How Much Do Glassblowing Artists Make?

Learn from expert Ed Donovan how much glassblowing artists make in this Howcast video.

Hi, my name is Ed Donovan I’m here at DC GlassWorks. You can find us at We are a public access glass blowing facility, we also do metal and metal-casting and welding. We are primarily a teaching facility. We want to share with people the magic of glass blowing. It is an amazing substance and today I’m gonna be talking to you about glass-blowing. How much does a glass-blower make? Man that’s such a great question. For me almost nothing. I don’t, I don’t really have a sales per say, like my annual, if I were to, a starving artist is a really good way to describe a glass blower. There are some really successful glass blowers who make an amazing amount of money and if you look at the individual prices of an individual piece because glass is so labor intensive and so expensive to produce all of the equipment that you see is very expensive. The time it takes you to produce is extensive, the cost in order to make a piece of glass is pretty high. So when you see it in a shop you think “wow that’s a pretty high price for a piece of glass, if I were to be making those I could make a lot of money,” there’s an amazing video on the web that I saw that kind of pokes fun at people’s fanciful idea of how much money you can make in glass. And it was saying something along the lines of well, if I sold a pumpkin for $35 I could make a hundred pumpkins a day that’s like $3,000 I could make so many pumpkins and sell them. Well the problem is where are you selling all these pumpkins you are making? That’s kind of the trick. There’s a huge range in how much a glass blower can make, and so the idea that you can make this one thing and make it really well and make it really quickly is certainly kind of an alluring thing. Yet since it is expensive your clientele is probably not so extensive, so you need to be very careful about what you think you are gonna be making in glass blowing. I think it’s more important in my opinion to make glass because you love making glass; and after that then you can hopefully find someone who likes you made glass as well as you liked making it and therefore making money.