From Bookmarks to Temples: What Time and Money Actually Look Like Across My Work

By Hansheng Lee – Lee Hansheng Studios | Art Collective International

I make a lot of different things, at a lot of different sizes.
A bookmark that fits in your palm.
A miniature landscape the size of a playing card.
A commission that starts as a quick sketch and grows into something neither of us expected.
A digital illustration of an imagined temple, built in layers over days if not weeks.
A large piece that takes over a whole section of wall.

People see that range and assume there's a simple rule underneath it~ small is fast and cheap, big is slow and expensive, and the price tag should just track the size of the paper.

It doesn't~ not really, and I think that's worth explaining and expanding instead of just letting people assume. So here's the honest version. What actually goes into a piece, across every scale I work at, and why the time and the money don't move together the way most people expect.

🔖 The Small Work: Bookmarks, Miniatures, Charms

I already wrote about miniature work as its own philosophy, not a lesser version of "real" art~ pieces under five inches, tiny watercolor landscapes, minature scrolls, the kind of work that asks for a magnifying glass more than a gallery wall. I won't repeat that whole piece here, but the short version matters for this one too: small does not mean quick, and it definitely doesn't mean less.

A miniature landscape at that scale takes the same steady hand, the same color mixing, the same compositional thinking as a piece four times its size, just compressed into a space with no room to hide a mistake. There's nowhere for a shaky line to disappear into when the whole painting is the size of a coaster. That's actually harder in a lot more ways, not easier.

But not everything small is priced the same, and that's the part people miss. A hand-painted miniature scroll and a batch of polymer clay food charms both fit in your palm, and they're priced completely differently, on purpose. The miniature is one-of-one, slow, and can't be rushed. The charms are made efficiently, several at a time, using a batch process built for repetition. Same rough size, completely different amount of actual time per piece, so completely different price. Size was never the variable that mattered. Process was~! 

📜 The Middle Ground: Commissions and Unforgiving Mediums

Then there's the work that looks modest but doesn't behave that way once you're actually inside it.

Commissions live here a lot of the time. I like the "play room" inside commission work~ starting from something small, a quick bookmark sketch or a rough mockup, and letting it evolve into something neither of us pictured at the start. That evolution is part of what I'm charging for, honestly, not just the paint that ends up on the page. It's the conversation, the revisions, the translating someone else's vision through my own hand without losing either one.

Some mediums also just refuse to be rushed, regardless of how small the final piece looks. I've been working with sumi ink and watercolor on traditional xuan paper this year, small-format scrolls, and that paper does not forgive. There's no lifting, no blotting, no quiet correction the way Western watercolor paper allows. A stroke that spreads too far spreads too far, permanently, and the piece either survives that or gets started over completely. I've ruined more paper this year than I have in a long time relearning that discipline. A six-inch scroll in that medium can genuinely take longer, and cost me more in ruined materials along the way, than a much larger piece in a medium I've had decades to master. Size tells you almost nothing about what a piece actually demanded.

🏯 The Large Work: Temples, Panels, and Pieces That Take Over a Wall

Then there's the other end of it. Digital illustration work, deeply layered, atmospheric, the kind of piece where I'm building an entire imagined space one pass at a time~ mist, architecture, light, the feeling of a place that doesn't exist anywhere but still needed to feel like it could. That work happens in stages over days and weeks, sometimes even longer, because every layer and decision changes what the next one needs to do.

Physical large-scale work carries its own version of that cost. A multi-panel painting isn't six small paintings that happen to hang next to each other. Every panel has to hold its own weight and also talk to the ones beside it, which means the planning happens before a single brushstroke does, not during. Composition, color, pacing across the whole set, decided in advance and then executed panel by panel, with the whole thing only really visible once every piece is finished and hung together.

This is where the hours actually pile up in a way that's easy to see from the outside. Nobody looks at a small watercolor and assumes it took thirty seconds, but people do look at a large, detailed piece and correctly clock that it took a long time. What's harder to see is that the smaller, quieter pieces sometimes cost just as much in a different currency~ precision instead of duration, ruined materials instead of hours, a medium that punishes the smallest hesitation instead of one that simply takes a while to cover.

💰 Where the Money Actually Comes From

So here's the actual answer to "why does this cost what it costs." It was never really about size. But more so about some combination of time, skill built up over years, materials (and how many of those materials I ruined getting there), the risk a medium carries, and whether a piece is one of one or reproducible.

A one-of-one large illustration and a limited print of that same illustration are not priced the same, even though the print might physically be the same size as the original. The print is reproducible. The original isn't, and never will be again. A miniature that took real hours of precision work isn't priced like a batch-made charm just because they're both small enough to hold in one hand.

The charm is efficient by design.
The miniature was never trying to be.

I'll be honest, I get tired of justifying this sometimes. I've written before about the unglamorous side of being an artist~ the spreadsheets, the pricing conversations, the fatigue of explaining, again, why a piece costs what it costs to someone who's only looking at the size of the paper. That tiredness is all too real. But I'd rather explain it clearly here~ than keep having the same conversation piecemeal in comment sections and DMs.

🌱 Why I Still Make All of It

I could simplify my own life by picking one scale and staying there. Just minis, or just large statement pieces, one clean price point, one lane. I don't want to, and I don't think I ever will. Because its not who I am~ and I refuse to self scrifice myself to fit someone else's idea of who I am and what I do. 

I make for myself first. That's a promise I made when I left the corporate world behind, and it's the real reason I still make bookmarks the same year I'm building out an entire imagined temple in layers. The small work keeps my hand honest~ there's nowhere to hide in a piece that size, and that kind of precision sharpens everything else I make. The large work is where I get to build a whole world and hand someone a piece of it. Both of those are real. Neither one is the practice version of the other.

If you've ever wondered why a tiny piece costs what it costs, or why a big one takes as long as it does, I hope this actually answers it instead of just asking you to trust me. The size was never the story. The time, the risk, the years of getting good enough to make it look easy~ that's the actual story, at every scale I work in.

~Hansheng