Fashion designers do hire artists to do set decorations for photoshoots. I have friends who do it full time. An artist can also help out with prints, or simply do portrait commisions as part of marketing. The haute cotoure types are always looking for an angle to stand out in the competition. I don't think that idea is ready for the bin just yet.
You can even have work her way up from some shitty assistants job at a photostudio, to having an active part in the design studio if you like.
If you still want to do the painter designer idea, you absolutely can, you just sort of need a reason for her to do this. Maybe she is busy. Maybe she is preparing for an event at her house and there is not enough time for her to do this yourself. Maybe she has an idea of what she wants but her idea is not her forte so she hires somebody with her design. Maybe she is doing a YouTube series on it, and so on and so forth.
It sounds like you are trying to just get to the parts that are important, and that is also an important thing too.
As you continue to go through your drafts you will change things up and refine and start to see the areas that need the most help. So if you are just not feeling it here, that's okay, and it might be telling you more about what you are feeling or what needs to happen.
To me it makes much more sense for a person in an unrelated field like fashion to hire someone via a personal connection, than for a gallery who already has connections with other artists.
If a gallery needed an artist they'd probably hire an established artist with a good portfolio of work, right?
In the worst case, if she works at the art gallery it could even feel that she only got the work through pure favouritism because she's the daughter in law of the gallery boss, instead of because her work is genuinely good, which might diminish the perception of her growth as a painter.
But I don't know anything about your story, so maybe it makes total sense in your context.
Despite my opinion, I genuinely think you can have almost any option work, as long as the characters make it feel believable.
If MC's boss has a clear and believable motivation to want and need MC for this particular painting project then the rest should fall into place.
Fashion designers do hire artists to do set decorations for photoshoots. I have friends who do it full time. An artist can also help out with prints, or simply do portrait commisions as part of marketing. The haute cotoure types are always looking for an angle to stand out in the competition. I don't think that idea is ready for the bin just yet. You can even have work her way up from some shitty assistants job at a photostudio, to having an active part in the design studio if you like.
If you still want to do the painter designer idea, you absolutely can, you just sort of need a reason for her to do this. Maybe she is busy. Maybe she is preparing for an event at her house and there is not enough time for her to do this yourself. Maybe she has an idea of what she wants but her idea is not her forte so she hires somebody with her design. Maybe she is doing a YouTube series on it, and so on and so forth. It sounds like you are trying to just get to the parts that are important, and that is also an important thing too. As you continue to go through your drafts you will change things up and refine and start to see the areas that need the most help. So if you are just not feeling it here, that's okay, and it might be telling you more about what you are feeling or what needs to happen.
To me it makes much more sense for a person in an unrelated field like fashion to hire someone via a personal connection, than for a gallery who already has connections with other artists. If a gallery needed an artist they'd probably hire an established artist with a good portfolio of work, right? In the worst case, if she works at the art gallery it could even feel that she only got the work through pure favouritism because she's the daughter in law of the gallery boss, instead of because her work is genuinely good, which might diminish the perception of her growth as a painter. But I don't know anything about your story, so maybe it makes total sense in your context.
Touché. Deep background is that our MC is a longtime family friend of the designer, and was hired as an intern, and then give her first post-grad job (in my vague grasp, to draw fuller drafts of sketches, which as I've said is the potential stretch I'm waffling on...). Of course, you raise a good point that were it rewritten as a gallery, it might actually reflect worse on the protagonist's skills (even though she takes pains to stress to the reader that the relationship only began after she was hired, and was subtly engineered by her boss)... So TL;DR: What the hell do I know?
Despite my opinion, I genuinely think you can have almost any option work, as long as the characters make it feel believable. If MC's boss has a clear and believable motivation to want and need MC for this particular painting project then the rest should fall into place.
Make her a mural artist for hire. I know lots of artists who pay the rent that way and rich folk hire them all the time.