What is my art worth?
How do you set a price on your art to sell may seem like its all subjective. This is absolutely true, at least on the surface, but Ill explain some of the rational behind the pricing some of the paintings, art, digital art, designs, sculptures that you've seen. It really gets into the weeds, there are a lot of variables, but Ill start at a high level and break it down.
Pricing art with Materials and Time
Lets start with materials and time spent, the actual creation. Every artist takes time and uses resources to produce a piece of art, whether its traditional or digital.
Pricing art materials
With the materials, its all about what the physical input of the piece is. The traditional artist is using medium and a surface to place it on. The digital artist is using computing power, printing/ink. We can easily go into edge cases, but Ill leave it there.
Pricing your time spent making art
With time, its about start to finish and how much of that time the artist charges for. Artists spend a lot of time just thinking about a piece, they might choose to charge for that, but most will just charge for the production time. All artists should have an hourly rate they use. A beginner may only do $5-15/hour, but as experience and speed grows, they'll start charging much more. For example, an experienced artist could be quick enough and skilled enough to charge a $50/hour rate with a 4 hour turn around.
How do I figure out my hourly rate or my time value?
With those two out of the way, we've got a pretty great starting point.
Lets say I spend 4 hours painting at $50/hour, totaling $200 of time value. Then I spent $20 on materials, like paint and canvas. Great! Now we've got a painting worth $220. I can go to the market and sell it for $220, I take a $20 loss on materials, a 20% loss on taxes, for a profit of $200, my time value.
But what about taxes? Right. Depending on your state if you're in the US, there is a Sales tax you'll charge. Its 6.5% in Kansas where I am. So that's about $14.30. So now the customer is paying $234.30.
Hey its starting to look like a real price now!
But How do I sell a painting for $1,000,000?