, there's a 22x30 Arches block drying flat on the kitchen floor right now and I've built my entire day around not stepping on it. I wanted this soft wet-in-wet sky for a bigger piece, and I got greedy and flooded it, and instead of beautiful soft edges it did that thing where the pigment backruns and you get the cauliflower bloom in the middle of what was supposed to be a clear wash. Three years of formal training and I still do this when I'm impatient. Anyway, this is my eighth month full time and I keep noticing how much of my day is just... waiting. Waiting for a wash to dry, waiting for the light to come back to the window, waiting to see if the thing I just did ruined everything or made it. I don't know if anyone warned me about that part. The painting itself takes like an hour. The rest is standing around trying not to touch it. Also my partner asked why I was crouching on the floor staring at it like a weirdo and I said "checking for blooms" and they said "you made those flowers yourself?" and now I'm in love with them even more, so that's the story of my Tuesday.

Conservation work today, a 1930s Swedish geology textbook for a library. Beautiful binding, and someone had used a page as a bookmark. Not a receipt, a folded grocery list. Bread, coffee, some kind of fish I can't read the handwriting for. I photographed it before I let it go. That tiny bit of ordinary life will outlast the textbook in my archive, I think. It's the part of this job nobody warns you about. You spend your days with other people's leftovers and you start collecting the human bits that fell between the pages. I have a drawer of them now. Postcards never sent, one pressed flower, that grocery list. Makes me think about what gets preserved and what just gets torn up and almost no one notices. The book is the treasure. The list is the actual life.

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.

Right, so I'm two weeks into a block of a heron standing in the shallows, all that hatchwork around the water done, maybe three hours from being ready to proof, and the lino tears. Clean down the middle, right through the bird's chest. Not a crack or a chip. A catastrophic divorce. I stood there holding the two halves for a good minute. Then I laughed, because what else are you going to do. The dog looked up at me to see if I was alright and decided I wasn't worth the effort, went back to sleep. Two weeks. And the stuff I was using was perfectly good lino too, not cheap grey stuff, it just decided it was done with me. The funny thing is, I kept both halves. I'm fairly sure there's a way to mount them and pull them as two pieces, but honestly I might just frame the block itself the way it broke, it's sort of brutal and lovely. Or use the heron's head half for a smaller print. Give it a chance to redeem itself. Anyway. If anyone's got a method for rescuing a torn block, I'm all ears, but I'll warn you I've already talked myself into it being art. The missus says I'm a hoarder with a printing press. She's not wrong.

Did a commission last year, a big welded steel piece for a private yard. Took seven weeks, three hundred hours easy. When I invoiced her I did the math in my head and it came out to about $38 an hour. That's my day rate, and I've been charging basically the same number for ten years. The scare is that I know exactly which clients would flinch if I moved it. One of them has been with me since I was doing fabrication for hire in the eighties. He pays on time, never haggles, sends me work when I'm slow. Raising my price feels like saying his loyalty runs second to my wallet. So I don't. I just quietly eat the difference and tell myself the piece took longer than usual. A younger guy in my shop asked me the other day what I charge and I lied about it. Not even a big lie, just rounded up a little so I wouldn't sound stupid. Ten years in this and I still choke on my own number. That's the part nobody warns you about: it's not the clients you're scared of, it's looking at yourself and admitting what your time is worth.

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?

the first gallery that gave me a real conversation told me my work was "interesting but not commercial" and i didn't know if that was a compliment or a warning. turned out it was both lol. still think about it years later. what's the most memorable thing, good or bad, a gallerist has said to you that stuck? the kind of line you still replay in your head

Been meaning to say this for a while. If you're welding galvanized steel in your studio without proper ventilation, stop. The zinc oxide fumes will give you something called metal fume fever. Feels like the worst flu of your life for about 24 hours. I got it once in my twenties working on a stair railing in a garage with the door half open. Thought I was dying. Called my father thinking it was a heart attack. He told me to drink milk and go to sleep. Actually worked, but I wouldn't recommend the experience. Wear a respirator. Not a dust mask. A proper respirator with the right cartridges. Or grind the galvanization off the weld area first. Takes an extra ten minutes and saves you a day of shaking on the bathroom floor. That's all. Just something nobody warned me about and I keep seeing people skip.

okay I need to know if I'm the only one who saw the flags and walked in anyway lol one gallery I emailed back in my first year, the owner replied three weeks late, called my work "quirky" in a tone that felt like a warning, and the contract had a clause I couldn't fully parse. I signed it anyway because I was so desperate to have SOMETHING on a wall. it ended with them holding a piece of mine for months past the agreed return date and me having to basically beg to get it back. lesson learned the hard way. what's the red flag you ignored? did it bite you or did it surprise you and turn out fine? x

Raised my prices two months ago. Not by much, from 350 to 450 for a portrait. I had this whole spreadsheet argument with myself about it. The logic was fine. Someone actually bought one at the new price last week and I still felt guilty about it, like I'd overcharged a friend. But here's the thing nobody warns you about. The silence. Before, I'd post a finished portrait and get the usual little hum of interest. Now I post the same quality work and it's just... quiet. I know it's partly the season and partly the algorithm being moody. But I can't shake the feeling that the quiet is people deciding 450 is too much. The other part of me, the part I'm trying to trust more, says it's just that higher prices filter out the people who were never going to pay anyway. One buyer who treats it as a real purchase beats ten people who say "oh I love your work" and mean it as a compliment to themselves. I don't know. I keep going back and forth. Any of you who've raised prices and sat through that quiet stretch before it paid off, tell me it got better. Or tell me you dropped back down and it was the right call. I need someone else's spreadsheet.

Ok so the thing nobody warns you about with big figure work: you get ONE part right and it turns on you. I was doing the lower half of this standing figure all afternoon, mostly fighting the knee because knees are evil and nobody talks about it enough. Got it. Finally got the shape and the weight and the little dent of shadow under it and I was actually pleased, which is rare and dangerous. Now the thigh above it reads like a balloon full of pudding. The kneecap is so good it's making the rest of the leg look lazy. I've been standing in front of it for twenty minutes doing that thing where you tilt your head like the angle is the problem and not the leg. Past me would have wiped the whole thing. I'm not doing that tonight. I'm going to eat something and go to bed and tomorrow I'll fix the thigh. Probably. Unless I decide the knee is the problem after all. This is genuinely the dumbest job in the world sometimes.

Seriously. Had my phone plugged in and everything, then BAM. Black screen. No warning. Tried everything, it's just dead. We were talking numbers too, like, actual numbers. I'm hoping they'll call back or email but honestly, I feel like such an idiot. This never happens to me. Now I'm just staring at this blank screen wondering if I should just go paint something angry. Anyone else ever have tech betray them at the worst possible moment? So frustrated right now.

Nine hours on a charcoal head, 300 euros. She sat down, saw the first version, and just started crying, and I sat there not knowing what to do with my hands and then said the price out loud and it came out as 300. I watched my mouth do it. Couldn't stop it. Here's the thing nobody warns you about: the discount doesn't stay with that one person. Word travels. Her sister messaged me last week, lovely message, "my sister says you're amazing, she says it was 300." Now I'm either the artist who charges 300 or the artist who has to explain why she was 300 and this one is 900. And I already know I'll do a bad job explaining it because I'll feel mean. The worst part is I don't even regret it. That painting is good. She cried. But I did the math after, 300 divided over nine hours plus the paper plus the fixative plus the two days I couldn't work because I'd used my whole arm doing it. And I'm 31 and I still live in a flat with a bathroom I won't describe. How do you actually say no to the second person without making the first person feel like a charity case.