How To Price Your Artwork — Addendum
Articles of Interest: How To Price Your Artwork — Part 1
How To Price Your Artwork — Part 2
This is an addendum article to the two listed above, How To Price Your Artwork Part 1 and Part 2. In those articles I talked about pricing your artwork so that you meet your expenses and include a profit margin. I also mentioned that it would be a good idea to slightly inflate prices in case you had to do a little haggling when facing a client who either has less money or is offering less money than you’re asking.
Now, I gave only one model for pricing, the hourly rate model. Treat your painting / sculpting / drawing work as a day job and price it by the hour accordingly. Using this mode of pricing you’ll always be assured of receiving proper remuneration for the work you put into each piece.
The unfortunate drawback to pricing your artwork by the hour is that pieces of equal size may not be pieces of equal price. In the case of my own work, I’ve got paintings in my inventory which cost several thousand dollars more than others of a larger stature. That price is based solely on how many hours went into each work. The more technical I get with my painting the more time I spend on it. The more time I spend on a piece the higher the resultant price.
From an artistic standpoint this is a fine model. If I work ‘x’ number of hours I’ll get paid ‘x’ number of dollars.
From a collector standpoint this model may be viewed with a bit of skepticism. If you were in the market to buy a painting, walked into a gallery where two paintings by the same artist were hanging, saw that the smaller of the two was priced at two times the price of the larger, which one do you think you’d buy?
We live in a society where the idea of “more for less” has been pushed for a very long time. It’s ingrained in our culture now. Buy in bulk, get a discount. Going to the buffet and stuffing yourself silly is more cost effective than ordering modestly off the menu. This is a perception problem, not a rule as such.
Just because some retailers offer this fiscal option to their clients doesn’t mean everyone does or even should. But, should you find yourself in a situation where your most time consuming and subsequently most expensive piece just won’t sell, I’d like to propose another model for pricing your artwork that might help combat this consumer perception problem.
When I was at University I had a professor who taught my 4th year painting course. He had been quite well known for his work a couple of decades earlier and had enjoyed a decent level of income from it. Now, working as a professor at York, his career had waned from it’s previous pinnacle and he was living a little more modestly.
I talked to him about how he priced his artwork and he told me he priced his paintings by the square inch. The bigger a painting was, the more it cost to purchase. Because he had artwork still available from different eras in his life, he had two pricing schemes. Artworks from his heyday were priced at $4.25 per square inch. A square inch of any other painting he did before or after his time of notoriety would only cost a collector $2.25.
That means that an 18″ x 24″ painting from his period of fame would cost $1836. One of comparable size that he did yesterday would only cost $972.
If you find your sales are lagging because of the hourly pricing model I proposed in my previous two articles then this model of pricing by the square inch may work better for you.
To be fair to yourself, I would suggest that you still keep in mind what your expenses are and what you want your profit margin to be. I also think you’ll have to keep in mind exactly what your time is worth to you when coming up with a “per square inch” pricing scheme.
As always, my number one piece of advice when pricing out your artwork, and I cannot stress this enough, is do not give your artwork away! Just because the gallery down the street can’t get you what you want for your artwork doesn’t mean that another gallery in the next town can’t. There are six and a half billion people on this planet after all.
For now, that is all. Goodnight.
