As I mentioned in an earlier note on Substack last week, I read a post on another social media platform where an artist was claiming to have made over 400,000 dollars last year selling original paintings and prints through his website alone. While I’m sure it’s possible, it seemed like a bit of a stretch, and the fact that he posted his approximated gross earnings online was a bit of a red flag. Being the ever curious guy that I am though, I decided to check out ht e comments section to see what people were saying and if anyone had questioned him or called him out on his claim.
The comments, hundreds of them, were all mostly along the same lines. Either congratulatory or asking him how he did it. What his secret sauce was, and that is where the inevitable BS raised it’s scammy head. His reply to almost everyone asking how he did it was “I can show you through my online course on how to market your artwork”. I know not everyone said yes, but some people did and if you had done a bit of quick math you would have known right out of the gate that this number, the 400k was a bit of a stretch.
In his post he claimed that 70% of his sales were original painting, and 30% prints of his original work. So lets do a quick breakdown of this scenario and see how it all ads up, especially when you factor in all the outside forces that eat into the thing he needs most to achieve his monetary goal – time.
70% of 400,000 is $280,000 dollars. If he sells his paintings for $1000.00 a pop on average he needs to produce 280 paintings a year.
If he works five days a week, that ads up to a total of 260/261 days a year. So he’s cranking out more than one painting a day. Doable but also questionable, and here’s why.
He needs to sleep, eat, go to the bathroom, buy art supplies, photograph the finished work, color correct it, size it, print it, manage his website, upload new work for sale, remove sold work from the site, correspond with interested buyers, potentially send those buyers additional photos, engage with people that stop by his studio, and on and on.
Each one of those tasks takes time. In a 24 hour day we subtract 7 for sleeping leaving 17 hours. Now take 2 for eating leaving 15. Take another 8 for painting leaving 7 hours to do all of the above only if you don’t have any other interruptions and the only thing you do is work, sleep, and eat. I didn’t even factor in things like personal hygiene, going to the bathroom, conversations, etc.
Let’s go back to the paintings versus prints sales for a bit. He said he averaged $1000.00 per painting and his prints sold for an average of $200.00. To hit the $400,000 mark he has to sell $120,000 worth of prints a year. That is 600 prints a year, once again doable but doubtful. That’s 1.64 prints a day for every day of the year like I said possible but highly doubtful that it’s probable.
Once agin we have to think about the time factor here as well. Let’s say he has a nice high end printer like an Epsopn SureColor P900 or a Canon Image ProGraph PRO 300. And let’s say he’s printing 13×19 prints of his 24×36 inch paintings. The print time is going to be between 2 and 5 minutes on average. Split that down the middle and you are looking at 3 minutes per print. Then each one of those prints needs to be signed, and packaged addressed and shipped. If he’s shipping flat they need to have a backer inserted to keep them from bending with some sort of protective acid free slip sheet between the print, the backer, and the plastic bag. All of that has to get inserted into a mailer of some sort. Probably 10 to 15 minutes of work all in all right?
Then it needs to go to the shipping facility. I suppose he could have them picked up, I mean he is selling $120,000 in prints a year but I doubt he is. So even if he batches things and takes a number of print to say UPS at the same time there is the amount of time eaten away by printing a number of prints, packing them, labeling them and dropping them off which eats into the 7 hours he had to create new work that he’ll need to photograph, color correct and set up to print later.
All of this comes back to something I said at the very beginning of this. His replies to everyone asking for advice on how to be as successful as he is. How to make $400,000 a year selling your art. He said I’ll show you how for a price. So, maybe he’s not making 400k a years selling art. Maybe he’s really making an unknown amount by praying on people desperate to sell there art and buying into the “You to can be an overnight success, and get rich and famous through social media” ploy.
Like I said, his claim is doable, but highly doubtful and a bit of quick calculating and thinking about his claim shows it right off the bat. I’m certain that a number of people in the comments bought into his pitch, or people clicked the link in his profile and signed up for his seminar. Hopefully most didn’t. Remember if it sounds to good to be true, it probably is.
The average salary for a doctor in the US is approximately $374,000 to $387,000 per year as of late 2025. So this guy is claiming he made more than your general practitioner in 2025 selling average landscape paintings and prints of them.