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Okay, from a managerial standpoint, I'll put in my two cents about being aware of hours spent on a portrait. Some of you know I previously managed a portrait artist. One of the things we used was a log sheet of hours spent on each portrait. It wasn't to rush him needlessly, it was to have some idea how much time was actually spent on a portrait and how much he was making per hour. This included any hours planning, sketching, stretching and prepping the canvas, etc.
From there, we could evaluate whether all those hours were valid or not and what he could do, if anything, in the future to improve. Would it be cost efficient to train someone else to prep the canvases? Did he waste a lot of hours at the end fiddling needlessly because he really didn't want to let the portrait go?
That may seem to some to be a cold approach, but there was never any intention to short cut the quality of the portrait. We simply used a tool to help us make management decisions in the future.
Michael, somewhere in this Forum there is a post by Karin where she talks about putting in hours to really become a pro. Maybe it's the one called "So, you wanna be a pro?" If we could find that, it might address what you were originally talking about. But, I think this topic really spun off into a couple of different directions.
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