How to Price Your Artwork | Part One | Top Tips

One of the biggest challenges an artist faces is trying to price their art. It can be a really emotional process because it's almost like putting a price on ourselves, and I want to share some ideas that are going to be really helpful for anybody wanting to sell their artwork. 

The biggest thing, which can take time, is to remove yourself from your work and don't hold that emotion against it. That's incredibly important because then you can let it go, you can add a price to it, and it doesn't become, “oh gosh, how am I gonna put a price to this? It's basically like I'm selling myself”.

I've put together an 8-step way of creating pricing for your art and I'm going to talk about how I priced my art when I first started out.

Factors to Consider:

When you are starting to put a price on your art there are a few things to think about. How developed are you? How long have you been doing it for? What is your skill level? And also, how confident are you? The more confident you are, the more likely it is that your prices will be higher. If you haven't been drawing for very long, it's probably a better idea to start on the lower scale of things. If you have been drawing for quite some time and you are not selling your work, it might be the right time to have a look at your marketing plan. Because honestly, it's never really about the pricing, it's more about how you're putting yourself out there.

Methods for Pricing Your Work:

There are lots of different ways of pricing your work. You can just guess what price you want to do, which is pretty much what I did at the beginning or you could go with a formula, you could go with an hourly rate, or you could go with researching your fellow artists and slotting yourself in around what they're doing.

Now, guessing is what I did from the beginning. I kind of went, "hmm, what do I feel comfortable selling my work for?" And for me, that was £40 and I built it up from there.

Another option is to use a formula. A lot of people use inch times the cost that you put on an inch. So, say you have an 8 x 10-inch piece and you charge £2 per inch, then you times your 8 by 10, which gives you 80, and then you times that by how much you charge per inch, which is 2. So that gives you a total price of £160, which actually isn't a bad place to start out.

You might want to go down the route of an hourly rate but, you do need to be quite careful if you choose to use this formula and think about your development, your skill level, about other artists around you, and how long you've been doing it. Because if you say "I want to earn £30 an hour" and then spend 30 hours, you are going to be charging quite a lot of money, which is great if you are established and your skill level and development are really good. But if you're just starting out it can result in quite a high starting point.

You can research fellow artists in the same genre as you, at the same skill level as you, the same development as you. If you are just starting out and you're wanting to put a price on your work, it's not wise to research somebody who has been in this industry for years because they're going to be further along their journey and likely to be more skilled and developed.

Once you've got your pricing, you can then start to think about how you are going to develop that. The way I raised my prices was, as soon as I had a couple of months of full books, I then increased my prices and that way you are raising your prices by a small amount on a regular basis.

I have been drawing now for seven years and I've gone from £40 to £1000 so, please don't think that you can't raise your prices because you absolutely can! To watch the full video click on the video above.