An exhibition is a great place to sell your work. The question is how much your work is worth. When pricing your artwork, there's a couple of factors to take into consideration. In this video, we will be looking at simple ways to help beginners price their artwork. It will be a critical decision on how much you want to sell an art piece as you have to balance against what buyers already to pay. As a beginner or emerging artists, I would recommend to focus on two factors when pricing your work.
These are material costs and cost of labor, which I described here as a wage. First, calculate the cost of your materials. Make sure that you never sell for less than what it costs you to create your art piece. Then you have to calculate your wage or cost of labor. You can understand this as the amount of time you work to create an art base and what is your time worth, if you're indecisive $20 to $25 per hour would be a minimum to start with. Let us look at a simple formula.
In this example for creating a one meter by one meter paint Canvas, the cost of the material is $50. And it took 10 hours to create the artwork at a rate of $20 per hour. In this case, the price of the paint Canvas is $250. Next, I would like to introduce you to the flat rate method. I would use this method especially when I don't recall costs of material. In this case, it would be an estimation based on your gut feeling.
It would be dependent on the size and materials used to create an artwork. The clue is that you are happy with the price that you want to sell the artwork. Now, let's have a look at the more complex method to price your work. In this advanced formula, I have a markup. The markup is the base price that would be on all my artwork. In this example, the markup is $50.
Next, I multiply the material costs by a percentage. In this case it is 300%. I add any hanging system costs as well as any delivery costs, especially if I outsourced part of my creation. This is particularly true for photographers who get their photos printed at a professional laboratory. The framing costs in this case is zero dollars. Adding all of these costs gave me a total selling price of $210.
Let's take a second example for the same advanced formula. Here again my markup is $50. Then I multiply my material cost by percentage. In this case, photography paper costs $25 which are multiplied by the free hundred percent. There are no hanging systems. So this means zero dollars, and it costs $10 to get it delivered.
Associated framing costs are $200. As this is the photographic paper production, I have the possibility to sell it with or without frame. So I have two selling prices, one with and one without framing costs. One important notion relevant for photographs is editing. As a photographer, you have the choice of having an open edition or a limited edition. Limited Editions can be a good way to make your photographic artwork more valuable.
An example of limited edition is if you have an image and do an addition of only 23 Productions. In this case, you need to make sure that the buyer knows what number in addition, they are receiving, for example, the fourth. When auditioning as a photographer, you should ensure reproducibility of the images, which means that every time the image has to look exactly the same. My last recommendation on pricing is do your research before you price your pieces and compare with the work of other artists have a similar caliber For your show, it is advisable to create a price list and have several copies of it as well to make it easier for visitors to consult your prices. This is also helpful. In the case the organizer does not allow you to put the prices on your exhibit labels.
I have included the template for you in the resources section. Lastly, I highly recommend that you create selling contracts for your artwork. I have done some extensive research and I have included various aspects in the document provided in the resources section. This is a template that you can adapt for your purpose. You will find an example of a contract in English and its translation in German. Please note that you have to ensure compliance with finance and tax authorities and regulations in your country.
We already saw that Do you have to be careful about not pricing too low and also see what other artists in the same category are charging. My last piece of advice would be to increase your prices if you have significant sales.