Pricing Your Art
As a freelance artist or designer you need to take a professional attitude to your pricing and marketing. Our Guide to Desktop Publishing, Jacci Howard Bear, has an excellent guide to working out hourly and flat rates for desktop publishing. The same principles apply to artwork up to a point, but it depends on your market. For decorative and domestic art, realist work of various genres and so on, a visit to your local galleries can be useful. Find artwork that is similar to yours and use their pricing as a guide.
Portrait artists often tie the price of a drawing to the size and number of figures in the drawing. This is directly related to the time required to execute the work, so is a useful method and one that 'unartistic' clients can understand. As your reputation and demand for work grows, the price increases accordingly.
For other genres, I'm not keen on using hourly rates as a guide. You might need to consider it, especially if the work you do is detailed and time consuming, but there's the implication that more time=better art. And we know that this isn't true at all! Often a quick sketch can be a marvelous piece worthy of a generous pricetag. The art-as-manufactured item formula (overheads + materials + hourly rate x time) doesn't really take into account the aesthetic quality of a piece - you'll have a boring, overworked, labored-over drawing at $400 while a brilliant, dynamic ink sketch rates a measly $50.
Contemporary Fine Art is a different game and the value of this work is incredibly subjective. Art History guide Shelley Esaak comments on this in her blog entry on expensive art. A drawing can be an investment, the price the buyer is willing to pay depends on the future value of your work, as well as any intrinsic value within the work itself. Their perception of your professionalism and commitment, and your current reputation, are important factors then.
I'd be interested to hear how others tackle the problem of pricing. I certainly don't have a canned solution, but I hope some of these ideas might give you a starting place.
Comments
A very tough subject to tackle with. As an artist, I have always wondered why no yardsticks have been developed for pricing art. Does any work of art becomes expensive only because the artist is already famous, and sought after ?
The truth is ‘every artist would like to see his painting sold’. So his effort will be to make it ’saleable’, and pricing the work reasonably is one of the ways, naturally. How can any famous artist authoritatively say that any other artist is undercutting the value of art in the market ?
No doubt it is best left to the individual to decide the price of his work, but still, by some miracle, if some ‘yardsticks of pricing art’ could be implemented, I would be the happiest artist.
yes, darn and I was hoping for a quick, canned answer!
(ha!)
Actually, it’s a bit harder depending on where one lives. Myself, for example, living so close to Indianapolis (CW Mundy, Robert Eberle, John Dumont, Nancy Noel) and trying to use their art as a guide for my own pricing is a bit skewed.
CW Mundy, for example has a wife (Rebecca) who has worked at getting this guy up in the market. She’s a wonderful gal, too. Was at my second wedding because she and my ex-wife were good friends during high school.
I’m off subject, sorry.
Anyway, the concept of pricing one’s work according to area contemporaries has its drawbacks, especially considering the galleries shown at.
Around here, though, most gallery owners are willing to take the time to help adjust prices up or down, depending on what they feel th emarket is.
Thanx for the tips, y’all! Some great points!
Berry, that’s where the ‘reputation’ element comes in. Perhaps I should have phrased it more like “artists whose work is comparable and are at a similar point in their careers’.
I was hesitant to suggest asking for a gallery appraisal, as some galleries don’t like being approached for this sort of thing. However if you have any kind of familiarity with a local dealer, I’d certainly ask for their advice.
One article I read advised against overpricing, sayin that your price should always rise, never drop. My thoughts were opposite to that – I’d have looked for the highest price point my work could reasonably bring. That said, I’ve done quite a lot of absurdly cheap work to get some exposure.
I kind of look at the person who i’m doing the piece for. Good friends, nothing, acquaintance of a friend, $10.00 a hour, plus whatever else may pop up. I did a big project that took me 3+ months to do, I didn’t think under $300 was to much and the person paid. So like I said depends.
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