When I was a child, I wanted to be a fashion designer. My mother bought me all sorts of activities related to fashion—computer games that allowed me to design my own clothes, paper-doll kits where I could shape their outfits to my odd image. My dexterity was awful, so the doll garments came out about as well as you’d expect. I’d make dresses and skirts and tube tops out of duct tape, and I was always so impressed with myself because I knew how to fold the tape so that it would stick to itself and never to my dolls. As she always did with any of my interests, my mother emboldened me to keep stick with it. But like any six-year-old who’s dead set on what they want to do, it didn’t last long. I soon moved on to my fantasy of becoming a pop star.

Then it was music lessons, from piano to guitar to singing, every Saturday for about two years. Then, one day, the lessons just stopped, and my interests stopped with them. I’d find out later that it was because of money, or the lack of it. 

She’d been spending hundreds of dollars a week to keep me in those classes and spent even more on the instruments I used during practice. Even hiring a family friend hadn’t kept the cost of the lessons down, and with three growing children, it was impossible to keep my expensive hobby in the budget. Things needed money, that wasn’t lost on me, even as a child. I knew that sometimes I couldn’t have things because low funds got in the way. But it never truly clicked how expensive it was for my mother to keep up with my varying hobbies. Not until I went to college.

As a SCAD student, I quickly learned how expensive it is to be an artist. One trip to any bookstore or art shop can give you the sharpest reality check on what goes into painting a single picture, developing a photograph, or sculpting a vase. The materials for my first few Foundations courses ran me hundreds of dollars, and as someone who was already struggling to keep my head above water, this was a blow to my wallet and my ego.

 The reality is that for most people, when it comes to hobbies, the expense is our first thought. How much does this canvas cost? Are all the best paints really this expensive? The good brushes don’t come in packs of 12? To start being an impressive artist, you need semi-impressive tools to get started. You can’t exactly sculpt Venus de Milo out of Model Magic. So, when that $40 for clay turns into $70 because of tools, and then $150 for the pottery wheel, it’s supposedly justified by the fact that these materials are necessary for you to make the best work you can. 

That’s a harsh truth of fine artistry—money matters. 

Yet, I know so many talented people stifled by the costs of materials who can create incredibly beautiful pieces. Yes, everyone would like to have expensive materials, or the best stuff on the market, but art isn’t about who uses the fancier oil paint. Take my younger sister, who for my entire life was the fine artist among the two of us. Where I could hold a tune and play a few songs on a piano, she could sculpt, sketch, and paint. I was a writer, and she was a fantastic visual artist. She’d been that way since we were kids. What kept my sister from truly pursuing fine arts as a career path was simply that it took too much time.

Really, time is the most expensive material.  It’s so valuable that we’re always trying to find ways to price it, and no number ever seems large enough to justify the work we pour into something. When I see an expensive painting, something that is thousands of dollars, I know that I’m not just seeing the costs of materials. I’m seeing days of effort, of labor spent trying to get the lines perfect, and the colors to pop. I’ve seen my sister spend hours on a sketch just because she couldn’t get a line to look exactly how it did in her head. I’ve seen her erase and erase and erase then sketch and sketch and sketch again until she’s made herself so frustrated with the attempt. I’ve seen her spend hours crafting a human hand from clay, and I’ve heard the joy and passion she expresses when she’s surpassed her own expectations. 

I remember crying my freshman year because I’d spent three days trying to stipple a master copy of a Spirited Away scene. It was 3 a.m., and I’d cramped my fingers trying to poke dots in layers to get it to look right. I didn’t finish it, leaving me close to tears in front of the entire class. I told myself that I didn’t like drawing, that I couldn’t draw and it hurt to be surrounded by people who could. But really, I’d spent so much time trying to get everything perfect—all that time, and my piece to still looked horrible.

I told my sister this in a teary-eyed phone call. I expected some sensitive response, telling me it was going to be okay. But she just snorted. “Well, duh, it takes time to get better at this stuff. Did you expect to be an expert overnight?” I got annoyed with her at the time. But now I later understood why my sister was so good at what she did. Those hours she’d spent laboring over sketch, the seven class periods she spent sculpting a hand, that was her effort, her passion, her time. It’s what helped her talent come to fruition. She’d always been good at putting lines on paper, but she would have never been able to do so if it hadn’t been for the blood, sweat and tears she’d poured into it.

The cost of materials is high, but what will always be more frustrating is the thought of spending money on something you may not be good at. It takes time to become better at a hobby, every one of the Professors at SCAD have worked tirelessly to become the artists that they are, each painting hanging in our halls is proof of sleep lost over getting those details right. To be a fine artist, to be an artist at all, is to work. It’s to spend all of yourself on a piece, in hopes that you get it right, and to still not be satisfied with where you are artistically. It’s to keep going even after messing up a sketch a dozen times, and to spend too long trying to fold duct tape for a doll. It is expensive to be a fine artist, and yet so rewarding all at once.