How to Price Your Art

If anyone knows, let me know.

I kid.

But this is something we’ve been working on for a while. What factors do you take into account? Size, complexity, mediums used? How you value your time? It’s enough to make you throw paint at the wall (I haven’t done that, I’ve only thought about doing it). Unfortunately it’s something that must be done if you want your pricing rubric to make sense to potential customers.

So what we ended up doing was assigning different values to paper vs. canvas, watercolor vs. acrylic and added in how much time we spent on the project and its size. We set my “hourly wage” at $20, a figure that will increase as I gain more experience and skill. After putting this all together we discovered that our sweet spot-the point at which we’re making and not losing money according to our rubric-is 8×8, acrylic and canvas. Anything smaller, especially in watercolor or on paper, just cannot be priced high enough (at this point in our career, at any rate) to justify working in those mediums or size. From this point on we’ll be experimenting with both acrylic and watercolor on canvas to discover what works best for our style of art (which is still and ever evolving). If you’ve visited my etsy shop you may want to look again: some prices have dropped. I have also organized it a bit differently in the hopes that the pricing will make more sense (i.e. I’m putting watercolor and acrylic in separate categories). I’m sure that when we’ve amassed enough of an inventory to participate in art shows we’ll need to revisit our pricing yet again, since we’ll not want to stand out wildly from local price points (but also not drop prices to rock bottom). I’ll need lots of coffee when that day comes.

And there you have it, how we price our art. Does that make sense to you? How do you do it differently? Let us know!

(If you’d like a more in-depth explanation of how we created our spreadsheet direct questions to Kerry, he is the amazing person who put it together, endured my cries of “what! I spent two hours on that piece and it’s amazing and you want to charge what!?!” and ended up with prices that make sense.)