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Adventures in Painter - part 2 of 1 2

Published 01/09/2006

Since a lot of photographers are uncertain as to where to start pegging their hourly rate, her starting-point suggestion is to take your most expensive product and double it. Let's say that a 16x20 on canvas, your minimum size offering, is $500, doubled for a watercolour it turns into $1,000. This would be a simple head and shoulders portrait.

Marilyn recommends charging additional amounts for extra heads and detailed backgrounds too. A believer in keeping price lists simple, she doesn't charge differently for the material substrate. Her watercolour work is printed on paper, one size larger than the image, eg 16x20 goes on 20x24 paper but priced for the 16x20 print size.

Her base price is $1,400 for a 16x20 and smaller. Marilyn makes copies available for album collections (10x8) of the same piece as her regular print prices sans the art charges, since she feels she's already been paid for it. Additional wall prints of the same image are charged out at 20% less for each of the additional prints.

She has been playing around with collages, finding a great response for this new niche. The success of her pricing model and style is clear with her Painter commissioned work booked to June of 2007! Marilyn has a blog that shares all sorts of Painter knowledge, creating a Painter Artist community, http://www.msholinprosales.com/Invision/index.html.

Marc Bailey

Marc Bailey, a Quebec photographer, has been creating with Painter for a little over a year. He loves the creative and revenue doors it's opening for his studio. He even changed his studio name to reflect that. Marc shares the pricing model he has put so much thought into.

The key philosophy to Marc's imagery pricing is, "that he is not a photographer but an artist, so the price is only related to the beauty and workmanship of what is on the walls."

Oddly, in Marc's studio, his clients are not given a fixed price for the finished art at first, just a range of $1,000 to $3,000, perhaps higher. They do a couple hours' work on the image, enough to get a feel for how long it will take, plus enough to give his client a feel for the look of the piece. This involves them in the art creation; he invites comments along with guidance from his client.

He has two guidelines that help to determine pricing. The first is the detail desired - a detailed oil painting, an impressionist painting or a watercolour. Each has a different detail level. Mixed into that is the client's budget (although they are more open-budgeted than you might expect). His painting value begins at $1,000.

Marc charges Painter images as an add-on to his regular-priced canvas print images, varying some for each client. There is no set price for any size/product. This reflects the difference of effort and creativity that occurs in each commission, removing the induced stress of working to a stock price. The value has climbed beyond $3,000 but averages out at $1,500.

You should note there is no matching of value to print sizes; the add-on price is for the artwork, not an image size. Marc combines the artwork charge with the size selected for the final price, encouraging the client to consider larger images. His marketing/production approach is to create a small section sample of an image he thinks would work well for a client he believes can afford/appreciate/desire his art product. Marc shows this on spec to a client, at their time of viewing. A bold position that Marc takes is that final art pieces cannot be reproduced in smaller sizes, establishing a higher perceived value for the effort.

Like the others, Marc uses an hourly rate as a rough background guide in determining the final charge. This is used as a guide to find the ballpark, not a fixed price. He has determined a fine oil painting takes about 40 hours of work. At the moment he uses a $50/hour rate, putting a ball park starting price for an oil painting around $2,000.

And Finally

In figuring my pricing model I like the hourly value guide combined with the doubling of my canvas product. With a value that feels right for my studio, I am going with the addon approach to any size product. I think removing substrate charge-choices keeps presentations uncluttered. While I will have internal guidelines, I like the flexible solution of increased detail moving up the value.

These pricing models should give you the needed guidance to generate appropriate value for your artistic efforts. They sure clarified mine!

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1st Published 01/09/2006
last update 09/12/2022 14:50:57

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