How do you figure out pricing for your products and services?
Pricing is really hard. I rely on other people – my friends and peer groups. It’s really important because it’s easy to lowball yourself and it’s easy to ask for too much. I really believe there’s a sweet spot and it’s important to figure that out.
Some people, like Patagonia, they usually have set rates. But then you go outside of the box – maybe you’re doing a video project or a ten-day expedition – and those rates change all of a sudden because they don’t have set rates for that stuff.
So it’s always figuring it out. It seems like it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been doing it for. It’s one of the hardest things of all, for sure.
Yeah, it’s been an interesting learning process for sure. I think every solo artist and designer has struggled with it.
The first couple of years it was chaos. I had no idea what I was doing. But I did myself a huge favor by constantly reaching out to designers and artists I looked up to and asking them questions. Sometimes I sent an Instagram direct message, sometimes an email.
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand and do my due diligence to know what the industry was charging. More than anything I think it just gave me confidence in what the base was so whether I went above or below, I at least knew what some other people were doing.
So that was super helpful. And reading general blog posts and articles from other people, listening to podcasts.
My rates have changed a lot over the last couple of years. I used to do a lot of work hourly. Now I really try to avoid hourly work and focus on project rates.
My rates will change depending on the client and project. If I’m working hourly I try to be between $75 and $150, obviously trying to be on the higher side.
In some ways there is a little bit of value-based pricing that I’m kind of thinking through. When I’m doing my project rates it’s based off of how many perceived hours will be invested into the project, and then I pad it a bit based off of how much I assume the client is going to be a pain in the ass.
Then murals I price based off square footage. And that’s a pretty set rate of basically $40 to $50 per square foot.
Two, three years ago, I could not charge the rates I’m charging now because I just didn’t have as refined of a design mind and a lettering hand. I think I just needed to build up my confidence over time.
I think now I’m comfortable charging as much as whoever charges the most. Not because I think I’m as good as them but because I understand the value of my own work and I know that things I create can help a brand make hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. And if someone is going to pay me 10, 20, 30 grand for that, that is an amazing win on their end.
I’ve seen my work do that for businesses and I know its potential so I don’t feel ashamed turning down someone who has $5,000 for a branding project when I want to charge $12,000.
The first [pet portraits] I did for free and then I was like, Hey, it costs 20 bucks if you want it. If not, I’m just going to put it up in a gallery.
People started showing the work to their friends and they started commissioning me to do their pets, and then the price changed. But I always wanted my art to be something that was cheaper because I know art can be expensive. I mean, it is a lot of materials, time and effort, but I wanted my stuff to be obtainable for everybody. I guess I was marketing myself much lower than I should have, but it booked me a year out and paid a lot of my bills.
I guess [I knew it was time to raise my prices] when every single person was like, You need to raise your prices. [Laughs] So then I just looked at what other people in the pet commission portrait business were charging for their stuff, how long they had been around and just tried to base it off of my experience and also how much I was spending on materials.
I’m sure everyone tells you that it’s pretty nebulous, right? But I still don’t know how to do it.
I remember asking when I went off on my own in 2014, How do I do this? What does this look like? My answer is still just as muddy as it was before, but I think you kind of gauge it.
I think the first important question to ask a producer or anyone that comes at you is the budget of the project. You also have to get a sense of who it’s for. That will give you a broad idea.
I definitely have internal set rates where I’m like, Okay, I would be very skeptical to go below this number for anybody. But what I would do for a national brand that I don’t really have any kind of connection with versus the small village where I was last week — those guys don’t have a ton of money. I think that plays an important role in it too.
For me it’s really important to do things I like doing. I’ve done projects that I don’t like doing and it sucked. So I’m pretty happy to give big discounts to jobs or causes I believe in. And usually it’s because of people. If I believe in this person, I want to help them out. And then I can lower my rates significantly.
Nate: It is difficult. We started designing our pricing on what it would take hourly to create a particular piece, based on complexity and size. And it was very difficult to keep it consistent or have—
Bree: Not be cheating people and not be giving some people deals and charging other people a lot. Because you just want to be fair and consistent and professional.
N: So we switched over and now we have it by size and a little bit of complexity. But basically per square footage and wood type.
So the larger the sign, the more money it’s gonna be because obviously it’s bigger. But as the sign gets bigger the price per square footage goes down a bit just so it doesn’t get astronomical. Now we try to keep it to 18×24” or larger, just because it works better with our medium.
B: And make it worth our time. We want to be biking and snowboarding. I mean, we obviously have bills to pay and don’t want to be arrogant.
N: And we have shop space and too little time. You know, it’s your time.
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B: You talked with a lot of professional photographers who were making money and giving you tips on what to charge. That’s a big part of it, too, asking what people are charging.
N: Yeah, I definitely worked with other local photographers who were already doing it.
B: He’d call sign shops, too, when we were first starting, trying to get quotes on signs for certain sizes. It keeps it fair too, you don’t want to undercut other people and make other people look bad.
N: Which I learned from the other photographers who are making a living from it. I sat down with them and was really nervous about talking to them. And this dates back fifteen, eighteen years. One of them said, I’m so glad you’re here – here’s my price sheet and this is what I charge. He said we can’t have people just trying to get into the business and undercutting all the people who have spent time doing this because then it devalues everybody’s work. And that resonated with me for sure. In photography, I had a hard time because I wasn’t confident enough. But later on in life, I was able to use the advice a lot.
Well, that’s a big one. It’s having the courage to ask people what they get paid on jobs and what they think you should get paid. Just doing it and learning, I think that’s probably the best thing. If you screw up, you’re going to do it differently the next time.
I think the market kind of dictates some of the stuff. There’s a pretty average price of $20 to $40 for paper prints, and you can do bigger, nicer paper prints for $70 to $100.
But mostly it’s just what it sells for. After selling for ten years I know the small canvas prints I have sell for $85. I have a lot of people who are like, Oh, these are so cheap, you should raise the price. And I’m like, If it’s so cheap, you should buy it, man, if it’s such a deal. But I know what it sells best at and sometimes that’s not exactly what I want for it. There is the sweet spot where I can sell at volume.
For originals, I’ve had good luck selling the originals, so I’ve continued raising the prices and kind of found a good ballpark. So I think that’s part of getting out there, showing and not being afraid to just sell your artwork. There’s a very purist, artistic sense that, Oh, you have to put a big price tag on it to make a sale. And it’s like, yes and no. Sometimes making a sale is making a sale. Making $500 is $500, you know?
So that’s kind of where I started. I started on the lower end and just said, I have a 2×4-foot canvas, it’s $500 to $600. I was showing at Boxcar Gallery in one of their studios, seven or eight years ago, and I was like, I don’t know what it’s worth — if somebody will pay me, that’d be great. It’s worth nothing until somebody pays you the money.
If I do an art show, the last thing I do is put up the price tags. I look at something – it’s not necessarily financially smart – but I think about cost of materials and need to find a home for it. I do $10.50 an hour times the amount of hours and then put $20 on top.
$10.50 an hour seems fair for doing something I like. There’s really no logic to it [and I don’t track my time]. I just think of something super reasonable. Now that you ask that, I have no idea how I came up with that. All gut feeling, but pretty standard. If I really like it, I charge more. Some are flat rates.
I just don’t charge a lot. It’s because I’m going to paint regardless and I don’t want it to stockpile up. If I make 200 paintings a year, I can’t hang every single one I like up in my own house. And some people like certain pieces more than the ones that I like the most.
So there’s no strategy. When the time comes to have a show and I look at the whole collection, I kind of look at the few that I really like. I’m okay with hanging onto some unless someone wants to pay what would be a typical amount for an original piece of artwork.
I guess I only price originals because all the reproductions kind of have a standard markup.
Originals are pretty much by size and content. If I did something a certain size then I put it in a certain price range, and if somebody wants a commission, I’d give them that price range and remind them that, depending on the detail they want, that will go up.
Right now I have somebody interested in doing a commission that involves Mount Alyeska so I gave them a price range for that and also said if they wanted their family blueberry picking or for someone to have on certain color shorts then that obviously would be more — that sort of detail costs more.
The art studio of Dawn Gerety, Artist in Girdwood, Alaska
I really like canvas sizes 36×48” and right now commission-wise that would sell pretty well for 4,500 bucks. I don’t know if I can fetch more than that. But I talk to my boss and I’m pretty flexible. [Laughter]
Material cost and, if it’s an original art item, I charge something for labor time. If it’s a print, I add something of a licensing fee, as if it’s a client licensing a piece of work for life. But I’m splitting it up over multiple people, which is a way for me to charge for labor on a reproduction.
When I start feeling like the work I’m putting into making something repeatedly is just too much for how much I’m making, I will either raise the price or retire that thing from my shop. The Ouija boards, for example, sold super well when I put the price really low, but I was spending a week sketching each one out, wood burning it, hand painting it and then coating the top in resin, which is really finicky to work with. I raised the price on those by $15 just to make it a little less tiresome to work on.
The bottom line is if you feel like you’re being robbed when you sell something, you need to raise the price.
When I went to ArtCenter I was in the advertising world for my internships and I was an art director so I bought photography. I learned the business kind of backwards. Everyone might have thought I was a ski bum with a camera but that wasn’t really the case. I came in and played ball with people. I asked for money. I asked for the value of photography. You couldn’t go off New York numbers, you were maybe asking for 1/4 of what the guys in New York shooting fashion were getting. But at the same time I wanted to ask for real money because other photographers were kind of giving it away for free — the lifestyle was enough for them, you know? But I was like, Whoa, wait a minute, it’s not enough, I need to make money, I’m married, I have a kid.
I didn’t have day rates, I had what I called a “situation rate,” and that could vary greatly. . . . I started with these situation rates because nobody is going to pay a day rate for six weeks in Alaska when you’re sitting in the Captain’s Choice [Motel] in Haines watching it rain for a week straight. It’s unrealistic to even expect that to happen. You’re lucky to get your hotel room paid for, quite honestly.
I didn’t want to be known as the cheap guy. Who wants to be known as the cheap guy? That’s ridiculous. So I was asking for good money and, in the ’90s and early 2000s, there was good money up about until ’08 when the bottom fell out with marketing departments and a lot of them didn’t come back. If they did come back, they came back differently and allotted their money in different places than they used to. Print advertising was essentially pretty dead by then and that was the big carrot, always.
For a lot of my trips I had to raise a tremendous amount of money to go hang out with TGR [Teton Gravity Research] for six weeks in Alaska, and I’d raise maybe 2/3 of it upfront. I just charged fees for “first look” — 5 or 10 thousand dollars — and then we would work on usage fees from there. I had such a good track record that a lot of people would take that gamble with me, so to speak, and help fund my trip. During the Freeze days I also had travel budgets. I would try to make my cake, which was paying for the trip, and then the icing was going to be the profit, you know?
With reproductions like prints and canvas prints, it’s based on a lot of different things, but that’s a very easy equation where retail should be double whatever wholesale is, and wholesale should be double whatever the production price is. And they’re limited-edition prints, so I put that limited quantity into that price point as well.
When it’s original stuff, which I do like to have some handmade original things that are smaller, it’s the time put into it, the cost of the actual materials and how much detail is actually in it. That’s always in flux for what I’m actually going to charge for it.
[For commissioned pieces,] with watercolor and ink it depends on the size and the details. For a 5” x 7” it’s usually $200 and an 11” x 14” is $850. And even though there is part of me that would want to charge more for it, I like charging that amount because I’m making it for somebody else, so the intention is different, and it feels like a little bit of a different process for me. For pyrography, it ranges from $125 for 1’ x 1’ to $850 for 4’ x 2’. [For raising prices:] I did raise my prices on my prints this year and part of that is comparing prices with what other artists are charging. Because I think it’s really detrimental when artists undercharge what they’re selling, both to the artists themselves selling that artwork, and to other artists around them.
The price of the actual materials changes, and I’ve got to pay for my new art studio. I’m always looking to improve my printing process and improve my organization process and the underlying cost of things.
But it’s more looking at what other artists are doing and just making sure that I have comparable prices and that I’m not undercutting anyone or overcharging. So it’s finding that nice middle ground.
Pricing is a difficult one. A lot of times I’ll get help from a gallery. I have a few friends who work at galleries and I’ll invite them to a pre-show. They’re good friends and they’ll be honest with me. They’ve seen my work grow and also have sold things of mine, so they know kind of where the market is.
One thing that I struggled with coming up, and other artists do too, is pricing stuff too low. If you’re going to take yourself seriously, you want other people to.
So this is really interesting — the whole pricing discussion is one reason why I got into murals. I had a show at a gallery downtown and I overheard these two women talking and they’re like, I love this so much but I just wish I could afford art. And as the artist I was just like, You love it? Just take it! And so then I was thinking, Who really doesn’t have money? And a lot of times it’s people who are on the streets or people taking the buses going to jobs and trying to make ends meet. So I’m really interested in murals because nobody has to pay to look at them.
It’s just art for the people.
There’s always a learning curve. It’s great when you work with clients who respect what you do and are more than willing to pay a decent price. Not having somebody who says, Oh, if you don’t want to do this project there’s 50 people behind you that’ll do it so take this money or nothing. Or, We have $200 — what do you mean you can’t design something that we can use on ten different products?
I was talking on the phone to one client about possibly working together and he said, Okay, so what would you charge for the design? And I said a number and he just started laughing at me on the phone. I was like, Oh crap. And then he said, No, you at least have to double that, if not more.
It’s great having a client who’s going to be totally straight with you and tell you, No, we’re not going to pay that — we’re going to pay you something that we know you should be worth. He told me not to accept less from people next time.
And then same with the art side of things, that’s always hard because sometimes I like to keep my prices reasonable because I want anybody to be able to buy stuff. I think that’s where having different levels of art — from silk screens to giclée prints to original artwork — helps. Anybody could afford a screen print, and then a giclée could be the next step up and a really nice piece for somebody. And then having the more expensive, original art for people who really want that original piece, you know?
Some people tell me I should double my prices. And I’m like, Yeah that would be great, maybe down the road at some point, but people aren’t going to really buy it at that price right now.
I try not to fluctuate things. It’s not like, Oh, I threw this huge number out there and it didn’t sell, I’m going to drop it. It’s talking to friends in the art world and seeing what they think are reasonable prices. If it’s an art show it’s more working with the gallery, talking about prices and then kind of sticking to them once they start selling at that price.
I’ll estimate it and charge a flat rate for almost everything. With design I’ll allocate 2 or 3 revisions in depending on the project, and if we go over that I’ll have my hourly rate. But that’s a last resort.
A lot of times I kind of stop tracking my time because I don’t want that to influence the work, even though at the end of the day I need to look back and make sure I paid myself more than $10 an hour.
[For fine art, one of the gallery curators he works with] was like, And this is the price you’re going to sell it at. They take 50%, which is more than the space I had just shown in which was taking 30%. So because a bigger chunk of it was taken, I had to also increase the price because I need to think about how much I need to get paid for one of the paintings and then I double it.It’s been fly by the seat of our pants. Just sort of flowing with it.
When we started, we thought we’d have this business that was just going to sell art and it evolved into this framing business. Then we also started doing furniture because that’s what Phil did before. But then it’s like, Oh, actually, we don’t really make money making furniture that’s custom because it should cost way more since it takes way more time.
So we scaled back and were mostly kind of learning which products work. What are the products that actually make money and that people want? We both wish we had gotten business degrees instead of art degrees. We’re both artists so it’s like artists trying to learn business by instinct, not really knowing what we’re doing.
[Advice to up-and-coming artists they work with:]Jon: It’s a basic idea of commodity brokering. I have always taught the younger artists coming in [to our print shop] that it’s much easier to sell 50 prints for $20 each to your friends than it is to have one of your friends in their early 20s who has $1,000 or $10,000 for you. Even if you want to do big paintings, start small. Everybody’s got $20 on them to help. Start building from there, start selling your paintings for less.
Get the photo of your work and make prints from that so that you have an artifact and a way to continue the revenue stream coming from that creative endeavor. Document everything, reproduce as much as possible, get something for “x” and sell it for “y.” Reinvest the profits, don’t go blow it on a fancy dinner. Put it back into the art project.
Lindz: I would say too that some of our artists try and presell prints on social media. They may purchase one or two prints from us and then put it on social media to figure out what that sweet spot is to charge their clients. They’ll look at the feedback they’re getting or not getting to help them know if it’s priced too high or not enough.
[For pricing their own work:]Jon: Selling a $5,000 painting in 2019 feels an awful lot like selling a $500 painting in 1998 for whatever reason — cost of living, cost of being an adult, responsibilities that come with that. But consistently raising the prices always.
Lindz: For murals the price is per square foot and that can range depending on the artist’s experience.
So when a client comes to us with a project and they have “x” amount in their budget, that may break down to $20 a square foot. That is below our rates but often times that’s when we’ll end up managing a project and bring in an artist who doesn’t have as much experience. They’re still learning the ropes so they’re not charging $55 a square foot.
Jon: Price per square foot does not work with mural pricing.
Lindz: Not always. Because if you are dealing with a very large square footage it may end up being $200,000 and that then becomes unrealistic for some clients. But the general rule of thumb is price per square foot plus supplies on top of that.
Jon: We have a number of what we want for our day to leave to go paint.
Lindz: Yeah. We know what our day rate is together if we’re working on a project that takes both of us out of [our print shop] and we try and stick to that when bidding a job.
Lindz: In Denver I would say $20 to $60 a square foot.
Jon: A beginning muralist is never going to get that price and they’re going to undercut it.
[For murals] I have a ratio. I do a price per square foot and if it’s smaller than such and such it’s this much, and for a bigger wall there’s a price for that. It’s kind of structured so I can just look at a wall and do a little adding up and give them a ballpark. And it depends on if you need insurance for the job or whatever. Also working in the billboard industry helps with [pricing] as well . . . seeing what they charge for painting walls and what that entails. [Pricing is] different when I do commercial stuff than when I do my own stuff. The ratio for a big normal wall is roughly 20 bucks a square foot. And then if it’s under 10 feet I do 30 bucks a square foot.
Then canvases are a whole different thing and it depends on what I’m painting. It’s kind of sizing. I generally do about $500 to $1,000 for a 2’ x 3’ up to a 4’ x 4’, the general doable size that you can ship. Once it gets bigger than that it goes up a lot more.
But as long as it’s easy to ship I try to stay under a thousand to keep it affordable. Because I’m pretty fast at it so I don’t feel like charging more. I could charge more but I don’t feel comfortable doing it because it’s easy for me. And plus it’s their dog, you know, so I give the dog portraits a little more leniency.
Usually [prices include materials but] I have a little leeway. Sometimes I’ll tack it on top, but if it’s for somebody who doesn’t have as much money I’ll work with them or I’ll do a lot of bartering. I’m down to barter. You have a restaurant, I like to eat, so I have a lot of barters around town that are nice to have. I can just go somewhere and have a drink and eat for free. Well, not for free, but it’s like, Put it on the tab!
Now that [Jaime Molina and I have] been working for so long, I can almost look at a wall and know what the price is.
Usually the way we work is kind of two-fold. One, we have per-square-footage pricing or a range, and that depends on the complexity of the piece, the materials we’re going to use, the surface, how intricate it’s going to be.
Then usually Jaime will come up with a price [on his own] and we’ll compare. Usually we pretty much come up with the same number.
That way we know if somebody’s trying to bid too high or too low. And then we can have a conversation about it and both agree on the number before we send it out. Coming up with the price is the easy part.
If a local business reaches out to me for their company party and they want a temporary wall painted or some kind of activation to make it fun, typically I’ll do the supply plus a daily rate. Like a thousand bucks a day is typically what I would go for, plus supply.
But if it’s a small commission for the community or a benefit for a good cause or for a good friend who’s continued to work with me, I’m willing to be more flexible and maybe do it for less than I’d normally charge.
Square footage-wise, I typically like to do that for murals, installations, stuff like that. On the low end, if I’m working with a local school or a non-profit, the lowest I could ever go is $10 a square foot. But it ranges and some work I’ve done I’m actually making $50 to $60 a square foot.
Sometimes I’ll do an installation or a painting in two or three hours and I’m like, Cool, I made $600 or $1000 for this event, that’s a great hourly rate. But then I’m like, Well no, I spent all that time before that emailing and gathering supplies and this, that and the other.
With productions there’s usually some sort of negotiation that takes place. Unless it’s, like, a production where they just totally get it and know your day rate is somewhere between $500 and $700 a day for doing production design. But then you have super low-budget, independent teams where they’re like, Well, this is a passion project, it would be good exposure for you, we could pay you $150 a day. I’m like, No, thank you. I’ve turned down a bunch like that.
As far as pricing for murals, if they’re part of some sort of program, they set the price and you just apply. And if you’re okay with that price you do it, right? If I’m negotiating a price for a commissioned mural for a company, an advertising firm or something like that, we go back and forth and figure out something that’s hopefully agreeable.
Before working on pricing it’s important understanding what a shoot will consist of. So everything from deliverables and client needs to how much work I’ll have to do getting models or skiers, or if it’s during a set amount of time or if it’s conditions-dependent, like a lot of stuff in the skiing world.
Tattooing I’m $150 an hour, it’s pretty easy. I have my power supply and it calculates my whole session. I hit start and as soon as we’re done I hit stop, read it out and it’s cut and dry.
Before I was using that I was probably shorting myself a lot of money. I would just be like, Okay, I think we worked this many hours and I would just kind of ballpark it. So with this I can have an exact time. I also keep it to just tattoo time. There’s usually an hour of printing stencils, making sure it fits, getting my machine set up and everything — that I don’t count.
Painting is very different because I think people aren’t seeing what you’re putting into a painting, how much effort and time. I undercut myself a lot, but I sell a lot of paintings and that, to me, is more worthwhile. I have more satisfaction in knowing someone has that in their house and they enjoy it and they don’t feel like they had to break the bank to get it. That’s more important than making thousands of dollars. I think that would be great at some point in my life, but for now it’s just cool to sell paintings.
I also had an art show in New York City, in Soho, at a gallery called Sacred. . . . I obviously had never done a show of that caliber before and didn’t know anything. When I got there the curator asked me to price everything out and I did, keeping my pricing pretty reasonable like I usually do. But then he went through and increased everything because he’s like, Dude, this is New York, you can really blow up your prices a bit more. I was like, Okay, you know better than I do. . . . One of my prices was maybe $800 and I think he put it up to $1,500 or $2,000. But then I didn’t sell anything and I kind of wish I would have stuck to my guns.
It’s always evolving. My rates today are different than they were a year ago, which is different than the year before that.
I typically have a base price per square foot that ranges depending on complexity, and that’s based on my material cost. If I’m doing something that’s photorealistic I have to buy more colors, so it costs more for paint and the price per square foot goes up. If I’m doing something that’s super intricate it’s also a higher price.
But I kind of figured out what I need to make per day and work around that. I think that’s how you do it. The weird thing is, I talked to other artists like Smug – he charges less for a large canvas than he does for a small one. And I’m the opposite. The bigger it is, the more expensive just because of the square footage and my material cost. I can’t even get a 5’x5′ canvas for less than $400 to $500, so obviously that’s a starting point just on materials.
Certain projects are really cool, though – they may not have the budget, it may not be what I’m used to, but it’s a cool client or I have full creative freedom. So I kind of prioritize based on what I want to paint as well.
A lot of times I know if I say a price the person is more inclined to be like, No, I can’t afford it. Or, I’m not going to pay that much. So you’ve kind of got to feel out the price.
Working with Duke [Russell] taught me a lot about pricing and he goes hardcore because he’s been making a living off his art for 40 years or something. And it is important to him to get what it’s worth or price his work at a legitimate level for the work he put in. And I get it but man, just like with skating or anything else, it’s such a joy to draw a commission so I’ll almost work for nothing.
I guess I don’t really know how to price my art. There are so many different factors. And like I said, when I was first doing those art shows everything was $150. It was priced to sell and to me that was fine. I felt great.
That was also when I was drawing the biggest. My whole art show was done on 18×24” pieces of paper. They were all big pieces and they all took so long. I now do little drawings, 8×10”, and sell them for three times the amount.
It’s changed because I have a family now. That has a lot to do with the price I put down. It also depends on where I’m showing it. The galleries all take a different cut. The International Gallery here took 50% and Middle Way Café is taking 20%. That’s a huge difference.
I can’t say it ever feels right to throw $800 on a drawing but I’m starting to understand it’s my own choice — am I working for $5 an hour or $20?
Yeah, so pricing is always difficult because sometimes there’s no rhyme or reason for what someone will pay for a piece. It’s like, what I’ll pay for a piece is different than what you’ll pay for a piece. It’s hard to figure out what price point is good for you during that time, during that show or for the market who comes to see your show.
For the most part, it’s always making sure that you account for supplies and time. You also need to figure out: Is it a one-off piece, a commission? Who am I talking to — is this a corporation or an individual? Will this person buy one piece and leave and I won’t see them again or will this person be someone who will be interested in collecting more of my work? Is this an institution? Where am I in my career? Do people know my work? How much have I commanded for a piece before? Sometimes that matters, sometimes it doesn’t. Really, it’s an on-the-spot sort of decision you have to make.
A lot of my small pieces will be $3,500 and up. My commissioned stuff is $5,000 and up. And then bigger projects, especially if they have some installation piece that is really involved, will be $15,000 to $20,000 for my base price. So it varies, especially because my work varies a lot.
There are a lot of factors that play into pricing, but I always tell artists that there is no cookie-cutter way to gauge it. Do as much research as possible about your market because that will really help you out in terms of making sure that you price your work correctly.
I still rely on my friends a lot, asking them what I should bid. And I compare to past projects and what I’ve sold things for.
When people ask me to do logos or something I don’t know what that costs. I kind of figured out oil painting just from the galleries and doing it more.
But the digital computer stuff, it’s really confusing. I recently did a digital illustration for the new airport and that was about $7,000 for just a PDF. And I thought, This is weird. Because that throws your whole perspective off on what to charge for things.