Someone once told me that by charging pennies for decent quality art, I'm letting my customers expect that other artists with similar quality should also charge pennies, and it helped me a bit to stop undervaluing myself.
obviously the issue with pricing is deeper than that, there's the matter of artist's popularity(/brand), their turnaround time etc. ... but yeah, as a general rule I suggest aiming to sell one 50$ slot over 5 10$ slots. You WANT less work for the same money!!
BONUS: if your potential customer has issues with you for "being greedy" because of the way you price your art, you don't want to work with them. Trust me.
(this post is in reference to this thread:
x.com/leeyamchen/s... )
Agree with all that.
There's also "the artist will donate 80% of the rate so it's more affordable in X circumstances" which helps maintain a value without locking you into/out of specific markets. This also helps bump back garbage clients, "sorry mate, deal window juuuuuust expired, refund coming"
For general art I figure $25+ per hour at a minimum in 2024 for artists based in the US.
Adjust it up for inflation every year or two. Also adjust up for your area’s Cost of Living (never down).
If someone somewhere else can do it cheaper let them. There’s no point in only scraping by.
This is why it’s important to find ways to sell the same piece multiple times. Low cost reproductions as things like stickers or art prints are a great way to do this.
My offspring does beadwork, for example, and they have stickers made of some of their pieces that sell quite well.
This is so real and why Fiverr caused some damage, people were getting pages of custom art for like 5-15 USD
I get building up demand, but that's where reproductions or things like YCHs can come in handy
