Pricing your art: 9 things to consider (that most forget)

PRICE WITH CONFIDENCE

To make money, you have to price your art. This is a high-pressure decision for many artists because it means placing numerical value on our most prized creations. But pricing your art doesn’t have to be nerve-wrecking and don’t worry — you can and should change it later anyway.

There are a few main factors to consider when deciding how much to charge: time, size, material. There are other factors to consider also, that many people forget: rarity, selling platform, location, diversity, and knowing when to change your price.

TIME

Make it worth your time. By that I mean pay yourself a decent hourly wage. If you’re comfortable working for $12 an hour and it took you 3 hours, tack $36 onto the current price you’re thinking of. This structure is especially straight forward for original pieces.

And even if you’ve made multiple copies, many people keep that hourly wage price tag on as they sell prints of the same piece over and over and over. But this can be adjusted if you wish to lower your price for non-original prints or copies, which is what I do. If I can put time into something once and then sell it 50 times, I give this factor less weight.

Don’t let the comparison game get you down when factoring in time. Never charge yourself less than you deserve just because it took you 14 hours to finish a piece that other artists could finish in 45 minutes. Their work isn’t your work and your time is your most valuable resource.

SIZE

In general, the bigger the piece, the more you should charge. Larger pieces are assumed to take more time and use more material (even if it didn’t). A larger piece also takes up more space, giving it a heavier decorating power over someone’s home or office that they hang it in.

Some will tell you to charge exclusively by the inch or by the foot, but I think these formulas are time-consuming, confusing, and don’t always translate to match the real time and effort you put into any given piece. Instead, use size as just one factor to consider amongst the other 9. If you sell 8″x12″ artworks for $50, and you’re wondering what to price a similar piece that’s twice the size, charge twice as much: $100. If you feel uncomfortable with a price hike that high, try charging 25 percent more for something 50 percent bigger. Don’t pull out your calculator — it doesn’t have to be exact. Just create a rough scale you can rely on. As you adjust one, adjust the other so that they are proportionate.

MATERIAL

If your canvas costs $80, don’t forget to charge your buyer that. If you had to buy a new camera lens for that perfect angle, charge extra. If it’s a huge piece and you probably used up a whole tube of paint on it, charge it. Hell, tack on an extra $10 for materials you bought once upon a time but were used again on this piece (like brushes, stamps, glue guns, etc.) because you know those things aren’t cheap. Don’t be shy. You took the time to research the best products, went through the effort of buying them, and paid good money for them. These things need to be covered in your price if you plan to make any sort of profit or at least want to break even. Don’t let your art be an expensive hobby. Charge for all of your materials.

This principle is generally why acrylic paintings are worth more than watercolor paintings. It’s not about quality; acrylic paints are just more expensive in comparison. Photography can be expensive since a good camera alone can cost more than $1000, however, since it can be used again and again, you would never charge $1000 per photo. Keep this in mind as you find the pace of how long it takes to use up your materials.

RARITY

I’m going to say up front that this doesn’t always matter. Every original piece you make is one of a kind. Big whoop. So is everyone else’s. But it DOES matter if you have the ability to sell 500 prints of the same drawing on any given day and today you’ll be releasing only 20 prints of your new drawing. It matters if you paint your illustrations on antique portraits — how rare is the antique? It matters to collectors when you number your products. Is this pin number 1 or pin number 200? The amount you add is always situational. Use this factor when pricing your art if it really counts, but don’t abuse it.

SELLING PLATFORM

By selling platform I mean any service you have to pay for (or use for free) in order to sell your work.

For instance, galleries charge a commission on the work that you sell at their location. They’ve given you the privilege of being seen and sold in their gallery, so they take a cut. If you’re charging $100 for a piece, a 20 percent commission fee will give them $20 and you $80 after the sale. Consider this loss of profit when pricing art meant to be sold in this type of space.

It also costs money to host a website that you own and sell your work on, or to sign up for and use an Etsy account. Selling at street fairs or art shows sometimes costs money as well — event planners may charge for the vendor space, the application processing, or charge commission. These platforms help you tremendously by getting your work seen by a bigger audience, and I think they are usually worth the fees.

An easy way to offset the fees is to divide the cost to you equally amongst the things you expect to sell on the platform. If Etsy charges fees by the year, divide the costs by how many prints you typically sell in a year (If you’ve been selling for a short amount of time, like a month, roughly assume each month will be the same for sales and multiply by 12 and then divide the cost by that hypothetical yearly number) and tack that number on to each item. If they also charge per item listing, tack that cost on to every item. For platforms that you use for a shorter period of time, such as a vendor booth for the day, it’s a little tougher to guess how many items you’ll sell and thus harder to figure out how to spread the cost out. Each event is so different. Sometimes it’s honestly easier to not charge extra and hope the rapid sales will make your money back (my vendor folks will understand the reality of winging it here).

This rule becomes murky when you sell often using multiple platforms. You don’t want to charge wildly different prices in different atmospheres. Consistency is important — we’ll get to that in a minute.

LOCATION

I grew up in the Detroit area — and I don’t mean Farmington Hills. Because of this I was invited to a lot of homemade basement shows that didn’t cost a thing to get in. Also because of my location I charged significantly less for my paintings than a lot of other U.S. artists do. Frankly, no one in downriver Michigan at my age was willing to pay $300 for a painting. I understood; I was equally short on cash as my neighbor and no matter how much I drooled over a piece, I couldn’t afford that. Knowing others felt the same, I never charged more than $120 for any original work, no matter how large, and I sold prints at $10 each when I first started doing art shows.

Gasp all you want, but I went home with cash in my pocket, unlike other artists who priced everything at $200 and came home empty-handed. Low prices can be appropriate for a low-income area.

Fast forward to my first out of state art show: Chicago. I kept my price sheet intact, including my $10 print pricing. The sheer amount of total strangers who paid more for my work than I was asking for astounded me. I had one man pay more than double my asking price and flat out tell me “because you undervalue your work,” as he put the cash in my palm. My jaw dropped. This was not only flattering to my insecure artist soul, but it was a complete eye-opener. I needed to raise my prices!

People in my hometown had sometimes “overpaid” me, and I had always thought it was because they were my friend or my family member who just wanted to be nice and support me. But here was a complete stranger who slapped me right in the face with the truth: I’m selling myself short. That month I doubled all of my prices and planned to test them out at my hometown events.

Where you sell matters when pricing your work. However, these days, most artists begin selling online. This means the world is your oyster. How do you price for THE WORLD which is full of high income earners and low income earners alike?

Start with a hometown price, because most likely the people who will buy your work in the beginning will be friends, and friends of friends. Once you expand outside your city or state and see sales coming in from across the country, raise your prices.

WHEN TO RAISE PRICES

Obviously, you can’t charge beginner prices forever. People will begin to value your work more as you get better and establish relationships, so your prices should reflect that. But how do you measure your value? For starters, if your time, materials, or other costs to you rise, your prices should rise regardless of perceived value. That’s bare minimum. But if your basic art costs stay the same, you should still charge more if:

• You see a rising trend in demand in daily sales
• You feel like the value you give is way more than the value you earn
• You gain some sort of fame, such as going viral or making it onto a talk show
• You can’t sustainably reach a financial goal without working 70 hours a week

If you plan to change your prices, advertise it. Not only will it inform your audience and eliminate a surprise, but customers on the fence might decide to buy quickly before the price hike. Keep in mind when I doubled my prices, I went from a cheap $10 to a still-cheap $20. If you’re a baby-steps kind of person, try setting a solid base price and then adjusting by 20 percent your first time.

I you’re ready to raise your prices and want to know more about how to do this, read my blog post here.

DIVERSITY & CONSISTENCY

Know that while two people may admire your artwork equally, one might make $130,000 a year and the other might make $25,000. So cater to both admirers by having more accessible low-priced work alongside your high-ticket items. Cheaper art may come in the form of tiny paintings, prints, stickers, bookmarks or magnets with your work on them. More expensive pieces can be your original or large-scale work.

While you need a diversely priced shop, never charge different prices for the same type of item in the same situation. Buyers prefer consistency.

For example, if you’re selling two 8”x11” laminated prints at a gallery in Toledo, you would charge the same price for them even though they have different designs. The time and materials it took to create each separate original apply to the original, and any upcharge for time should be identical. Each paper print takes roughly the same amount of effort and cost to make.

If you prefer one design over the other, still charge the same price for both. Just because you prefer a design or attach sentimental value to it does not mean it’s objectively more valuable. Pricing with your emotions is a bad business decision. If you are having attachment issues with a piece, don’t sell it. Although I’ll tell you from experience that hoarding a room full of paintings that “I just can’t bear to part with” gets old after a while. Suck it up, sell it. At least as a print.

For example, ALL my 8×11″ prints are $30 regardless of the time or materials used the make the original. (Remember, these aren’t the originals.) ALL of my pins are $5 regardless of the design. ALL of my coffee mugs are $39. My commissions start at a base price of $225 and increase in $25 increments depending on the number of elements a client wants. These prices reflect the average costs of my selling platforms (art shows and my website). They reflect a worldly location since my sales are from all over. Everything is consistent, except for originals, which vary based on time, materials, and size. If you want to stalk my prices currently, check out my shop here.

SALES & GIVEAWAYS

Prices can be dropped or eliminated for the sake of marketing. Sales and giveaways give you a chance to promote yourself and your art while still getting your art into the hands of someone who will appreciate it.

Sales drop your prices drastically in light of some important event or time and are usually short-lived. Most of your effort goes into advertising that this will be going on in hopes of reaching the most potential buyers. Customers are used to sales in the form of “buy-one-get-one” or in percentage discounts. Don’t reinvent the wheel on this one.

Giveaways are easier on the artist because the audience does the marketing for you. Requiring the tagging of two friends on a post for entry into the contest means two more people each entry will see your work. Free advertising for free artwork? Sounds like a fair trade. There are many more ways to do this though which are equally beneficial. Since this is actually a super deep topic, I plan to dive deeper in another post in the near future. Stay tuned for that.

QUESTIONS ON PRICING YOUR ART?

Pricing your art doesn’t have to be hard. These 9 things will help guide you on your quest for finding what’s right for you and your product. Know that you’ll find a proper price tag and you’ll get the hang of when to adjust, but expect trial and error.

Dig more into setting a price for your artwork on The Carolyn Whittico Art Podcast here. I tell stories of undercharging, raising my prices and how reputation can take your income to infinite heights.

Remember: If you can’t figure it out, just set a price based on a wild guess! It doesn’t have to be perfect. Just start. Once it’s set, you can always raise it later. If you never set the price, you’ll never sell the painting.

Happy pricing!