You have researched your subject and inspiration for hours, maybe days. You've been out here and there, trying to capture something special on a camera, something that would just be the starting point... Then you've pondered, and sketched, and pondered again (over several cups of tea), to finally put down on canvas. And you will spend hours, again maybe days, occasionally weeks, working to achieve a perfect masterpiece, which too often it isn't, but you start again anyway.
And somewhere along this repeated, long process you accumulate and choose some worthy pieces, the ones you would be proud to show and hopeful to sell!
But how do you put a price on that?
It certainly not an hourly rate. And if you go too cheap, you're out of a really good potential market, one that is difficult to enter but could mean making a living out of your art. If you go too high and don't get your big break, you've priced yourself out of a wider, certainly less active but excessively more accessible market! Talk about Catch 22.
I've adopted the slow pace small steps approach personally. I was not in a position financially to wait for the big break, it had to sell and it had to sell NOW!! So I started with small paintings, smaller prices. Some other artists commented at my very first show that my paintings were too cheap but in reality, as I pointed out to them, they were more expensive than theirs proportionally and more importantly: they were selling. To balance it out, I always had a bigger painting on show, proportionally priced again, clearly showing that my paintings were not cheap... they were only small!
As the time go on, I put the prices up slightly every year and I also increase the size by a few inches. And I intend to keep the same strategy as long as it sells.
Some might say that to sell in galleries, the prices have to be higher, it still works my way though; galleries want big paintings anyway!
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