Thread by @kendrictonn

Had a request for a more specific breakout on the costs in producing a painting. It's not necessarily susceptible to an incredibly precise analysis, but let's give it an attempt, taking this 30"x40" figure from a few years ago as our example.

(thread)

https://twitter.com/MorlockP/status/1316386110923304961

Starting broadly, I'm not paying a monthly studio rental fee or anything, because I work at home. Finding a property that both suited my needs as a studio & my rather modest budget was difficult, but here we are.

If I were starting from zero, and presuming I can't use window light, I'd say I'd need about $150 in a simple, but decent easel, a good medium arm palette is about $100, and $2-300ish in high quality lights. These things will last foreverish, thankfully.

More consumable, but very long lasting if cared for, I guesstimate I use, eh, $3-400 in brushes. It's nice to have more, for redundancy and special purposes, and looking at my coffeecans-full makes me... uhh, want to vomit. I almost entirely use these:

dickblick.com/products/escod…

It looks like my basic set of paints would cost about $250 to acquire initially. I'm neither the thinnest nor the heaviest painter, so let's say, eh, I use 1/5th of that per painting? I use, almost exclusively, Michael Harding and Old Holland paints.

The painting surface, for this scale, I usually use a polyester canvas adhered to a wooden substrate. Roughly:

Wooden base: $70
Adhesive: $30
Canvas: $50
Oil primer: $75

So, quick-and-dirty guess, $225 to make the thing I'm actually painting on.

A piece like this, I'll generally have the model in for about 10-15 3hr sessions. Let's just say 40 model hours. I pay 15/hr here, which is higher than the local art college, but notable less than an art model would get in, say, Boston or NYC. Gives us $600 in model fees.

A hand made frame, hand gilded in imitation gold, will be about $35 per linear foot, plus, idk, $25/ea for the carved corners. That gives a total cost of $800, which, without checking my records, sounds about right; this was a slightly pricer frame than normal.

(Frames, btw, are sort of like suits. The price difference between having Hobby Lobby make you one, and having a craftsman make you one, is substantially less than the gain in quality you get might imply.)

These handwavy numbers get us to $1675 to put the painting on a wall. Show submission fees, shipping costs, etc, may further add to that before anyone actually sees the piece.

(I'll say as an aside that these are, call them, early-mid-career numbers for me! I've been making paintings, and reinvesting paintings in more paintings, for a while now, which allows me to be more profligate than is strictly necessary.)

Ah, "hourly rate for artist" was in the OP question, but tbh I have no idea. Aside from logistical legwork, I paint on these substantially when the model isn't present without track those hours.

And do we count the evening hours when I'm just staring at the painting & listening to Belle & Sebastian? I think they're important... somehow 🤔 Generally I expect to have these on the easel about 2 months, often with a last burst of work a few months later.