How to Price Your Paintings - A Guide to Pricing Artwork

so i wanted to talk about how to price your artwork and it's a question that i get a lot and i think there's some misconceptions or misunderstandings number one is galleries are absolutely the number one determinant of what your price should be so for instance if you take a beautiful landscape or let's say a pretty good landscape that you've painted and you take it to you know a small town gallery and they are very happy to hang your painting and they may only be able to put a price on it in the small town gallery of you know say 800 um or or whatever 300 and then that same uh painting you could if you were to get uh put it in a prestigious gallery in new york you know catering to the very high end of the market you know you you could get you know fifty thousand dollars for that same painting and so it absolutely depends on what gal your gallery you're in or what agent represents you or somebody that can sort of like uh you know um speak about your reputation and it's it's somebody that they can trust now one of the things you have to be careful of is there's a lot of galleries out there that don't really move art and some of them will be happy to hang your paintings but they don't sell any paintings and and maybe they don't even know how to paintings or how to sell paintings and and the reason for that is because people open galleries for a lot of reasons uh number one it could be a spouse who who just wants to have a you know a little business of their own and so they you know open a gallery because it's a lot of fun but they really don't know how to run a gallery and maybe there's always paintings on the wall but they tend to be the same paintings because and they may put big prices on those paintings but they just don't sell them then there's uh galleries that do move art and those are the galleries that you know tend to be you know have a long reputation or or they have some connection to the community where people trust them and everything else so you just and by the way running gowers is very very difficult it's a it's a extremely um hard way to um you know extremely tough business to be in and and very few of them survive i mean i mean the ones that that are here for the long term and aren't just a you know somebody's whim project that's never going to actually turn a profit or whatever so let me just go through a few of these um points that i want to make and number one is when you start off painting it's absolutely critical that you have a consistent price structure or you know you can't charge 200 for one person and then 2 000 to another because you know if you have to sort of establish across the your broad work what your price fee structure is and everybody that buys your work is going to be very keyed in on that they're going to want to know what your work sells for they're going to want to know what it's sold for in the past and in general the market sees price as you know sort of your reputation so the higher prices you can't you can command the the greater your reputation now sometimes there might be somebody that sells them for a thousand but he's selling one every two weeks and then there could be another person that sells their paintings for uh you know for 10 times that but they only produce uh 10 times or 1 10 the number of paintings so it really depends on a lot of things but the public doesn't see all that they just look at your price and they see what you command and that's kind of the respect that they give you in terms of you know the market and and what your painting sells for so speaking about your work itself keep in mind that your subject matter your lighting your composition those things that appeal to um you know to the people that would buy your paintings is is very very important and is actually more important than how well you paint so a lot of artists think well if i can really really paint well that my work deserves a certain price but a huge part of that is the subject matter so if you can go out and find a you know a landscape and as you know even if you're working from uh photographs and you find a um uh you f you have a beautiful landscape photograph that's um just unbelievable i mean you're you're all the way there almost the only thing you have left to do is paint it and and so whenever when i used to paint a portrait i i used to always uh feel like if i had a great source photo that i was done it was just a matter of executing it so that this your source material is critically important and that's a big part of what determines your price so never forget that that means putting a lot of effort into painting your masterpieces or being out out in the field to get source material or whatever it is so that's really really uh important now when you start a painting you're going to produce a body of work and um you really only want the public to see your very best work because your your let lower quality work will lower the public's perception of you know where you are as an artist so if you only show them your very best paintings that's far better because then that will be sort of your body of work as opposed to including all your early work that maybe not be that may be not as good and then that'll be seen as you know sort of bringing your average down so to speak so i would highly recommend only showing your best work then the next thing is as you're creating this body of work because you can't just approach a gallery or an agent and with you know three or four paintings you've got to have at least 10 or maybe even 15. so only show them those best paintings now keep in mind that you're going to have a lot of paintings that that you may not want to sell to through the galleries and in the early days you're going to have a lot of friends and family that are asking for paintings and there's nothing in the world wrong with giving out those paintings that are you know subpar or maybe aren't your best work or selling those paintings to friends and family just make it clear to those friends and family that those aren't your prices at all that they don't have anything to do with your fee structure or the prices that you command that they are these are paintings that you're either giving away or giving or selling to them at a greatly reduced price and that way those prices will not be seen as as sort of um you know where you are in your prices or won't affect your fee structure going forward and and they should know that and if anybody asks to see their work you say look this was a special price for a friend or family but then as you accumulate your masterpieces don't sell those to friends and family but keep those and use those to when you approach the gallery and then your your prices will be whatever the gallery decides they should be and that's something you can negotiate with them but you don't have to include all this mediocre work or maybe your early work that's not up to par and you can happily give that away to friends and family and just let them know the prices is not official so to speak another thing to keep in mind is that the artwork that your work is is hanging next to will affect the public's perception of what you should be charging for your painting so in other words if you're hanging your paintings and everybody around you is charging 10 times more than you than you do then that will refl reflect very well on your work because people will look at that and say boy this works greater than even this very expensive stuff but on the other hand if you're hanging your work and there are other artists around you that are charging a lot less and maybe their work's even not as as good as yours the public will look at your work as being overpriced so that's something to think about another important thing to consider is when you're painting your paintings i would if you're doing oil paintings on canvases then i would highly recommend always painting on linen canvas instead of cotton canvas because cotton is seen as student grade typically and linen is seen as as a higher grade and that will you know greatly affect uh possibly the perception of your work you should also use uh heavy duty stretcher strips and any of the medium canvas sizes are larger so if you're doing a you know even like a 24 inch canvas you know in some dimension then i would definitely use heavy duty stretcher strips and that will give your work you know a more of an impact and then on some flimsy lightweight stretcher strips and then one more thing is to possibly purchase a frame for two or three of your paintings and let that be a very beautiful frame that's a high-end frame not not something inexpensive and that might cost you some money you might you know look in antique stores and look for something that's old that you can fix up or come by it some other way but even finding an old beautiful frame and then painting the painting to fit that frame because frames can be very expensive but have a couple of your paintings and frames and and that will make everybody see your work in that light and it really can make a difference to have a one or two in a beautiful beautiful expensive frame another thing to consider when you're trying to set the price of your painting is that whenever you you can raise your prices but you really don't want to ever lower them because you want to always be seeing as an artist who's maybe his prices are low or you know get them while you can because uh their prices are just going up and up or but if your prices uh start going down that really uh you know the people have already bought your work are gonna feel bad about it and so it's something you really want to try to avoid doing so really want to consider before you raise your prices that you probably shouldn't come down from those prices now one other thing to consider though is that if you paint um if you raise your prices by uh or double your prices say then you can expect maybe your demand to cut by 50 but you'll still end up making the same amount of money so it's one of those things that you have to balance and you know make sure you're not raising your prices too much but on the other hand um you know if you do raise them you don't have to paint as many paintings to make the same amount of money so um that's about all i have on how to set the prices of your painting um i could try to you know show you a painting and say what it's worth but those other variables are just so great that it really depends much more on the galleries that you can get to to hang your work and everything else so thank you guys so much for watching and don't forget to go check out my art supply company if you haven't already genevafineart.com and where we sell easels and paint that doesn't have fumes and all kinds of things for artists including our palettes which are going to be back in stock very very soon and everything else thank you guys for watching and we'll see you in the next one you

Channel: Draw Mix Paint

Views: 200,755

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Id: 5CPi__nRnZQ

Length: 11min 17sec (677 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 01 2021