Why Creative Professionals Lose Money (And How to Fix Your Pricing)

I have worked for Fortune 500 companies and a long list of advertising agencies over the years. In all that time, across every type of client from corporate to mom & pop, I have noticed one pattern that never changes.

Artists apologize for their rates.

Not with words, necessarily. With behavior. They flinch when they say the number. They rush to explain how they calculated it. They offer discounts before anyone asks. They pad the conversation with justifications that nobody requested.

Lawyers don't do this. Accountants don't do this. The electrician who rewired my kitchen did not hand me a spreadsheet showing why he charges what he charges. He told me the number. I said yes or no. That was the entire negotiation.

But artists? We turn pricing into a confessional. And the client can feel it. They can feel the doubt. With some clients, that doubt becomes leverage they didn't even have to ask for. With other clients, they ask for discounts and low rates because they already know they can chew artists down. Chum is in the water.

The shift is simple (not easy, but simple): stop negotiating with your own feelings. Know your number before you pick up the phone. Know it cold, with the math already done, so that when the moment comes, you can state it the way a professional states it.

Done

Just create.™

copyright 2026 Howard Simpson

What a $1,000 Plumber Bill Can Teach Artists About Pricing

A factory machine broke down. Management called a specialist. The plumber walked in, listened to the sound of the machine, and tapped a single pipe with a small hammer.

The machine came back to life, then he handed over a bill for $1,000.

The manager wanted an itemized invoice. So the plumber rewrote it:

Tapping with a hammer: $1.

Knowing exactly where to hit: $999.

Artists hear this story and nod. Then they go back to charging by the hour. They go back to explaining to clients why they cost what they cost. They go back to showing their math like a student turning in homework.

Doctors don't do that. Lawyers don't do that. Plumbers definitely don't do that.

You are not selling your time. You are selling years of knowing exactly where to hit.

State the number. The number is the number.

Just create.™

art copyright 2026 Howard Simpson

Want to Ask an Art Teacher Anything? Skip the Awkward Email and Try This Free Tool

Commission in progress

 The Just Create Coach is my attempt to make my art teaching more accessible.

It’s free.

You can use it here:

https://www.abbadabba.com/freebies.html

It contains all the information in this blog and stuff in my brain. It's an easy resource to use.

That’s where much of my thinking lives. The coach I created just lets you ask questions instead of digging through posts, pages, and years of material. I used AI to make this interactive. 

For anyone who has an immediate reaction to AI, I understand the hesitancy. 

I’m using it to organize my own knowledge into a searchable tool. That’s the kind of thing I could not have afforded to build with custom programming. This is practical.

And it solves a real problem. People ask me if I’d talk to aspiring artists they know. I say yes. I give them my contact info. Almost nobody reaches out. I don’t think they’re lazy. I think they’re nervous. I was nervous too. So now they can ask the awkward question without the awkward email or phone call.

Try it.

If you stump it, tell me what you asked.

That helps me make it better.

Just create.™

art copyright 2026 Howard Simpson

One Way to Learn

 

I have so much unfinished art. I came across this unfinished piece while making room on my laptop and moving it to a backup drive.

At the time, I wanted to challenge myself in a few ways. I wanted to try that 1950s pin-up style. Second, I wanted to see if I could bring this washed-out photo to life. I also wanted to get better at hair. I've always disliked drawing hair, so I never put much effort into it.

I feel I was on my way to a good illustration. This didn't get finished, most likely, because I started it in-between jobs and then got busy with paying work. 

I must have done this around the time I created the hair video tutorial. https://youtu.be/Jd_4mjGH1u0?si=kZcGNC4yWvbhiFV_

The style I'm using looks like the 1950s. Not my usual technique. I created this video after not finding a hair tutorial that suited my needs. So I studied hair. I put what I learned into this video tutorial.

A lot of artists get stuck when they can't find a prepackaged way to learn. They want tips, tricks, and quick results. Not only did I learn more by studying hair on my own, but that knowledge is now mine. It's a part of me. I don't have to keep referring to someone else's tutorial.

Where did I learn? From hair stylists and barbers.

Seeing it now gives me an idea for something different I can do with this style. Won't get to it until next year. I have a big project I have to do first.

Just create.™

art and text copyright 2026 Howard Simpson

The Law is Catching Up to AI

The AI copyright debate is starting to leave the campfire stage.

For a while, it really was the Wild West. Models trained fast. Data was scraped faster. Artists were told this was just “learning” and “get used to it.”

That era is ending. Not because courts suddenly care about art. Because money, sourcing, and market harm are now on the record.

First, a baseline that still matters. The U.S. Copyright Office has ruled that AI-generated work, by itself, cannot be copyrighted. That decision limits ownership on the output side.

The real fight is upstream.

Bartz v. Anthropic put training data under a microscope. The case wasn’t about whether AI can learn. It was about what it learned from. Pirated shadow libraries, not legitimately licensed books.

The result was a $1.5 billion settlement. The largest copyright recovery in U.S. history.

The ruling split the issue into two:
Training may qualify as fair use in theory.
Using stolen data does not.

That distinction forced the settlement and sent a clear signal to the industry. Scraping without permission now has a price tag.

Then came Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence.

The court rejected the idea that copying copyright-protected works is harmless if the final output looks different. Intermediate copying still counts if you’re building a competing product. More importantly, the court recognized something creators have been saying for years.

Training data has market value. If there’s a licensing market, taking the data for free is not fair use.

California is now pushing that logic further with the bill AB-412, the AI Copyright Transparency Act. The bill would require AI developers to disclose what copyrighted works were used in training, and give creators legal recourse when companies refuse to answer.

This doesn’t shut AI down. It removes plausible deniability. For artists, this is a qualified win. Not a royalty system. Not full protection. But leverage.

The Wild West doesn’t end when everyone agrees. It ends when the rules start getting enforced.

 

Why I Don't Fear AI

 

Here’s why I don’t fear AI replacing what I do as an illustrator, storyboard and comic book artist.

AI can replace labor. It can’t replace an illustrator.

Not real ones. Not the ones who think, interpret, translate, and direct the eye with purpose.

Here’s why.

1. Illustrators don’t draw pictures. They shape meaning.
   Your process makes that clear. You read the script until the scene forms in your mind. You don’t start drawing until you see it. The mind is your first tool, not the pencil.
   AI doesn’t see a scene. It rearranges data. It doesn’t interpret subtext, pacing, emotional temperature, or intent. It simply imitates the surface.
2. Illustrators light a scene with purpose.
   You understand why a shadow traps a character’s emotion or why a hard edge focuses a reader’s eye. You’ve spent years observing how light bends around form and how it drives story.
   AI understands none of that. It renders “lighting style.” It doesn’t know why a character should be ominous in panel seven or contemplative in panel three in a graphic novel. Your mastery is rooted in the craft of storytelling, not aesthetics.
3. An illustrator makes choices. AI only outputs.
   Your thumbnails, your refusal to judge early sketches, your search for the one moment that carries emotional truth; these are decisions formed from training, taste, restraint, and experience.
   AI can’t choose with intention. It can’t feel when a composition is honest or when it cheats. It generates options. An illustrator creates meaning.
4. Illustrators bring lived history and influence to the page.
   Your lineage stretches from Windsor McCay to Jack Kirby, from Caravaggio to Alex Toth. You don’t mimic them. You absorb them. You understand why Kirby pushed perspective or why Caravaggio staged light the way he did. AI copies appearance without understanding lineage. It can’t synthesize tradition into something new.
5. Illustrators solve problems AI can’t see.
   Editors and Creative Directors hire illustrators for judgment. For pacing. For visual distinctness. For continuity. For deciding how the reader will move through a sequence of emotional beats.
   You understand the invisible mechanics: panel rhythm, line of action, silhouette clarity, balloon space, acting, and camera grammar.
   AI doesn’t know any of those rules. It imitates them when they are accidentally present in the data. It doesn’t apply them with intention, and it can’t troubleshoot a broken sequence.
6. Illustrators collaborate. AI doesn’t.
   A script is a conversation. You interpret, negotiate, push, question, and revise. You bring intelligence to the table. A collaborator.
   AI is a tool. It brings no perspective, no lived understanding, no creative friction. And friction is where good work comes from.
7. Illustrators create from identity.
   You don’t create for an audience.  Remember when you were drawing as a little kid.  You did that for yourself. Maybe you showed the really good ones to your mother. You create to stay alive. It’s breath. AI has no inner life to draw from. No unconscious to wrestle with. No inner child to reconnect to.
8. Illustrators bring value defined by time, cost, and experience.
   Your worth is not measured in hours but in your eye, your training, your storytelling instincts, your reliability, and your ability to solve visual problems no dataset understands. Your rates reflect that value.
   AI has no rate. It has no consequences. It has no accountability.
9. Illustrators evolve. AI repeats.
   You adapt to the story. You shift. You grow. You interpret.
   AI is static. A mirror of training data, not a mind that responds to the moment.
10. Illustrators create the work AI imitates.
    Without illustrators, AI has no dataset. It feeds on the very people it supposedly replaces. Remove the illustrators, and the machine starves.

AI can speed production. It can fill gaps. It can generate references, variations, and studies. It can serve the illustrator.

But it can’t be the illustrator. Because an illustrator isn’t the hand.

It’s the mind behind it. The taste. The judgment. The lived experience. The instinct sharpened by years of seeing the world with intention. That can’t be replaced.

Not by a model trained on pixels. Not by a prompt. Not by speed.
Only by another human who sees.