I’d pay $800 for that!

About a year ago I did a commissioned portrait for my wife’s friend’s 30th birthday. It’s a portrait of her two daughters:

It’s a good likeness and she was very moved when she saw it. In fact, I think it will hang in their living room for a long time to come. But I digress.

The point here is this: when I showed this to some people at work (I work at a major tech company in the Sacramento area), one of the ladies I work with said that the high-end portrait photography places are outrageously expensive but she knows lots of people that pay the exorbitant prices. I said that I would price this at about $800 if this were my full time job – it was about 28 hours of work – and she said, “I’d pay $800 for that.”

What?!

That’s right, the market is out there, you just need to TELL PEOPLE that you’re an artist – or at least impersonating one – AND how much your art costs. So now I tell everyone that I’m an artist and I have my URL in my email signature. I also have a business plan that’s about 30 pages long – and growing, because I’ve yet to add the 10 pages of handwritten stuff to my digital version on Google Docs. This blog is a big part of that business plan – and it’s really helped me to kick myself in the butt and get involved with my art again. Even if it never makes one red cent, I don’t care because I’m extremely happy that it’s done more to motivate me than anything in the last 15 years.

The portrait is very good, although I see my mistakes, the most notable one being that I should have both simplified and also pushed the darks – but I was working from a poor photographic reference (it was a surprise gift) with flash photography wiping out the details and flattening the features, and I was approaching my deadline (her birthday, a hard stop) so I left it as-is and she was very, very pleased with it, which made me very happy.

Is there an $800 portrait in your future? Or an $8000 portrait? I think there is in mine, I just have to start pushing for it again.