Mural Pricing Mistakes That Cost Artists Thousands (And How to Fix Them)

Pricing your work is your favorite guessing game, you say? Don’t worry. For most artists, it’s their least favorite - and frankly, it shouldn’t have to feel like one. This minisode gets real about the messy middle between undercharging, overthinking, and learning the hard way, with honest perspective from Alli K Design, the Off the Walls Murals team, and Kyle Mosher. From showing up to walls way bigger than expected to losing thousands on early mistakes no one warns you about, these are the moments that actually shape how artists start pricing with confidence. What comes through isn’t a perfect formula (because there isn’t one), but something more useful: a grounded way to think about your numbers, your time, and your value, built through curiosity, community, and experience. If you’ve ever second-guessed a quote or wondered if you’re doing it “right,” this one will feel like a conversation you didn’t know you needed.

In this episode, you’ll hear:

• Why pricing murals will never be a plug-and-play formula, and what to do instead
• How Alli K approaches pricing through curiosity, community, and asking better questions
• What a certain muralist learned about time, energy, and setting boundaries (including charging for site visits)
• The real cost of early business mistakes… and how Kyle Mosher turned them into better systems
• Why outsourcing the parts of your business you avoid can actually make you more money
• How to balance being the artist and the operator without burning out
• The bigger vision behind Off The Walls Murals’ work – and how pricing well allows you to give back in a sustainable way

Hit rewind on these episodes:

• Setting Your Prices as an Artist with Alli K Design
• Booking Brand Collabs with Artist Kyle Mosher
• Building a Creative Business with Your Best Friend feat. Caroline & Tianna of Off the Walls Murals

Resources mentioned:

• Make-A-Wish Foundation
• United Way
• Children in Crisis

Welcome to Brush & Banter—the podcast where creativity meets real-life hustle. Brought to you by Zibra, we go beyond perfect brushstrokes to explore the messy, magical, and meaningful side of being an artist. We’re here to bring you conversations with working artists, practical tips to grow your creative business, and a built-in painting companion for your next project. 

Brush & Banter is co-hosted by Brie Hansen, President of Zibra; Annie Bolding, Founder of It’s a Disco Day Designs; and Lauren Cooper, Founder of Rosemont Lane Design Studio.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:10

Welcome to another special episode of Brush and Banter. I'm Bree Hansen, president of Zebra, and co-host of the show. This week we're revisiting past conversations to highlight the moments that can really shift how you think about your business. In this mini show, we're getting honest about money, specifically some of the most common mistakes artists make when it comes to pricing, client expectations, and understanding their value. You'll hear from Allie Kaye, Off the Wall Murals, and Kyle Mosier as they share lessons learned the hard way. From underpricing projects to navigating client relationships to costly mistakes that changed how they approach their work. If you've ever second guessed your pricing or felt unsure about what to charge, this episode is here to bring a little more clarity and confidence.

SPEAKER_06 0:56

It's taboo. Pricing. So pricing is one of the hardest things I feel like for muralists. In fact, side note, my neighbor was, I was painting my garage the other day, and she was like, I was doing a crossword puzzle, and you know what it said is like, what's the most expensive art form? And then I guess the answer was murals, which makes sense because when you're pricing your work, like there's a lot that goes into it. The equipment, the all that, right? So what has helped you gain confidence in pricing your work fairly? And what do you wish more artists understood about pricing murals?

SPEAKER_01 1:32

Not hermiting your idea of what pricing should be. Um, you have to constantly talk, engage, figure things out with other people. It's a fine line because we don't want to just like monopolize, like, okay, everyone needs to charge the same. Like, I think it's against the rules. I don't know, something weird about that. It's helpful and you're going to be more confident knowing what other people are pricing, how they price situations. But it's also very hard. Like, I don't charge the same for every single project. It has so many different variables. So when someone's like, What should I charge for this? I'm like, Well, I'm gonna ask you 12 questions and then I'll be able to get to that answer. So it's definitely being curious, being curious about the project that your client is asking for, um, but also being curious about the people that are in your community, and it really is based on your community. I think it is hard to compare yourself to someone that lives in California or someone that's on the East Coast, like all of our living situations are a little bit different and people value money a little bit differently if you're in a big city versus if you're a rural country or overseas um and things like that. But if you're in a different city, if you're in town, out of town, how many walls are there available? Like that makes a huge difference. Um I wish there was a formula and it's like one last thing that we have to think about, and like this is the price, take it or leave it, but yeah, it's just having to be curious.

SPEAKER_02 3:10

Yeah. So you would say for someone starting out to kind of just reach out to people that are in probably the community or in a similar city or town to where they live, and just kind of ask questions before they even start.

SPEAKER_06 3:24

Oh, for sure. 11 years into your business, do you feel like for the most part you show up to the job and you're like, yep, I've priced this fairly, or do you feel like there's still those moments? I feel like every wall is different, the texture and the whole thing, right?

SPEAKER_01 3:39

Oh, never. I'm like for some reason when someone's like, Yeah, this is 20 feet, I'm like, okay, that's not bad. But then I get to 20 feet in person, y'all, is tall. Like 12 feet is like this is so much bigger than I was expecting. So I don't do site visits anymore. Um, or if I do, I I charge for them just to again protect my time. It's just so weird. Every time I do a site visit, it's like a 50-50 chance that it actually goes through. When I don't do a site visit, it always goes through. So I don't know, the energy is weird, but I know that I would not have that feeling when I get to the wall because I've already seen the wall, but it's fine.

SPEAKER_02 4:24

That means you're doing something you love.

SPEAKER_01 4:26

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 4:26

Okay, so often in your career and your journey as an artist, I think there's a shift that happens from when kind of what you were saying of when you're just creating, and now you're all of a sudden like, oh wait, I'm actually running a business. People are paying me for this. I have to like manage books and a schedule. And so talk about that transition and what that moment is like when you kind of realize that in your um Yeah, I mean, it's terrifying.

SPEAKER_00 4:53

Hire people that are smarter than you and better than you at those things. So true. Shout out my CPA. He said, Stop buying that $10 coffee.

SPEAKER_07 5:04

Um hold it up. It's here.

SPEAKER_00 5:07

Shout out my oat milk cold brew. Yeah, it's terrifying. I mean, I've made I I I've made every mistake that you could ever make as a as an artist, as a person, as a as running a business. I mean, for me, like I have to make these mistakes. Like I try to avoid them, let's be clear.

SPEAKER_04 5:25

Right, right.

SPEAKER_00 5:25

Don't go off making mistakes like on purpose. Like, I try to avoid making mistakes, trust me. I just know that I'm gonna mess things up. So it's like I gotta learn, I gotta one, be able to look at that as information, right? Like it's yeah, it's just information. It's like, okay, maybe the first time I ever got like a commission, I didn't realize that I was shipping it to Hawaii. You know, it's like I didn't take in count shipping cost. Yeah, and then I had a um who was the other, oh, I had a guy write me like a fraudulent check, and then they held me liable for it. So it was like $7,500. My bank was overdrawn. I was like, cool. Cool. I wonder how many $400 paintings I have to sell to make up for this $7,500. Like just stuff like that, where I'm like looking back, I'm like, oh my god, Kyle. Big old idiot. But I think that's where you know, the having people surrounding yourself with people that are smarter than you, which is not hard for me, but like, and being like, what should I do? How can I do this better? Being receptive to that information, and uh my assistant Allie, who you've met, I mean, she's incredible. Like, she'll challenge me on stuff, but in a way that it's just it's not coming from a place of ego. It's like genuinely like, you know, how do we make this mural better? How do we make this better for the client? How do we make this experience better for the client?

SPEAKER_07 6:40

And as an artist, sometimes I'm like, I just want to paint the pretty pictures. Why do I have to do taxes? Why do I have to do these things? And some of the best advice I've been given is just like the things that are slowing you down because you're afraid of messing up, outsource those things. Yeah, and account that when you're you know factoring in shipping costs and and like okay, shipping costs, but also I need to pay a CPA, I need to pay somebody to help schedule. Like, those are the things that as an artist, like if you can outsource those, like it saves the space in your brain to continue being creative, which is important because that's that's the moneymaker.

SPEAKER_00 7:14

Yeah, having that um the bandwidth to do other things is so important too. I mean yeah, being present, that's another thing, just being present with the art, the creation, and in just day-to-day life. It's like if I find myself drifting to being like, oh, I gotta, you know, what's what's this contract look like? You know, you're not being present with you know, that's another big thing too. Like running a business is knowing when to compartmentalize that. And when you have like, you know, when you are an entrepreneur and you own your own business, it's hard to compartmentalize. Like there are times where two, three in the morning you're working, and anybody who's a creative knows, and then there's times where you're a morning person and vice versa. So it's just um it's all part of the bigger picture of being a professional.

SPEAKER_07 7:57

What early conversations do you do remember having around like the expectations or money, or um, you know, like leaving your full-time job? Like, how did those kind of honest conversations start to unfold between the two of you?

SPEAKER_04 8:10

So I was a a staff accountant and I also have a marketing degree. So I naturally kind of took on that side. She was a graphic designer, so she naturally kind of took on that side. So it was very easy for us to just kind of naturally fall into our own roles in it. Um, but I do think that one of the things that was really important for us was we had talked a lot, we're dreamers, both of us. And so we had a lot of conversations about what we wanted to do, what the purpose of this was, like giving back is huge for both of us. We want to donate a lot of murals every year. We want to, we're actually, we'll talk about this later if you'd like, but uh, we're gonna be building a nonprofit as well. And there's just a lot that we are aligned on. And we had a lot of these pie in the sky convert conversations early on of like, where could this go? And you know, these conversations that don't even feel like possibilities at the beginning. And we were so aligned in that way that it just was very easy for us to naturally kind of build towards that together.

SPEAKER_07 9:17

We are curious to hear about this nonprofit and you know, the donations of murals that you guys have mentioned. So we'd love to hit to have you share a little bit about maybe what that looks like and what the future holds.

SPEAKER_04 9:27

Yeah, so one of our things is we like to donate murals. We've recently started doing interior decorating as well and doing whole room transformations. Um, one of the first conversations I think we had was we really want to do murals and room transformations for children's hospitals.

SPEAKER_03 9:47

Um like cancer wars, anyone that like uh domestic violence shelters, anyone that like really needs kind of a pick-me-up.

SPEAKER_04 9:53

We've done things for like the Make a Wish Foundation, the United Way, things like that. Uh, we did paint for Children in Crisis, which is a local uh children's it's a foster care system, but they're really unique.

SPEAKER_03 10:04

They have like their whole like own neighborhood and stuff, and they offer counseling and stuff like that. It's a really cool organization.

SPEAKER_04 10:10

The whole idea is we want to be able to paint for these people and not charge them. And we do that. We actually just recently donated a mural there, but we want to be able to do more than we are capable of doing in our schedule because we can only do a few per year at this rate. And so, in order to expand that and offer that nationwide, we are going to be starting a nonprofit where people can donate. And then once we've hit the X number of dollars, we can go do room transformations in like the um foster care rooms and things like that, children's hospitals, and donate that to the organization for free. But obviously, we're partnering with people who want to donate. If we had our way, honestly, every mural that we ever do would be donated to somebody. Like that's what we've talked about so many times is we just want to make an impact and make a difference. Cause I feel like we've been blessed with a talent that needs to be used for good. 1000%.

SPEAKER_07 11:02

For anybody who truly feels called to paint, all of us would say, like, I would do this for free.

SPEAKER_05 11:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_07 11:07

I would do this, like, and there is a world where, like, to some degree that's true, where these people don't have to pay for it. But you as an artist and as a working professional do still get paid. Um, and so I love this concept of you know, community fundraising and community building because everybody there's enough resources in the world for everybody to win, honestly.

SPEAKER_05 11:30

Yeah, speaking of, is there any like brands paint related or otherwise that have been like you want to shout out, like more than helpful in terms of donating for you guys? Or like have have you made any of those connections where you're like, oh wait, like muralists should know that like so-and-so company gives back and like wants to help too.

SPEAKER_03 11:50

So off the top of the head for me, I don't know if you can think of anything else, but Sherwin Williams has donated a few times for us, um, specifically for Make A Wish. And we're really close with a lot of like our rep and stuff. Um, so if we contact them and tell them about our projects, they've been really good about donating. Um, we have local people that have donated, like construction companies and stuff.

SPEAKER_04 12:12

I did recently hear though that Zebra has partnered with some of our friends from Ruby that have done communities. We've never even thought about, you know, talking guys. Um ask a while. Yeah, it's really cool to see like the most recent make-a-wish one that we did. We had two different local construction companies partner with us because we designed the entire space, which included new flooring and it included us knocking out a doorway to build. He was in a wheelchair, so we wanted to get the wheelchair from his bedroom to the bathroom seamlessly. Um we took out carpet, put down a floor, and built a larger opening. So two different construction companies actually joined us to help with that.

SPEAKER_07 12:53

Thank you for listening to the Brush and Banter Podcast, brought to you by Zebra. We're so grateful you're a part of the creative community. Gearing up for your next project? Head to enjoyZebra.com to grab your new favorite brushes, designed for comfort, precision, and serious creative flow. Be sure to follow Zebra Painting on Instagram for painting tips, artist features, and more. If you enjoyed our banter, subscribe on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts, and don't forget to leave a five star rating and review. Now, go make something beautiful. We'll be here when you need a little banter.