Reference photos and pricing

Not posted for a while so thought I had better put fingers to keys. Have been a bit under the weather for the past few weeks so have not got a lot done. Did manage to get out and take a few reference photos and have just started work on a horse picture.
On the forums there tends to be a lot of posts about pricing. This is always the hardest part when you come to sell your art. You need to find a balance between what people will pay and what you will work for. New artists tend to under price by a vast amount, for example a recent one I saw an artist asked if £20 was too much for a work they had spent over 15 hours on, taking into account materials they would be working for about £1 an hour. Then you get the ones that only want to make back the cost of materials because its just an hobby. Now I don`t mind if people want to work for £1 an hour but it does have a knock on effect in that it de-values all art. I try to price my work as fairly as possible taking into account the time it takes me to do a piece and the cost of materials. My commission work prices are based on that as for my other work if it is in a gallery they take up to 50% commission so my prices have to take that into account as they would be upset if a customer said `I can get that at half the price on the net`. So I hope this helps people understand a bit more about pricing.

 The person this portrait was for has now got it so I can post it at last. This was taken from a photo taken at a wedding and this person is only one of the people in the photo. Also the print is only 6" x 4" so the actual face was quite small. I scanned the face at high resolution and then re-sized to a workable reference size. The problem with working like this is that there is very little detail in the photo so unless you know the person or pet it is hard to get a good likeness. Sometimes it is better to tell a client that the photo just is not good enough to work from rather than produce a painting they are not happy with.

This is the landscape I finally got round to doing. It is South Stack Lighthouse on Anglesey. I have been intending to do this for some time now, it is 10" x 7" on Ingress paper. There is no sky line in this because without having a boat the only way to get this view is to stand on the cliffs across from it which are higher so you are looking down.
Thats all for now will post again soon.