Forums » Smalltalk » Need advice from established artists.

Hey, I've been drawing for years, and love doing it. Yet now i'm getting into wanting to sell my art and do commissions, but I don't know how much to charge. What do you all recommend?

At they very minimum, charge minimum wage for the amount of time you put into a piece. If your province, state, territory, etc. has a minimum wage of $12/h (for example) and the piece you work on takes about 2 hours, charge $24 for the work, and depending on the challenge of the piece, add extra on top of it. Most artists will charge vastly more for 2 hours of their time, but beginners will often charge much less, which brings down the average in a way that is harmful for everyone.

Also, consider what you will and will not draw, how many revisions you will allow someone making a request, and the timeline in which you will try to get the piece finished. These all play important parts into who your audience is and what rights you can stand behind for your own sanity.

Don't just look for commissions in one place; spread out your services to various platforms. You may get more bites at f-list or furaffinity than on RPR or tumblr, for example, but that all depends on your style, how big of an audience you have, and what you want to draw.

Basically everything that @dray said.

I charge a bit more per hour for my work ($22/hour), but that's because my time is at a premium and because I kinda-sorta know what I'm doing after a lifetime of trial and error. My pricing would also be different if this was my sole source of income, but it's currently not. I have a day job that pays for my base needs, and art is a secondary source of income for the time being.

If you're just getting started, I would go for minimum or a decent living wage (whichever of those suits your needs most, depending on where you live) and work your way up as needed. Never charge below minimum wage, though, even if it means you have to wait a little while for people with funds to come along. People who really like your work for what it is will pay a fair price for it without question, and those are the kinds of repeat clients you want! If you don't feel like you're getting the traffic you need? Keep drawing! Keep improving and updating and tailoring your portfolio to what you want to do for others.

The hardest part about setting up commissions, that I've found, is marketing. Specifically: knowing how to advertise your services without shoving it down your target clientele's throats or making them run away. People don't like ads, and they hate spam even more. So what I like to do online is make sure I have a non-invasive link to my commission info and portfolio (you need these both set up somewhere online, ALWAYS, preferably on your own website) somewhere on all of my social media, in the signatures of forums that I frequent (RPR doesn't have signatures, but I have a link to my commission thread on my profile), and in my introductory posts. I also mention that I'm an artist everywhere I go, and I only post samples of my art when someone asks to see, or it's relevant to the discussion we're having. This way, the promotion is organic and not being shoved in peoples' faces.

If you have other questions about this kind of stuff, feel free to PM me whenever!

These lovely people have hit up most of the pertinent points. I'll reiterate: charge what you're worth, which is at minimum, a basic living wage. Also keep in mind once you start, if things go well, you can raise your prices.

I've also noticed that in my circle of colleagues, the people who seem to get the most pings when they open commissions are the ones who are constantly putting out work. It's a way to show that you're prompt and efficient, which people tend to like, but more importantly it's a way of staying top-of-mind. If you're putting out work frequently, people get used to your style, people get accustomed to your presence, people think of you when they want something. What platforms are you putting work out on? You may want to consider diversifying -- the sites Dray mentioned are good ones to start with.

Best of luck!

I honestly believe you should only charge what makes you feel comfortable. If you're satisfied with the price for your own work and the quality that you feel you provide, that's entirely your choice. The quality of work and the time you put into it is what's most important when it comes to the price.

I take this coming from my own perspective of selling my own art. Though, my art is a different medium. I work in the art of crochet. It takes me 7-8 hours to crochet a single beanie of the style I create. If I were to charge 10$ an hour for a single hat, I'd have to charge 80$ just for my time alone.

I use a mass produced brand of yarn that is not a high end wool as some yarn workers use. I use something cheaper, durable, and that comes in a location I can reach it for a convenient price. 4-7$ depending on the fiber.

1 hat = 1 ball of yarn.

I'm now at 84$ for a single hat. This isn't including the time it takes me to learn the pattern(1-12 hours depending on complexity), if the hat has stripes of different coloured yarns(I've used 8 different colours in a single hat, that would be another 32$ for all those skeins(balls)), the crochet hook(anywhere from 4$ to 15$ depending on the quality of the hook).

We're getting to be way over 100$ just for a single hat! That's entirely unjustifiable even if my hats are lovely. I find them to be incredibly so, but I don't think that much money is worth the product I'm creating. Instead, I charge 30$ for my hats because it's a reasonable marketprice, it's competitive with others, and I feel satisfied with this being the price for the work I've created and my time spent.

If your art is something you feel you're deserving of 12$ an hour on something that could take you 8 hours to produce, then by all means go for it! However, you should also try and compare your own work to the work and prices of others. I don't think you should ever undersell yourself to a degree that you're feeling undersold for your work, but please make sure your prices are reasonable to the market place itself.

Just make your prices feel comfortable for you, and try looking at the selling prices of other artists and compare your work and what they're selling for. Be competitive.

Again, do not undersell yourself or beat yourself up if you don't feel you match the level of another artist.

Be proud of your work, but do your best to try and make the price fit your art and your time.

Of course, it's always your call to decide how much you charge, but there's a systemic problem with the idea of charging below minimum wage. I can't speak to craft, but in the art world, there is a real problem with people undercharging. It's a cycle: commissioners get used to seeing ludicrously low prices for good work, and begin to expect it, and therefore try and shout down people who charge a reasonable hourly wage.

I think some of the issue is that not everyone who does commission work is doing it to make a living, and so artists who don't rely on commission income to pay their bills feel free to undercharge so that they can attract quick jobs. The problem is that it becomes a spiral, and the kind of clients you attract by undercharging are almost always the kind that will jump ship immediately if you raise your prices even a little, and usually berate you for being 'greedy' on their way out the door: i.e., people who you really never wanted to be working for to begin with. Again, I can't speak to the craft world, but in the visual arts, this is a dismally common trend that I promise you want to avoid. Fixing this is very straightforward, and it would benefit everyone! I bet even hobby artists who don't rely on the income to live would prefer to be making more, and ultimately, it's like a union: if we all say "this is what we're worth", there's really no arguing with it. The funniest irony of this is that hobby artists are the ones who have the most power to enact this change. It's much harder to raise your prices and perhaps lose a repeat client if you're afraid that it means you won't be eating this month.

You just have to look at the furry community to get proof of this. Furry artists are known to be some of the most well-paid commission-based online artists in the business. This often gets attributed to furries, as commissioners, being generous, and while this might be true, it's also because artists who draw furry content by and large charge living wages. The commissioners expect it, so they pay it, so the artists get paid enough to live.

Comfort certainly has to be taken into account, but at the same time, your work doesn't exist in a void. What you charge affects the market, which in turn affects the people who make a living off of that market. Moreover, why would you think your time was worth less than a living wage? Regardless of your degree of skill, you should be paid what you're worth!

While I understand that comfort plays some part in the final price/quote...I'm afraid I have to agree with pretty much everything @jkatkina just mentioned.

When it comes to visual art--textiles and physical art items are not my forte, so I can't really have much input on how to price such items--there is a plague of people underpricing their work to the point where potential clients are asking for pennies for fully-rendered art (deviantART's point system has done no favors for this, btw).

This stuff takes uncommon skill that is learned over YEARS of practice and dedicated time, trial and error, study, repetitive stress injuries...much like a lot of other, higher-paying professions! This isn't just a hobby for some of us--it's work. It's a skill that many people want that they can't do well enough for it to be to their liking, so they outsource it to professional artists! There is value in that skill, and that value...is going to be at least minimum wage! Saying otherwise is just an insult to artists and the hard work that they put into getting as skilled as they have, and it contributes to the negative viewpoint that art is not a sustainable profession!

I'm sorry if I'm coming across as antagonistic on the subject, but I feel very strongly about this! I spent a chunk of my college degree studying the economics behind art, and the reason artists don't make very much--in a nutshell--is because they don't take themselves seriously, and they don't ask for what they deserve, and therefore society doesn't take them seriously, and then they have the expectation that artists are desperate enough to work for any price!

This is not a view I wish to contribute to, please and thank you!

Oh, it's totally cyclical. Society doesn't know how much work goes into a finished piece, and newbie artists price their work based off of what they see others charging, which is chronically underpriced, and the cycle carries on.

The way I see it, there's two roads you can take:

1. You can charge nominal prices, but you're competing with the rest of the pack who are also charging very low. You put less work in up front but your clients can be dodgy deal-seeking types. Consequences can be that you're trapped selling work for cheaper than you'd like, you don't learn to exert boundaries, and making a few quick bucks now damages both your reputation later and the work of other artists.
2. You charge more now, but you have to push yourself in a number of ways to make your work 'worth' it. You analyze how successful artists work: everything from art style to how it's advertised and for how much and how quickly it's produced, and you try to emulate or compete with that. The consequences are that you'll get fewer bites up front but your dedication to improving your style will hopefully take you somewhere that you're happier with your art later, and networking with other artists will begin to get you clients who trust you (and vice versa) that will refer you to other clients, which means you build a stable of income in the future. That's not assured, of course, and I'm only biased to this second option because I've seen it used as a platform by friends who've been more successful than me as they launched into professional art and animation! So... take some salt with that.

THIS. This is the point that I was trying to get across.

I see the difference between digital art and crafting. There is also a major difference between doing this as a profession and doing this as a hobby. There's also a huge difference between amateur art and professional art. I think an acceptable choice is a minimum wage over a "living" wage when it comes to the choice of doing this for the sake of a hobby. I understand that this can cause issues along the road for artists, but competitive pricing is unfortunately something that all markets have to deal with, no matter the market or product.

Minimum wages in different countries are also something to seriously consider. In the US, the federal Minium Wage is $7.25, while the minimum wage here in BC is $11.35 in CDN($8.89 USD)($6.80 British Pound), Ontario is changing its minimum wage on Jan 1st to $14 CDN($10.97 USD)($8.38 British Pound).
Currency exchange is something to also seriously consider when you're telling someone to use their minimum wage. It could be really high or really low where you are, but when you average them out you can come up with a comfortable middle ground for yourself and everyone else.

Unfortunately, a minimum wage is nothing to a living wage, but that's an entirely different topic for an entirely different kind of discussion.

I should probably also clarify that where I live in the U.S. (since we also have state minimum wage), minimum wage is $11/hour, and minimum wage in Seattle (specifically) is due to be bumped up to $15/hour, because real estate is incredibly expensive around here. To live comfortably, without worry, you kind of have to charge around the $20 mark...which is why my commissions tend to be so high in price. It's literally so--in case I lose my day job for whatever reason--i can pay my bills.

Just thought this would shed some light on a few things.

Just want to chime in and say that I agree with what's been posted. Charging your time is absolutely acceptable, but you have to find a happy middle ground and see what you're comfortable with.

I knit, and an average, adult sized, plain raglan sweater without any fancy stitches with a medium thickness yarn takes a minimum of 40 hours to complete. I have to factor in supplies (yarn primarily) and then also consider how much time I put into learning how to knit and get to a skill level where I make good looking, well fitting sweaters. In an ideal world, I would get paid about $500-$600 for the time I put into it based on the hours alone. That's not counting yarn, which can easily cost around $120 for such a sweater if you're really picky about the quality and origin. And that's not even working with a ridiculously high hourly wage, considering I put about a Bachelor degree's worth of learning, research and many more hours of practice into the skill.

I sell an adult sized plain handknit sweater for about $150. I made a compromise because a) I'm not a professional and I don't have the resources and time to make knitting a full time job that nets me $600 a week, and b) realistically, even he most supportive people are not going to shell out that much for a single piece of handmade clothing unless I have an existing reputation and cater to niche but well paying groups.

On the other hand, charging by the hour can be like shooting yourself in the foot. I do Virtual Assistant/Quality Assurance work, and that is based on the hours I put in. I'm too efficient for my own good - what takes most people 2 hours to do, I usually do in under 1 hour, meaning I get less for the same work, and same quality of work, than others. Ideally I'd get compensated per project, not by the hour, because in the long run that means I get more for the same work. The same applies to my art, I can go pretty fast and churn out a full drawing in very little time once I get the energy for it, so when I was doing commissions I charged for the piece, not the hour, based on how much experience I had and what the demand was.

It's all about finding a happy balance, and what that looks like is up to your individual situation, resources and the demand for your work.

Charging per piece can be another way to go, but I definitely think that you should be figuring out how much work you're putting into that piece before you go there. I was trying to do that for a while but I found I kept pouring too much energy into it to make it worth its while, and then I'd get commissioners who would ask for revisions on top of it and it was really getting under my skin.

It chills my blood to think of spending that much time on a hand-knit sweater to get so little for it... makes me really hate our economy of convenience in some ways, even if on the grander scheme it provides a lot of wants and necessities to the masses for super cheap. I'm not sure that many people understand how much of a deal they're getting for that--or for a $30 hand crocheted toque, or for a $15 portrait.

It really is a tough market.

That's absolutely right! This is what makes these questions so tough to answer, it's all so dependent on the circumstances you're in and what you can do and how you do it. I think everyone has to do some trial and error before finding a way that suits them.

I know man, even mass fabricated is becoming too expensive for lots of people. If you don't fit in a narrow range of sizes then you can't even shop cheaply. I'm 6'1" and good luck finding good quality jeans for under €50 that are plus size and at least 32" long so I don't look like I'm standing in deep water all the time lol. What irks me the most is that cheap and mass produced clothing gets sold for €150 a piece easily because of a brand name that's slapped on it, when handmade is custom fit and often more durable because more care went into it. Or they shell out $200 for a large canvas print that's mass produced and sold in stores, but paying $100 for a custom painting is 'too much'. There's this societal stigma that handmade is cheap and of poor quality by default because everyone assumes 'anyone can do it'. Well, here's the yarn and there are the needles, make me a cable sweater and then we'll talk.

I'm just learning to knit and I can already tell you that that ain't gonna happen, lol. The toque I'm wearing right now has this weird ridge along the middle where it fell off my needles and I barely managed to salvage it--if people are looking for cheap or poorly made, they're probably thinking about glitter and glue and first attempts without realizing that things scale up in difficulty and craft (as in the attention to detail and finesse that comes with getting everything 'right') pretty quickly.

Mass Produced comes with some great marketing and it's pretty impossible to be competitive with that. If you're going to sell hand-made anything you really have to appeal to the qualities you're striving for. If I were starting out as an artist (and I still might do this because it seems like a fun way to pass some time), I might instead of trying to jump in and compete with professionals, maybe consider setting up a more social aspect to things. Since there are so many artists selling their work, I've been finding that knowing who I'm buying from is as important to me as what they're making (and this is one of the main boons of hand-made/local/small scale work. You feel like you're making a connection.)

Raziel, I'm not entirely sure if this would be effective as I haven't demoed it, but I've seen places like picarto.tv setting up Ko-Fi Accounts and linking them to their live-streaming page while they draw. This allows people to tip them for their work. You might consider the idea of asking people to help support your journey as an artist by tipping you for showing especially hard work, or for posting a series of 'homework' you've assigned yourself and stuck to, or maybe even involve others if you're aiming to get support from other artists by completing art practice that they assign? You could take requests, but that veers sharply into the 'sell your work for exposure' arena and that's usually pretty bad. If you're off-setting what income you're making, you ideally want to be making up for it in improving your skills and in networking. Self-marketing practice, basically... and there should be a limit to how much you do before you're dipping too deep for too little reward.

Once NaNo is over I may give this idea of drawing tangentially related things for tips a try for the upcoming holidays... it's a bit short for me to plan out properly but I'll see if I can take a break-down of my experiences and what I'd do differently. My first thought is to compare hosting a live-stream vs. posting on social media like tumblr... I have minimal exposure and have been out of the commission circuit for a long time, so I might be a good indicator of how tough it can be, lol.

Oh gosh, that reminds me. Positive thinking is such an important part of the process of getting to be an established artist. If you don't think you can do it, you often start believing it. It's one of the reasons I haven't done art for money in so long, honestly. Usually the thought of selling my work gunks me up so bad that I freeze up, mostly because I took that hunt for work really hard when I was ending college. I know how to draw; I have a BDes and I spent about... good lord, too much money to think about on school. That mental game is (at least for me) the big hurdle. It's fierce. If you can keep your mindset generally resilient, it'll be just as good a practice as honing your art and your marketing.

I really appreciate what's being said to compare hand crafted items. They really aren't just set for "anyone can do it" when it comes to perfecting them just like any other art skill. This is why I still call my craft an art form.

A happy middle ground is something I think should be done.