How to Price your artwork (without just making up a number)
Pricing your artwork can feel weird.
You’ve spent hours creating something, you’re emotionally attached to it, and now you’re somehow supposed to put a dollar value on it?
For a lot of emerging creatives, pricing ends up being a combination of looking at what other artists are charging, picking a number that “feels okay”, and hoping someone will pay it.
There is a better way.
While there’s no single perfect formula for pricing creative work, there are a few things you should be considering.
Start with your actual costs
Before anything else, work out what it actually costs you to make the work.
Think about:
Materials
Framing
Printing
Packaging
Studio costs
Equipment
Software
Photography
Transport
Exhibition costs
Some of these costs are easy to calculate per artwork. Others are overheads that need to be spread across your practice.
Your sale price needs to cover more than the canvas and paint.
Your time has value too
This is the part creatives often forget.
How many hours did the work actually take you?
That includes more than physically making it. There might also be research, sketching, sourcing materials, preparing surfaces, photographing the finished piece, uploading it to your website, answering enquiries and packaging it for its new home.
You don’t necessarily need to charge an exact hourly rate for every artwork, but your time absolutely needs to be part of the equation.
Consider where you're at in your practice
Pricing also reflects where you are professionally.
Things like your experience, exhibition history, demand for your work, previous sales, commissions, awards and the development of your practice can all influence your pricing.
Your prices don't need to stay the same forever.
As your practice grows, your prices can grow with it.
Look at the market — but don't copy it
Research artists working at a similar career stage, with similar materials, scale and audiences.
This gives you context.
It doesn't mean finding someone whose work looks vaguely like yours and copying their prices.
You’re looking for a realistic range and understanding where your work sits within it.
Keep your pricing consistent
If an artwork is $600 on your website, it shouldn’t suddenly be $450 at a market and $750 in a gallery.
Consistency builds trust with collectors, galleries and customers.
You also need to factor in gallery commission when establishing your prices. If a gallery takes a commission, avoid simply increasing the price in that gallery to compensate. Your retail pricing should ideally remain consistent wherever the work is sold.
Create a system
Having a pricing system makes everything much easier.
For paintings, you might develop pricing based on size.
For ceramics, jewellery or products, you might use:
Materials + labour + overheads + profit = base price
Then check that figure against your wider market and adjust where appropriate.
The exact formula matters less than having a method you can explain and repeat.
Don't price based on whether you think someone will buy it
This is a big one.
It can be tempting to think:
“Would someone really pay $500 for something I made?”
That isn't a particularly useful way to price your work.
Your price should reflect the work, your costs, your time, your practice and your market — not your confidence level that particular day.
When should you increase your prices?
There isn't a magic milestone, but it might be time to review your pricing when you're consistently selling work, demand has increased, your experience and exhibition history have grown, your costs have increased, or your current pricing no longer reflects the time going into the work.
Price increases also don't need to be enormous.
Small, considered increases over time are much easier to manage than suddenly doubling your prices.
The biggest thing to remember
Your artwork isn't just the materials sitting in front of you.
You're also pricing the years you spent developing your skills, the failed experiments, the studio expenses, the hours nobody sees and the experience that allowed you to make that piece in the first place.
Build a pricing structure that is sustainable for your practice — because being able to continue making the work matters too.
The Creative Toolkit is a growing collection of practical resources from The Rundle Collective, created to help emerging creatives navigate the business, opportunities and realities of building a creative practice.
