How to price your art. It's a good question. How do you price your art? It's tricky. Well, I don't know how to price your art, but I can give you the who-what-where-why-when for you to consider on your way to price your art. So let's discover the basics. First and foremost, there's no right or wrong way to price your art. And most, of course, you're not selling, in which case you should readjust your pricing. And then you have to make sure that you're covering your materials, your overhead if you have right for a studio, let's say, and your hours. Now, I don't know how much you think your time is worth, but all of that should be encompassed in the price that you charged to your customer. So first, you need to consider what is it that you're selling? What art medium have you chosen to work in? And how much can that typically fetch? Historically, drawings were used to make studies that were then translated into larger masterpieces that were done in oil paint. So oil paintings will fetch more, drawings, not so much. You need to price accordingly. Secondly, bigger is always going to fetch more than something that is relatively small. For example, here I have two original pieces of art that I did, both with white backgrounds, pink hearts, but obviously I would have to price this one lower than this one by size alone. And on the note of original art, original art will always fetch the most as a rule. It's not to say that you can't make good money with making reproductions. In fact, sometimes in the long run, you can make more money with lots of little sales of reproductions, then you can with one big sale of an original piece of art. Now, if you want to make an addition, it's a great idea to do a limited addition so that you can drive value per piece. It's just the supply and demand model. If there are less pieces available, then it stands to reason that each one of those pieces is going to cost more. Next, who are you selling? When you sell your art, you're also selling yourself as an artist. So you need to tell people about who you are. Tell a compelling narrative through an artist bio on your website, how people to get to know you. And if you've won any awards or you have a lot of experience or you've received any good media attention, all of that should go into boosting your prices as an artist. So price high and justify. Next, where are you selling? As a rule of thumb, you can charge more if your work is exhibited in an urban center. But do your research, go into galleries here and there and see what those prices are like. Those prices are reflective of what the market is willing to pay. For example, these plaster pieces here that I made sold very easily at $40 in Toronto, whereas they sold not very easily at a lower price point two hours north of the city. So even though I don't live in Toronto, it's actually worth it for me to make the drive in to exhibit there. Moving right along, when are you selling your art? Certain times of the year, maybe more conducive to releasing artwork at a higher price tag such as around the holidays when everybody's in a buying mode. On the other hand, if you have inventory that's just sitting around and you'd like to sort of clear it out, instead of just putting it on a discount for everyone, what you can do is have an invite only exclusive event for your past clients so that when they come, they can get a discount as a bit of a thank you from you to them. And at the same time, you're not devaluing the art that they pay full price for. Lastly, why are you selling? Do you really need to sell? There are lots of good ways to make money without selling. For example, did you know that a lot of galleries have a really good rental program and the going rate is 20% off the top of the cost of the artwork itself. So there are other advantages too. Artists' Challenge Shop got a lot of notoriety by renting a really big mural through the Art Gallery of Ontario. And my husband Dave rented this piece to a TV show again for 20% off the top of the cost and we got it back and we have it for our walls here at home. So you have options. So those are my five W's of pricing your art. Now a couple of notes. You must understand that people value things based on emotions and intellect and we do that as sellers and we do that as buyers. For example, if you see something that reminds you of your childhood or something like that, you're probably going to be more apt to purchase that than the next guy who doesn't bring that same narrative to it. For example, here's a piece that I purchased recently. It's a watercolor by my high school friend Jamie Bradbury. And so obviously I liked it for the composition. I think it's very well executed but I also really like that my friend from high school made it. So that was an easy buy for me. That was an easy yes for me to purchase his work. Now one thing that I didn't know it was how much the frame was going to cost. I purchased it on its own as a watercolor. It needed a frame and the frame ended up being about 50% of the total cost of the artwork. So framing can be a real deterrent to somebody purchasing your artwork or not. Some artists try to get around that by putting a frame like just a generic frame on there. But that tends to be a waste of money too because people want a frame that matches their taste, their house, so on and so forth. One way you can get around that is by ditching the frame all together and just going with a nice coat of art resin like this. This is a piece that I did that has no frame but looks like it has a coat of glass over top. Of course it's not glass. It's epoxy resin but it looks finished. It looks polished and artists who work with resin say that not only can their work fetch more with a coat of epoxy resin on it but also these pieces are the ones that sell quicker than those pieces that don't have art resin on top. So the choice is yours. It's your art. Sell it ultimately for something that you will be happy with. That's a lot of information but hopefully gives you some confidence when it comes to pricing your art. If you like this video we got so much more where that came from. Subscribe, take a look at some of our other stuff and whatever you do, be happy and stay creative. you