Cars can sometimes be confusingly used to extend ones, well, let’s call it perception of self to be kind. Art on the other hand, cannot only provide us with a symbolic extension — sometimes it’s even made in the literal shape of one. But today’s blog is not so much about sizing-up as it is about putting a price tag on it, so brace yourselves, because we’re going to explore the pricing-by-size model of art evaluation.

Similar to the hourly-based model, pricing by size focuses on the physical aspects of ones work, but unlike the former, does not base the value on the time spent creating the work and as such only focuses on the finished product — rather than on the process.

I find this perspective especially useful when making my abstract paintings (they usually take less than a day to complete but are equal in quality to anything more realistic in my opinion), because the time spent on one such work is incomparable to the effort spent on something as complex as mimicking natural forms.

But just because abstraction doesn’t take that long to create, doesn’t mean it’s crap compared to realism (my guess is, we’re opening pandoras box now); both realism and abstraction require a lot of learning, skill and attention to detail in order to produce a quality product, but often a realist work will take a long time to complete (especially if you put a lot of effort and energy into shading and texture work).

And because it takes a long time, the process is divided into a myriad of small steps — easy to do and simple to fix if done incorrectly (unless you spot a mistake in the proportions or composition only long after you’ve painted 80% of the work).

But the process of abstract painting (or sculpting, drawing, etc.) isn’t as segmented; you really only do maybe 10% of the amount of steps compared to a realist portrait, but as such the steps you have to take are larger and harder to fix if done incorrectly.

It’s not hard to fix weirdly painted eyes (even though it might have taken you 60 minutes to get them to that point), but it’s incredibly hard to fix a badly executed bold brushstroke — think of Cy Twombly’s pantings; I don’t like his work, but one can imagine that if the last stroke on his white canvas was badly executed, he couldn’t just correct it by painting over it — he’d have to start all over again.

You can think of it as risk, really; a slow, controlled process like realistic portraiture isn’t risky, jut time consuming (think of all the videos of people drawing realistic portraits; they always segment the work into small batches and almost never work on the face as a whole. 

But a fast-paced process like abstract expressionism (think Rothko, not Pollock), is quick, semi-controlled and chaotic; the percentage of bad paintings that are created and then binned by abstract expressionists is exceptionally high, but quite low for realist painters.

So, what the price-by-size model compensates for is exactly this difference; time vs. amount of risk. It would maybe even be better named as the risk-evaluation model, but I think such a funky name wouldn’t really cater to us creatives as I guess it makes a convoluted topic like compensation even more foreign — we’re not financial analysts, our games are played with crayons and paint tubes, not Bollinger Bands.

To give an example of a price-by-size approach: In Slovenia, a 50 x 70 cm painting averages about 400€ (I know…). 50 x 70 cm is 3.500 cm2 and to make it short, a square centimetre costs about 0.10 € total. 

This 0.10€ can now be used to define prices of any other works we do, so a 100 x 100 cm painting would then cost about 1000€ (and yep, again that’s the average price in our beloved country).

But while prices for larger works are easy to calculate like this, it gets tricky for smaller ones; an A4 work would cost about 63€ (if calculated like this), but the average is about 100-150€, because to sell a work for 60€ is effectively akin to giving it away.  

This is why a good practice — if anyone would like to use this model to set their prices — is to start with a base price; a set amount to which we then add our price calculations. Call it studio fee, or base cost or whatever you like, the point is to always start at 50€ or 100€ (or any other number that works for you) and then add to that the size calculated price (I usually make an average of my material costs and call that my studio fee — mine’s 100€ — then add the total material costs for that particular work and the size calculated price on top). 

Never forget to add you material costs to any model you use!

The smaller works will always cost more than you spent on them and as such, selling them will make much more sense, but the base price won’t affect your larger work as much (an A4 sized work will cost 200% more if a studio fee of 100€ is added, but a 100 x 100 cm sized work will only cost 10 % more if 1 cm2 is set at 0.10€).

Tomorrow, we go and explore pricing by project and the various ways we can use the time and size models to create a working estimate for project based pricing.