for artists
How artists price their work
For makers: the three common pricing methods, why undercharging damages more than your income, and how to raise prices without losing everyone.
Most artists price their first works by feel, and by feel almost always means too low. The instinct is understandable — you would rather it went to a good home than sat in the studio — but a price is public information, and the number you set early becomes the number people expect for years.
The three methods
Cost-plus
Add up materials, add your hours at an hourly rate you would accept from any other employer, add a share of studio overheads, then multiply for the gallery or platform commission and your margin. Honest, simple, and it is the only method that will ever tell you when a piece is not worth making.
Its weakness is that it prices a fast, brilliant painting below a slow, laboured one, which is the opposite of how the market values them.
Square-inch or size-based
Pick a rate per square inch or per square centimetre and apply it consistently across a body of work. Common among painters, and its real virtue is consistency: collectors can see that your prices follow a rule rather than a mood, which builds a great deal of trust quietly.
Market-based
Look at what artists at a genuinely comparable stage — similar exhibition history, similar sales record, similar market — are achieving, and place yourself honestly within that. This is the method galleries actually use. It requires the least self-deception and is the hardest to do alone.
Why undercharging is not a neutral choice
It sets an anchor. Buyers remember your old prices for a long time, and a sharp jump reads as opportunism even when it is overdue.
It signals doubt. A price is information. A very low one tells buyers the maker does not rate the work.
It removes your ability to discount. If there is no margin, there is no goodwill gesture available when you need one.
It affects other makers. Prices are compared. Underpricing the whole category is a collective problem, and everyone in it pays.
The right price is the one you can say out loud without adding a justification afterwards.
Raising prices
Raise on new work only. Never reprice something a collector already saw at the old number; that is how trust goes.
Move in steps of ten to twenty per cent, not in doublings, unless something genuinely changed — a major show, real demand, a waiting list.
Raise when you sell out, not when you need money. Demand is the only honest signal, and the market can tell the difference.
Tell your existing collectors first. A short, warm note before the change turns an increase into an invitation.
Hold the line
The hardest part is the six months after an increase, when sales slow and every instinct says to reverse it. Discounting quietly at that point undoes the whole exercise and teaches buyers to wait. If the work is right, the market catches up.
Building an hourly figure you can defend
Start with what you need annually. Living costs, studio, materials, insurance, tax. A real number, not an aspiration.
Subtract the hours you cannot sell. Admin, photography, packing, applications, teaching. For most practices, only half of working hours are making hours.
Divide. That is your true hourly cost of existing, and it is almost always higher than the figure people guess.
Test it against the market. If the resulting prices are far above comparable artists, the answer is usually to make work faster or larger, not to quietly go back to undercharging.
Consistency beats optimisation
Collectors forgive a high price far more readily than an unpredictable one. If a 60×80 canvas is one figure this month and two thirds of it next month because a sale was slow, everyone who paid the first price learns to wait. A published, rule-based structure — by size, by series, by year — removes the negotiation from every conversation and is worth more than the few sales an ad-hoc discount would win.
Discounts, and what they actually cost
A friends-and-family rate is fine if it is named as such and stays private.
A quiet 20% to close a sale is not, because the buyer will mention it and your next buyer will ask.
A payment plan is almost always the better answer than a discount: the price holds and the buyer gets what they needed, which was time.
Never discount a commission. The hours are fixed and there is nothing to give away.
When a gallery is involved
A gallery commission is typically 40–50%, and the price on the wall must be the same price you would ask in your own studio. Undercutting your gallery directly is the fastest way to lose the relationship, and it teaches collectors that your published prices are fiction. If the split makes the numbers impossible, that is a conversation about the split, not a reason to run two price lists.
Every price you set is a sentence about what your time is worth, and buyers read it whether or not you meant it that way.
