Does It Get Easier?

This is something I posted a while back, but felt the need to repost.

When I was young, I thought that if I worked hard and paid my dues, that eventually things would get easier/better. But the thing is, that work is just rewarded with more work. You may learn how to handle some things better, which can make things somewhat easier, but it seems that life becomes more challenging than less, even as you hone your skills, build your portfolio, the work load increases as you learn to do more and develop your talent. It takes longer to get your skills to the next level, and if you don't practice, you only end up sliding backwards. Aging is an additional drain on energy. Kids make things wonderful and complicated. It seems with every age there are some things gained and some things lost, as opposed to say an RPG where you ever increase levels and skills. Life is a give and take, and pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, isn't something found but built.

I took a lot of jobs for next to nothing in my youth, thinking that eventually better paying work would come. But in the end, I find that people just migrate to those they can exploit, and by giving your time and work away, you negate the good paying, career building work, not the opposite. Instead the byproduct is a social expectation to receive your work for free, to go to college students who don't know any better, or some softy that hasn't learned the value of their time yet.

When someone sees a price tag attached to a finished painting in the thousands or an illustration in the hundreds, they don't see the cost of materials or the fact that the artist is probably only making about $10 an hour off that painting IF it sells. Yes, that job may cost $800, but it also probably took 80 hours of my time to create it, and that doesn't count the booth fees, etsy fees, or other platforms to try and present it where people can purchase it.

People who would fight tooth and nail that workers be paid more for minimum wage will scoff at paying an artist for their time. Fundamentally this is a mentality that exploits artists on the grounds that it is a passion, but disregarding that it is also work. That's why it's called ARTWORK.

The problem is not only in the consumers but also the artists themselves. It's HARD to ask for money, because you know how they are going to react or you want to make someone happy. But ultimately by doing jobs for cheap, you could be using that time for something that pays, or at least doing something that you love that could pay off later in prints. 10 years down the road you will feel used and sad that you are scraping by, by not asking enough for your time. People expect you to give them a break or something for free, because you can just do it, or you can make another, and being an artist, I personally do it because I want to make other people happy with it. But I have had to learn to value my time, because so many people want to waste it. It's taken 10 years, and I still feel like a heel, but if I don't hold my ground, then I have no one to blame but myself.

My time is worth money and I have a skill that while not exactly rare, is very specialized, and I deserve more than minimum wage for my work. It may seem like a lot of money, but it was also a lot of work. If you wish to be paid for your time to do whatever you do, don't expect someone else, even if they are an artist, to not expect the same. You get what you pay for!