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I had a new student in my botanical watercolor class yesterday. She's a pleasant enough woman, retired, looking for a hobby. We were going through the basics of setting up a composition from a live specimen, a simple cyclamen leaf, and she asked, quite earnestly, if she could just take a photograph of it and trace the outline instead. I explained that tracing would defeat the purpose of learning to see, which is rather the whole point of the exercise. She seemed unconvinced. She said it would save time and look neater. I suggested she give it a proper try first, and if she still wanted to trace at the end of class, I would help her. She did not want to trace by the end of class. But the amount of energy I had to spend not saying "you are paying me to teach you to draw, not to show you how to avoid learning to draw" was considerable. I understand that people want shortcuts. I do. Watercolor is difficult and it takes years to develop any real control. But the shortcuts don't actually get you where you want to go. They just leave you dependent on the shortcut. I suppose I am old-fashioned about this. Learning to see, really see, is the skill. Everything else is technique layered on top of that foundation.

Went to restock on Arches paper today, expensive enough that I have to talk myself into it every time, and the guy ringing me up sees the blocks and goes "oh wow, you're brave, I could never do watercolor, too stressful, I don't have the patience." And I just stood there with my debit card out like 🙂 ok. Because what do you even say to that? It's not the first time I've heard it and it's always framed like I'm doing something weird and self-punishing instead of just... painting. Like it's some extreme sport. I don't go to the oil painting aisle and tell people they're brave for waiting three days for paint to dry. I know he meant it kindly. I know. But I'm so tired of watercolor being treated like the masochist's hobby when it's literally just the medium I fell in love with. Nobody tells a guitarist they're brave for playing acoustic. Anyway I bought the paper and went home and painted the same window I've painted forty times and it still came out wrong so maybe he had a point honestly

Okay so I'm eight months into full-time art and I finally have enough data to be genuinely confused. My original watercolors sell consistently, like every time I post a finished piece it's gone within a day or two. But I got a professional scan done of one of my favorites, ordered a small run of prints to test the waters, and they've just been sitting there. Like barely any movement in three weeks. And I don't get it because everyone always asks "do you have prints?" when they see the originals. I made them available. Crickets. My partner says it's because people who buy watercolors want THE thing, the actual one with the paper texture and the wonky edge where my tape was, not a reproduction. And maybe that's true and I should just lean into originals only. But also maybe I priced them wrong or my thumbnails are bad or I'm just not promoting them right. Mostly I'm annoyed I spent real money on the scan and the test run haha. But it's also kind of nice to know the originals aren't a fluke. Any other artists out there where prints flop but originals move?? Or am I the weird one who should've known better.

I was buying a new palette at this little art supply shop downtown, one I've been going to for years, and this guy maybe 60s just watching me pick out colors finally goes "you know, with watercolor, you have to work light to dark." Like I had wandered in off the street and picked up a brush for the first time that morning. And I laughed it off because I'm bad at confrontation but then I spent the whole walk home fuming at myself for not saying anything. I've been painting daily for like a decade. I have a BFA. I taught a workshop last month. But sure, random man at the art store, please explain the most basic principle of my entire medium to me like I'm five. Honestly the thing that gets me is I KNOW he wouldn't have done that to a guy holding an oil palette. Watercolor is "dainty" or "hobbyist" or whatever until you try to actually control it and realize it's the most unforgiving medium there is. One wrong wash and you're done. But okay. Work light to dark. Got it. Thank you so much.

I had a booth at a local craft fair Saturday and a woman picked up one of my acrylic landscapes, looked at it for a good minute, and said "oh this is nice, I could probably do this with my daughter's $5 watercolor set." And I just stood there like... okay. So do it then? I'd love to see you mix titanium white into a puddle of Crayola paint and get that kind of coverage on canvas. Please. Film it. I didn't say any of that of course. I smiled and said "you should give it a try, it's really relaxing!" and she moved on. My husband said I was too nice and I probably was but also what's the point. People who think art supplies are all the same are not people you're going to convince in one conversation at a folding table. Still felt like packing up my easel and going home though.

Okay so I'm still pretty new to pricing my own work without a professor or a gallery telling me what to do and I think I massively undershot this one. A friend-of-a-friend reached out wanting a custom piece, her cat, sitting in a sunny windowsill, very specific reference photo she sent, gorgeous light honestly I was excited about it. I quoted $150 for a 16x20 watercolor which is like... insane when I actually stop and think about it. That's easily 15-20 hours of work when you factor in the back-and-forth and the sketching and the masking and the layering and fixing the thing I inevitably mess up. I did the math after I sent the message and it came out to like $8 an hour and I just sat there staring at my phone. I'm not mad at her she was thrilled with the price obviously lol. I'm mad at me. I keep doing this thing where I price based on what I think someone will pay instead of what the work is actually worth. And I KNOW better. I had a whole class on this. But when it's real and there's a real person on the other end asking nicely I just fold and throw out a number that feels "fair" to them and not to me. Anyway she's picking it up tomorrow and I'm gonna smile and take the cash and then I'm gonna spend the whole evening updating my rate sheet so I don't do this again. For the fifth time. 🫠 Anyone else have a number they immediately regretted the second it left their mouth?

So I finally did the math on a commission I shipped last week and I'm genuinely nauseous. Small piece, 11x15, one of those moody rainy window scenes I'm always painting. I quoted $180 and I was proud of myself for finally saying a real number out loud instead of apologizing my way to $120. I tracked the time this time. 9 hours and change. That's $20 an hour before materials, and materials for watercolor aren't cheap when you factor in the good paper ($6 a sheet if I'm honest, I used two), the pigment, the brushes I'm constantly replacing because I'm hard on them. So really like $17 an hour. A barista makes more. I made more at the café job I quit. The thing is the client was thrilled. Thrilled! Framed it, sent me photos on her wall. And I sat there looking at her photos thinking "I am never going to survive doing this." I don't even know what the answer is. I know $180 for 9 hours is a steal for the buyer and a joke for me. But raising it feels like testing how far people's patience goes. What did you all do the first time you actually charged what the hours justified? Did people stop buying? I need someone to tell me the roof doesn't cave in.

ok this is going to sound ridiculous but i'm sitting here cleaning my brushes after finishing a piece and i got genuinely emotional over my old escoda. i've had this one brush since my second year of undergrad, it's a size 10 travel brush, the handle is all chewed up because i was a nervous student who bit her brushes (gross i know but i was 19 and stressed), the ferrule is slightly loose, and i've rewarped the bristles like three times with my mouth after bad cleaning habits. but it still holds a point better than any new brush i own. i literally cannot paint without it. i dropped it once in 2018 and my heart stopped for a second. i know brushes are technically replaceable and there's this whole "don't get attached to tools" mentality in art but like. NO. i AM attached. this thing has been through every single painting i've ever been proud of. it was in my hand when i painted my dad's portrait the year he died. it came with me to every shitty shared studio i've ever had. it's survived three moves and a minor flood. my partner bought me a fancy new escoda for christmas and i keep it in the wrapper because i'm scared to use it. i don't want to replace my old one. it's not the same. anyone else have that one tool that's basically a part of them at this point

Honestly the amount of my "studio practice" that is just me physically relocating my entire setup every 45 minutes because the light moved is kind of embarrassing. I have a desk. I have a window. But the window faces east so by noon I'm basically working in shadow and I refuse to turn on a lamp because it changes everything about how I see the washes. So I just pick up my block, my brush jar, my palette and I chase the sun across the apartment like a little lizard. My partner keeps finding random wet paintings on the kitchen table and the bathroom counter and once on the floor by the back door. I have a perfectly good studio corner I am simply not using because the light is wrong and I will die on this hill.

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.

ok so I'm at the art supply store today picking out watercolor paper, like actually taking my time because this stuff is expensive and I have a specific feel I'm going for for this piece I'm doing, and this older guy who works there comes up and goes "that stuff's overrated, you should try this" and hands me this cheap cold press that buckles if you breathe on it wrong. I said "oh thanks, I'm looking for the hot press actually" and he goes "no no, cold press is better for beginners, you'll get better results." like sir. I have a BFA. I have been painting with watercolor for eight years. I paint literally every single day. I did not ask for your opinion on my paper. and I just stood there holding my paper and being like "okay thanks" because I'm 26 and I still default to being polite and then I walked away and fumed about it the whole drive home. why do men do this. why is it always at the art store. I have never once had a woman employee at an art store assume I don't know what I'm doing. not once. anyway I bought the hot press and it's beautiful and I'm going to paint something really good on it out of spite. that's the plan.

Okay so I finally got my first "real" gallery interest a few months ago (still riding that high honestly) and the owner loved my watercolors but asked if I could do them on canvas instead of paper because "that's what sells." And I was like... watercolor on canvas is a nightmare?? I tried a few samples to be polite and they looked so sad and muddy compared to what I do on paper. I ended up saying no and I still wonder if that was stupid. Has anyone else had a gallery try to change their medium or materials? Did you bend or did you walk? I keep going back and forth on whether I was too precious about it lol.

ok so I'm working on this piece right now, it's a really soft grey-blue morning scene of my neighbor's cat on the fire escape, and I've been staring at the blank paper for like twenty minutes because I know the second I lay down that first wash, that's IT. there's no undoing it. you can lift a little but you can't un-wet the paper. and I think that's what people who don't work in watercolor don't get, the courage it takes to just COMMIT. every other medium you can paint over, scrape back, repaint. watercolor holds the record of every choice you made. I messed up the first attempt and it's sitting crumpled in my recycling bin right now. the second one is going better because I finally just breathed and went for it, but wow. my heart was actually pounding. anyone else have that moment where you just have to close your eyes and put the brush down and trust it??

Okay so I finally did it. Bumped my base commission price from €140 to €180 for an 8x10 watercolor, which honestly still feels low when I look at the hours, but for me it was a big leap. And the very next inquiry I got, this woman who'd been following me for months and was SO sweet in her message, she replied "oh that's more than I expected" and just... went quiet. Never heard from her again. And the thing is, I keep going back and forth. €180 for something that takes me like 6-8 hours including the sketch and the back-and-forth? That's still under €30 an hour. But also, I did the actual math on it and with materials (I use good paper, homemade honey watercolor, proper sable brushes that cost an arm and a leg) it's like €15-20 just in supplies. So I'm basically charging for my time at a rate that's less than I made scooping croissants at the bakery. The part nobody warns you about is how much the silence hurts. Like the polite rejection email I could handle. But the ghosting? My brain has been replaying that message for two weeks wondering if I should've said "well, I can do €150 if it helps." And my partner keeps telling me the right clients will come, and logically I know that, but also rent is due on the first. Hoping the next one who says yes makes up for it. Anyone else had the "I'll wait and see" regret thing happen after raising a price? How long did it take before it started paying off?

I had this little study going, just a corner of my desk with the morning light hitting a ceramic bowl, nothing ambitious, and it was genuinely working. The washes were doing exactly what I wanted, the edges were soft where they should be soft, I was so pleased with myself. And then I started "fixing" things. Just tiny little adjustments. A little more shadow here, a little more definition there. Twenty minutes later I had a muddy overworked mess and I just sat there staring at it like why do I do this to myself every single time. Watercolor is so unforgiving about that specific impulse. Oil you can scrape back, acrylic you can paint over, gouache you can reactivate if you're careful. But watercolor just sits there and lets you ruin it and you watch yourself do it in real time. I know the solution is to just stop. Walk away. Start something else. But man, the compulsion to keep noodling is so strong when something is almost there. Almost there feels worse than not even close, somehow. Anyway I started fresh and the second one is fine but not as good as the first one was before I killed it. Just needed to yell into the void about this specific flavor of artist self-sabotage. Does anyone else have a version of this or is it just me and my inability to leave well enough alone

so I'm shipping a painting to a buyer, right, my first sale in like two months that's actually a decent chunk of change, and I've spent 45 minutes bubble-wrapping this thing like it's a hostage situation. I get to the UPS store and the guy behind the counter watches me put it on the scale and goes "you know, you really should be using a rigid mailer, not a box, the box is gonna shift around in transit." and I'm like oh okay thanks but it's already packed pretty tight, I've got foam corners, it's fine. and he just WOULD NOT let it go. he's like "I ship art all the time, you're gonna get a claim" and starts telling me about the proper way to do it while I'm standing there with my debit card out. like sir I did not ask. I did not come here for a consultation. I came here to pay you $18 to put a sticker on my box. I know he was probably trying to be helpful but I was this close to being like "okay and how many watercolor paintings have YOU shipped that were still wet this morning and you stayed up too late stressing about the corners", I didn't say it because I'm a coward but I wanted to. anyway it arrived fine. no claim. I'm gonna frame that delivery confirmation and put it on my wall.

I did a custom portrait commission for a friend of a friend back in February. Watercolor, 9x12, pretty detailed reference photo of her dog who had just passed away. I quoted her $80 because I was still in my "I have no idea what I'm doing and I'm terrified to ask for money" phase and also she was nice and sad about her dog. 14 hours. I literally tracked it because at some point I was like wait this is getting absurd. $5.70 an hour. I had to buy a new tube of burnt sienna halfway through because I ran out, which was $12, so make that even less. She framed it and sent me a photo and I was happy she loved it. But I also wanted to cry a little bit. I think about that commission a lot now that I'm trying to take this seriously. Like what would I charge today? Probably $300 minimum. And even that feels like I'm making it up. I don't know when that stops feeling fake honestly.

Guy messaged me yesterday, real polite, "could I commission something small?" and I was like sure! love that. Then he sent me a paragraph. A full paragraph. He wants a 60x80cm painting (small?? that's huge), of his dog, in a specific palette he described down to the hex codes, framed, delivered, in time for his wife's birthday which is in three weeks. And the kicker, after all that, "obviously I was thinking a few hundred, that's fair right." I did the math on the hours alone and I almost laughed out loud. That's about minimum wage before materials. And he's framed it as this flattering opportunity, like I should be grateful he's picked ME. I told him my rate for that size and timeline and he went quiet. Haven't heard back. Cool. Cool cool cool. I think the thing that gets me is people genuinely don't see the labor. They see watercolor, they think it's quick, it's just water, right? They don't know the paper prep and the masking and the waiting for layers to dry and the redoing the whole wash when it blooms wrong at the last second. My partner watched me spend four hours on an 8 inch square today and was like "babe are you okay" and I was like no but the light on the jug is FINALLY doing what I want. Anyway. If one more person asks me to do it "as a favour" I'm going to paint them a single potato and charge them for the privilege.

I've painted the same window in my apartment maybe forty times this year and I still don't feel like I've cracked it. Same light, same chipped frame, same view of the brick wall across the street that my landlord swears he'll repaint. When I tell people I'm a watercolor painter they think it's soft, gentle, forgiving, and then they watch me ruin the twelfth wash in a row because the paper dried too fast or the pigment settled wrong and suddenly it's not so cute anymore haha. It's not that I can't paint other things. I can. I do commissions, portraits, still lifes, whatever pays. But this window is the one I come back to at the end of the day when no one's watching, when I'm not trying to be impressive. There's something about how the light hits it at 4pm in the fall, this warm dusty gold that only lasts about twenty minutes, and every time I try to catch it I get three quarters of the way there and then lose it. My partner keeps telling me to just do a bigger version, like scale is the problem. It's not. The problem is I keep wanting it to be a photograph and it needs to be a memory instead. Anyway I had a good wash today, genuinely, one of the better ones. Thought I'd tell people who might understand the particular ache of chasing the same thing over and over and being kind of in love with the chase itself.

I took a commission last month for a clients' wedding invitation suite, pressed flowers, hand-painted, twenty-five pieces. They wanted original watercolor originals, not prints. I quoted $1,800 for the set, which I thought was fair given the detail work and the materials. I sat down yesterday and actually tracked the hours. Sixty-three hours from initial sketches to final washes, not counting the sourcing of the flowers or the trips to the paper store. That comes to roughly $28.50 an hour. Less than I made as a graduate teaching assistant in 2003. The work is beautiful. The client is thrilled. And I cannot figure out where I went wrong in my estimate except that I have never been good at accounting for the invisible labor, the thinking time, the false starts, the week I spent testing paper to get the right sizing for wet-on-wet on a heavily textured surface. I charged for the painting. I forgot to charge for everything that makes the painting possible. I raised my studio rate by 15 percent this morning. It still feels like I'm guessing.