THREE Ways to PAY Yourself as an Artist

Here is a sad fact: many artists don’t even get paid minimum wage to make their work.  They don’t understand the margins they need to add to price their work appropriately.  Today, I’m going to tell you three methods to give yourself a living wage when pricing your art.

When it comes to paying yourself, there are three main options.

Option One: pay yourself hourly

Keep track of your hours and pay yourself an hourly wage.  The more experienced an artist is, the more she can pay herself per hour.  Decide what you think would be a good living wage, then add it into your pricing system.

Option Two: Add a premium for your technical skill & experience

An alternative option is adding an expertise fee.  This is great for someone with very high technical skill that can make something complex in a short amount of time. An example is a potter that can throw a bowl in only five minutes.  An hourly rate wouldn’t make sense in this case, so instead, the potter can add a “flat fee” for the bowl that reflects her years of experience and high-level expertise.

Option Three: Price your work according to its size

The third method is to build your rates into a system of pricing based on the size of the art. For instance, it takes three hours to make a certain-sized painting. Add an hourly wage of $50 per hour, plus material costs, then include an additional fifty-percent margin. The total price of the painting would be $650.  Artists can also distill their price into a per-inch price, then they wouldn’t need an hourly or expertise rate. They could just rely on the per-inch price of their work.

Are you looking for a FREE resource to help you price your art accurately? Click HERE to check out my pricing guide, Pricing Your Art Made Easy, or click the button below!