Identify your Target Audience

You should spend enough time to do proper research to find out the target audience and find out the other artists making similar artwork like yours. Check their online portfolios to check out the details of their work and the pricing. You will get a fair idea about the market trend. It will help you to ask for the right price from your buyers.

Market your Artwork to the Potential Clients

Once you get the basic idea about the current market trend, you can proceed to the next segment which is how you can polish your skill with the right marketing strategy.

Every artist understands that it requires a lot of hard work and dedication to create art. You have to actively market your artwork so that clients will find you and hire you. For some popular artists, they don’t need promotions but if you are a beginner in your art career, you will have to put systems in place to find clients to sell your art to get your business running.

So, here are some useful tips to follow before pricing an art commission without getting underpaid.

What is Price Art Commissions & How to calculate it?

After finishing your artwork, the first question that comes into your mind is which will be the right way to price your art commission?

Just imagine if you make your art price too high, there are fair chances that you may not get enough clients and won’t be able to earn a stable income from the artwork. On the contrary, if you ask for a low price, you will be working long hours for very little money.

Finding the right balance between what you think your art is worth and how much you can ask from your clients can be a game-changer. Also, the demand for your work plays a crucial role in pricing your art.

Effective ways of pricing your digital art commissions

1. Time and Material Required: The artists need to calculate the number of hours and total costs involved in raw materials. Based on this data, artists can price the commission against an hourly rate more precisely.

Follow this Equation for better pricing:
Time + Material = Commission Rate

For example
Cost of material ($50)/ 40 (material lifespan)= $1.25
Here, material life span refers to the expected number of commissions we will deliver using a particular material.
Now calculate the hourly rate multiplied by the total time taken in your artwork.
If it takes 3 hours to prepare your artwork, you can simply multiply the total working hours with how much you charge for 1 hour.
Let's say,
3 Hours x $5 (hourly Rate)= $15
This can be the base price for your artwork.
Finally, we can add the cost of time and materials.
Commission price will be $15+ $1.25 =$16.25
Although this price range can be varied based on the country you belong to, you can easily make this equation in your local currency. You can charge high or less based on your expertise.

2. Per Deliverable:If painting is your passion and you have another source of income, you can price your commission based on the number of hours and efforts your painting takes to finish. This is a popular way of pricing commissions for hobbyist artists.

For fix Pricing

Commission Price = $2x(Total years of Experience)x(Level of difficulty) + Material Cost
The level of difficulty belongs to the amount of expertise your artwork required in a given time.
Here you can use a suitable dollar amount as per your level of expertise. It can be varied with a person’s level of experience and local currency.

More Useful Tips to Calculate Accurate Artwork Pricing

For more accurate pricing of your artwork, you can take advantage of the below-mentioned tips.

Step 1: Get Familiarized with your Market Niche
First of all, explore your market niche like where do you sell your art? Do you sell locally, regionally, nationally or internationally? Which is the best selling genre and what is the current market price for popular niche artwork?

Step 2: Define your Art Genre What kind of art do you make? What are its physical characteristics? In what ways is it similar to other art? How do you categorize it? If you paint abstracts, for example, what kind of abstracts, how would you describe them? This is the type of art you generally want to focus on for comparison purposes.

Step 3: Find Out Like-minded Artist Community
Identify similar artist genres and try to connect with them either by researching online platforms or visiting art galleries, open studios or other popular venues and watching their work in person. Pay close attention to those artists who have achieved remarkable success in their careers in similar domains like yours.

Final Step
Analyze carefully how much similar artists charge for their art. It will help you to make the right estimates of the prices you should charge for your art.