How to price your art for the first time

Pricing is a fascinating yet very obscure topic due to the art industry's uneasy relationship to price transparency. Therefore, for artists who doesn’t have representation or who are new to the gallery game, it might be tricky to establish your own pricing system.

My recommended way to start is by first establishing the cost price, that is, your base price below which you will not (presumably) go. This is because it is the total outlay required to produce your work, which includes all direct costs (materials needed) as well as your wage rate (calculated per hour/day or per work/project done) and a part of your overheads (those expenses not directly attributed to creating your art, e.g. your studio rent, taxes).

Cost price = Direct costs + wage rate + (part of) overheads

Then you add a markup (this is the extra value that you add to the cost price of an artwork) and this is how you get your retail price, which is the actual price to be displayed.

Retail price = Cost price + markup

The markup is usually determined based on comparable art in terms of media, size, subject matter, etc. There also many other factors that can be involved, such as the size of the artwork or even the fact that the artwork has a special significance for you, which can potentially rise the price of your work high enough.

Part of what I do is to help artists who have never price their work before coming up with their first price list based on the specificity of their art, the artist’s location (as VAT varies too), and on a thorough research I conduct of similar available artworks on the market.

Would you like to know more about pricing? Sign up for a free consultation call or drop me an email at belinda@belindamartinart.com