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Category: selling your work

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Monday Morning Art School: How to price your work

For some artists, the hardest thing in painting isn’t drawing or color-mixing but how to price their work. Charge by the square inch, of course.

Keuka Lake Vineyard, 30X40 by Carol L. Douglas, is available through Kelpie Gallery

A proper price is the meeting point between how much you can produce of the product and how much demand there is for it. If you can’t keep your paintings stocked, you’re charging too little. If your studio is full of unsold work, you’re either charging too much or not putting enough effort into marketing. Your job is to find that sweet spot.

Art sales are regional. If you live in a community with an aging population and a prestigious art school, you’re going to have low demand and high supply. If you live in a booming new city, you will have more demand and prices will be higher.
Art is not strictly a commodity, however. A painting’s value depends on the artist’s prominence. Most artists are terrible judges of their own work, seesawing between believing they’re geniuses and thinking they’re hopeless. Such subjective judgments hinder their ability to price their work.
Art festivals are a good way to establish a price history. I don’t miss them, however.
Don’t assume that because you labored for a long time over a piece, it is more valuable. Your challenges are not the buyers’ problem.
You can simplify the problem by setting aside your emotions and basing your selling price on the size of the piece and your selling history. How do you do that if you’ve never sold anything before? Survey other artists with the same level of experience and set your first prices in line with theirs. Visit galleries, plein airevents and art fairs. If you see a person whose work seems similar to yours, find his resume online and check his experience. Know enough to be able to rank events. Painting in Plein Air Easton is not the same as painting your local Paint the Town.
Charitable auctions are a good way to leverage your talent to help others. They provide a sales history to new artists. (But they aren’t tax deductible contributions.)
Striping (Heritage) 6X8, by Carol L. Douglas, is available through Camden Falls Gallery.
Let’s say you gave an 8X10 watercolor of the Old Red Mill to your local historical society, which turned around and sold it for $100. Great! You have a sales history (albeit a limited and imperfect one) from which to calculate prices. Just figure out the value per square inch and calculate from there.
Square inch is the height times the width. That means your 8X10 painting is 80 square inches. Dividing the $100 selling price by 80 gives you a value of $1.25/square inch.
To use this to calculate other sizes, you would end up with:
6X8 is 48 square inches. 48 X $1.25 = $60
9X12: $135
11X14: $240
12X16: $315
In practice, my price/sq. inch gets lower the larger I go. This reflects my working and marketing costs, some of which are fixed. If you started with my example, above, a 3X4” painting would more reasonably sell for $3 a square inch or $36, and a 48X48” painting for $.75 a square inch, or $1700. But that sweet spot between 6X8 and 16X20 are a fixed cost/inch, rounded off for convenience.
My price list is on Google Drive and I can access it wherever there’s phone service.
Charity sales are known for seriously underpricing work, but it’s better to start low and work your way higher. Periodically review your prices, and make sure you have a copy with you at all times, because people will ask you about paintings at the strangest times. I keep mine on a Google sheet I can refer to from computer or phone.
Once you have a price guide, it should be absolute. I adjust it slightly for family members (or more likely just give them the painting), but I use the same price structure in events and galleries.
You should continuously update your prices based on your average sale prices for the prior year or two. The goal of every artist ought to be to sell at constantly rising prices. When you find yourself “painting on a treadmill” to have enough work for your next show, it’s definitely time to charge more. Each time you show, your work will be better known, and over time your prices will rise.
The marketplace favors fair, consistent pricing. I charge the same amount everywhere I sell. I don’t want to undercut my galleries.
And I don’t explain my prices, for the most part. Does anyone ever tell Christian Louboutin that $995 is a bit much for a pair of platform suede pumps? No; they either understand Louboutin’s market or they don’t buy designer shoes.
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Should you lower your prices?

Basic economic laws shape the art market. That doesn’t mean lower prices make for more sales.

Dead Wood, by Carol L. Douglas

Yesterday a reader sent me this, which says that if demand for your work is modest, you should lower your prices. I am not an art appraiser like Alan Bamberger, just an artist who makes and sells art. But my own experience tells me otherwise.

Bamberger bases his argument on something known in economics as the ‘supply relationship.’ This refers to the correlation between price and how much of a good or service is supplied to the marketplace.
The higher the price of something, the less demand there will be. As its price goes up, so does the opportunity cost. The consumer elects to do something else with his or her money.
More work than they bargained for (Isaac H. Evans) by Carol L. Douglas
At the same time, producers make more of things when they can get a higher price for them. There is a point at which it is no longer cost-effective to produce a product for market, and producers go offline.
At some point, supply and demand meet. This is called the equilibrium point. Suppliers are selling everything they produce and consumers are getting everything they demand. In truth, capitalism is a little messier than that, and the market constantly pushes prices around—upward when there’s more demand, down when there’s little demand.
All flesh is as grass, by Carol L. Douglas
A great example of this is the lowly tomato. Back in Rochester, NY, where they are plentiful, I used to buy a basket of them for $2. Yesterday a friend bought a single tomato for the same price. Tomatoes are hard to grow in Maine. The lack of supply drives up the price.
That’s classic economic theory and it’s amply borne out in goods and services marketing—in things like gasoline, Ford F-150s, child care, etc. It is not necessarily true in luxury goods. There, the matter of perceived value mucks things up. Unlike tomatoes, paintings have no easily-quantified value. The price set for them is purely subjective. The late Thomas Kinkade is an unfortunate example of this.
In some art forms, supply is inherently limited by the time and skill of the makers. This question has been resolved in some areas of art. Music and photography, for example, can be reproduced infinitely. It hasn’t been solved in painting. I will make a finite number of paintings in my lifetime. When I’m gone, that will be it.
Packing oakum (Isaac H. Evans), by Carol L. Douglas
That doesn’t make artists immune to larger economic forces. In fact, as a luxury good, painting is the first thing people cut back on in hard times.
My prices were set in collaboration with a gallerist who sells my work. She knows the market and where I fit in. I keep them consistent across venues. Most professional artists do the same.
An artist may make work that is beautifully executed and explores the art questions of its time and place. It still may not be monetarily valuable because he or she hasn’t shown it where buyers congregate.
As my friend Bobbi Heath likes to say, if you’re not selling paintings, it’s because not enough people are seeing them. Don’t lower your prices; don’t be down on yourself as a failure. Just work to be seen in more places.
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How to avoid getting scammed

Is this art buyer legitimate or pulling an internet swindle? I asked the hive for help.
I sold this painting to an online contact. Since then, she’s become a valued friend.

There are two schools of thought among artists: those who embrace on-line selling and those who don’t. I’m strongly in the bricks-and-mortar camp, but I do occasionally sell paintings to people who see my work online.

I’m usually happy to oblige and in most cases, it works just fine.
People who regularly sell work from their websites usually accept payment through third parties like PayPal. That insures that they get their money. It gets dicey when someone wants to pay by check.
This week, I’ve been communicating with a buyer who is setting off a low-level vibration in my fraud detector. I checked a number of sources for advice. Here’s their consensus:
Check references
That’s difficult with an online contact, but I Googled him and came up with nothing. As a control, I ran the name of one of my students, my late aunt, and a sister-in-law who doesn’t use a computer. I found all of them.
This painting of the Delaware Water Gap sold to someone who saw it on my blog. There were no problems in the transaction.
Always use a trusted middle man
The fees we pay to systems like galleries (online or real-world), eBay, PayPal and credit card companies are there in part to cover the risks involved in commerce.
If it looks too good to be true, it probably is.
Artists are particularly vulnerable because we are emotionally involved with our product. It’s hard to be objective about when a response is normal and reasonable, and when it isn’t.
I’ve noticed serious buyers generally have a specific painting or subject in mind when they contact me directly. Scammers have no real interest in the content, and don’t tend to ask incisive questions.
Don’t be overeager.
This is hard advice for the impecunious artist to follow, but scams work because their victims’ excitement blinds them to the deal’s faults.
Low Bridge (Erie Canal) 40X30, is probably only going to sell online, since I no longer have any gallery representation in New York.
Never accept personal checks and only accept checks for the exact amount.
I sometimes insist on a cashier’s or certified check drawn on an American bank, in the exact amount. This isn’t a guarantee that the check won’t be counterfeited, sadly, but they do clear faster than personal checks. I never give out my bank information for a wire transfer.
You mustn’t ship the painting until the check clears, no matter how much urgency the client expresses.
Does the money pass the sniff test?
We’ve all heard of the Nigerian money scamand its many daughters. Nearly all online scams start with an unusual financing request from the buyer, often including an overpayment.
The same is probably true of this little study of the Queensboro Bridge approach. It’s a good painting, but it’s not going to sell in a Maine gallery.
Avoid buyers with too many stories. 
This is a red flag for me in the conversation I’m currently having. He might be a “Chatty Cathy,” or he might be trying to muddy the waters. But the sob story, in all its wonderful permutations, is the oldest scam around.
As Frank Scafidi, public affairs director of the National Insurance Crime Bureau told USA Today, “Slow down, ask questions and don’t become emotionally involved in the sale.”
Trust your gut. “If it feels awkward, stop all contact,” expert Linda Criddle told AARP.
Be wary of overseas buyers. 
This is tricky for me, since I have sold paintings to people around the globe. However, it’s harder to verify payments across national borders.