How to Price Your Art (Without Apologising for It)

I have a theory about why most artists underprice their work, and it has nothing to do with the math.

The formula is not hard. Cost of materials plus your time plus a reasonable markup. Any artist can work it out in ten minutes on the back of a napkin. The reason the number still comes out too low, the reason so many of us stare at the finished piece and then quietly knock 30% off before telling anyone, is not ignorance. It's something more uncomfortable than that.

It's the fear that the price will tell you something about the work that you're not ready to hear.

I know this because I've done it. Finished something that took three weeks, felt genuinely good about it, and then charged what I'd pay for a dinner out. Not because I thought that was fair. Because the alternative, charging what it was actually worth and having someone say "no, thank you", felt like a verdict on the work itself.

It isn't. But it feels that way, especially early on. And nobody tells you this is the thing that's making you underprice. They just hand you a formula and expect you to follow it.

So this article is going to do both. Give you the practical frameworks for how to price your art, because you do need those. But also address the thing underneath, which is why the numbers keep coming out wrong even when you know what they should be.

The Thing Nobody Says Out Loud

Most guides on how to price your art start with the formula. I want to start somewhere else.

Undercharging is not a knowledge problem. It is, in most cases, a confidence problem dressed up as a knowledge problem.

Seyi Odukoya, a painter based in Lagos who we featured in one of our early volumes, described his first sale like this: "Boy, oh boy, the feeling was so good. I felt like I was on top of the world. That motivated me to keep doing what I was doing and not to give up." That first sale, at whatever price he set, changed something. Not the work. The belief that the work could exist in someone else's life, at a price they chose to pay.

That belief is what makes pricing possible.

Art by Seyi Odukoya

The artists I've spoken to who consistently charge what their work is worth are not the ones with the most followers or the most gallery connections. They're the ones who have decided, and it is a decision made consciously at some point, that the discomfort of asking for what they need is less than the cost of not asking.

It's also worth reading what we wrote about this from the other direction: the question of what actually drives artists to keep making work, regardless of what it sells for. If you haven't read The Ritual of Returning to the Easel, it's worth ten minutes of your time.

With that said: here is the actual maths.

How to Price Your Art: The Practical Frameworks

Start with materials and time

The most common starting framework is this:

(Cost of materials x 2) + (hourly rate x hours spent) = minimum price

The materials multiplier covers not just what you spent, but the overhead around it: studio costs, electricity, brushes, palettes, storage, packaging. The 2x is a minimum. Many artists use 3x for original works, particularly if they're selling through galleries where a 40-50% commission is standard.

For your hourly rate, use what you'd charge for any skilled work. According to a-n, the Artists Information Company, the median day rate for a professional artist in the UK is around £500, which works out to roughly £62 per hour on a standard eight-hour day. A graphic designer or photographer in a similar market charges comparable rates. Your hourly rate should be in that range for original fine art work, adjusted for your experience level and geographic market. If you're just starting out, you might begin lower. But "just starting out" does not mean "charging nothing for your time."

Run the calculation honestly. If a painting took 20 hours and your materials cost £80, and you're charging a £40 hourly rate:

(£80 x 2) + (£40 x 20) = £160 + £800 = £960.

Does that feel too high? That feeling is worth examining. The work took 20 hours of your skilled time. A plumber charges more than £40 per hour. The discomfort you feel is not evidence that the number is wrong.

Research comparable artists

This does not mean: find the cheapest artist in your medium and undercut them. That race goes nowhere good.

It means: find artists whose level of experience, style, and medium is comparable to yours, and see what they're charging. Look at their Instagram, their websites, their Etsy shops. Look at what galleries list similar works for. You are not copying their prices. You are calibrating your sense of what the market can bear.

If you search "abstract oil paintings for sale" and find that artists at your level are listing 50x60cm works for £400-600, that tells you something. If your materials-and-time formula puts you at £800, it's worth asking whether you're undervaluing your time in the formula, or whether there's a market positioning question worth thinking about.

It's also worth looking at what the work is selling for, not just what it's listed for. Sold listings on Etsy (look for the green "sold" tag), finished auctions on Artsy and secondary market sales all tell a more useful story than asking prices alone.

Pricing for different formats

Original works and reproductions should be priced differently, and this is where a lot of artists muddy things.

Originals should carry the full materials-and-time calculation, plus a premium for their uniqueness. Once it's sold, it's gone. That irreplaceability has value.

Prints and limited editions are priced differently. A common framework: take the original price, divide it by the edition size, then add the cost of printing and packaging. A painting listed at £1,200 with an edition of 20 prints might see prints priced at £60-100 depending on print quality and size. Some artists price more ambitiously for limited editions. An edition of 5 signed, archival prints carries more scarcity than an edition of 100.

Commissions should be priced higher than comparable originals, not lower. You are working to someone else's brief, incorporating feedback, and often revising. A commission for a portrait that's similar in size and medium to an existing £800 piece should be priced at £900-1,000+, not at a discount. The additional service justifies the additional cost.

The gallery formula

If you're selling through galleries, they take a commission, typically 40-50%. Your retail price needs to account for this. If a gallery takes 50% and you need £500 for a piece, the retail price is £1,000.

This means your direct sales prices and your gallery prices should be the same retail number, not different. If you sell direct for £500 and through a gallery for £1,000, collectors will notice, and it damages trust in both directions.

Some artists maintain a slightly lower price for direct studio sales, perhaps 10% less than the gallery price, framed as buying directly from the artist rather than a discount. This is different from having two entirely separate pricing structures.

When to Raise Your Prices

The right time to raise your prices is almost certainly sooner than you think.

There are three clear signals:

When you're selling everything quickly. If pieces are selling within days of listing, or your waitlist is growing, demand is outpacing supply. That's a market telling you your prices are below what people would pay. Raise them.

When your work has meaningfully developed. If the work you're making now is stronger than the work you were making a year ago, and it should be, because that's what practice does, your prices should reflect that growth. The old prices don't have to stay as evidence of where you started.

When you feel a vague resentment when something sells. This one is counterintuitive but real. If a piece sells and your first feeling is not satisfaction but something like "I should have asked for more", that feeling is information. Trust it.

The practical mechanics: raise prices gradually rather than all at once. A 20-30% increase over six months is less disruptive than doubling everything overnight. Let your existing customers know you're planning a price increase in advance. This often triggers a surge of interest in existing inventory, which is not a bad thing.

Do not lower prices during quiet periods. This is the other side of the confidence question, and it's where a lot of artists make the mistake that's hardest to undo. Discounting tells the market that your original price was inflated, and it makes it harder to return to that price later. If things are slow, a better strategy is to increase your visibility, a new body of work, a fresh set of images, a submission to a new platform, rather than reduce your prices.

The Archive on Pricing

We have interviewed 80+ artists across eleven volumes of ArtSloth, and pricing has come up in more of those conversations than almost any other topic. What strikes me is not the variety of approaches, but the consistency of one underlying point.

Kristin Romberg, a large-scale abstract painter from Norway, put it plainly in her interview: "I never think about sales when creating a piece. It's just not possible. I make what I want to make."

That separation, between making and selling, is something the artists with sustainable practices seem to hold onto deliberately. The work is made on its own terms. The pricing is a separate conversation, handled separately, without letting one contaminate the other.

Michael Dwyer, an abstract painter from the US with decades of exhibition history, said this: "I would urge them to make art selfishly. Don't create work for an imagined audience. Make the stuff you want to see."

And Megen Leigh, a watercolour artist from Ohio who committed to drawing daily in 2017 after a difficult period: "Make art for yourself first. Don't focus on what you think you can sell or what you think other people will like. If you like it, that's enough."

Art by Michael Dwyer

What all of these artists share is a pricing practice that works precisely because it doesn't start with "what will people pay." It starts with "what does the work cost to make, and what is my time worth." The market response follows from there.

You can read their full interviews in the Sloth Artist Directory.

A Note on Discounting, Free Work, and "Exposure"

There is a specific kind of opportunity that arrives regularly for most artists, particularly early in a career, that deserves a direct response: the request to work for free, or significantly below your rate, in exchange for "exposure."

Sometimes this is legitimate. A genuinely high-traffic platform or publication, a well-attended show with good historical sales, a collaboration with an artist whose audience overlaps meaningfully with yours. These exist. Evaluate them on their actual merits.

More often, "exposure" means the person asking cannot or will not pay for what your work is worth, and needs a framework to make that sound reasonable.

The questions to ask: does this exposure reach the specific audience you're trying to reach? Has anyone actually sold work through this channel, and can you verify it? What would you charge if they were paying? If the answer to the last question makes the opportunity feel very different, that's worth sitting with.

Doing some work for free is a choice you can make deliberately and for your own reasons, supporting a cause you care about, helping a friend, contributing to a community project. That's different from being talked into free work by someone framing it as a favour to you.

Your work has a price. It is okay to say so.

One Last Thing

Pricing your art is not the same as valuing your art. Those are different calculations, and conflating them is where a lot of the anxiety lives.

The price is what the market will bear at this moment in time, with this body of work, in this context. It will change. It should change. It is not a statement about whether the work is good.

The value is something else entirely. The thing that makes you return to the easel when nothing is selling, when the last show didn't go how you hoped, when you're not sure anyone is paying attention. That doesn't live in the price. No formula touches it.

Get the formula right. Charge properly. And then keep making the work for the reasons you made it in the first place.

If you've built a body of work and you're wondering where to put it, the ArtSloth Sloth Box is our always-open, no-fee submission portal. No entry cost. No gatekeeping. Just your work, and a set of honest questions about what it means to make it.

Creative always,

One of the Sloths