Fractaleria
Short answer: start with commissions from the people around you and with local craft fairs. Charge for the materials, the hours and a margin — never just the materials. And sell the piece hanging on a wall, not lying on a table.
What really sells
At fairs, what moves most are medium-sized, eye-catching pieces: hexagons, mandalas in vivid colors, designs that read from a distance. Huge pieces impress but sell little, because people do not know where to put them.
On commission it is the opposite: personalized designs win there — a date, an initial, the colors of a room — and they pay much better.
How to set a price
The most common mistake is to charge the materials plus “something”. The materials are the cheap part: what you are selling is hours and judgment.
A formula that works: materials + (hours × what your hour is worth) + 30%. That 30% covers what is always forgotten: transport, the piece that went wrong, the fair booth.
And a warning: if your price feels high, it is probably right. Crafts are given away out of habit, and that drags the price of the whole trade down.
Where to start
- The people around you. The first sale is almost always to someone who saw the piece hanging in your home.
- Local fairs. Cheap, and they give you something more valuable than the sale: seeing live what people look at and what they ask.
- Instagram. Not to sell directly, but so there is a place to look at your work when someone asks.
- Workshops. They usually pay better than selling pieces: you charge per person and everyone brings their own material.
The photo matters more than the piece
A good piece badly photographed does not sell. Natural light from the side, a plain background and the piece hanging on a real wall. Never on a table seen from above: you cannot tell the size and it looks like an object, not a work of art.
If you want to teach
Running workshops is the path with the best margin, but it takes more than knowing the technique: you have to know how to lay it out for another person. That is what the instructor certification is for.
None of this is a promise of income. It is what I have seen work, and it depends entirely on each person’s work.