Discussion - Fees and Pricing in Commissions/Prints

Price and fees are one of the things that I’m currently struggle with to get a grasp of, as I have not really sold prints, nor taking in commissions to produce work for customers/clients. In this session we discuss the topic of pricing commissions, which I do want to hear about as it will definitely give me an insight to help my understandings and knowledge for pricing artworks and to look into different areas of commissions such as book covers, magazine covers, posters, in-book illustrations, etc.

I find that a lot of the pricing for commissions varies a lot and that there are many factors that contributes it, such as deadline, working for national or international papers, companies and authors. Being commissioned by a large company with a high reputation would of course pay you more, whilst you would be paid less from a small business that is in the minority. A few hundred pounds for a commission seems alright to me, though there are those that can hit the £1000s bracket where a lot of artists wished to be paid for, and some of these I find are ridiculous amounts where it could equate to a year’s worth of salary. Like I said, this comes down from how big or famous the company or person that is commissioning you.

An in depth analysis to all the different types of commission work and their pricing had me thinking how much should I sell my work to customers. There will be a time where I would be out there selling my illustrations for exposure and gathering an audience/followers, and naming my prices can be difficult. Making your prints expensive can make people pass, while making them cheap will draw attention, but at the same time you won’t be making enough unless it was to be sold at a mass quantity in a short period of time to the consumers. I would want to name my prices for my prints at a fair amount, not too expensive, yet not too cheap, but as of now I’m not an established artist, just someone within the minority, I will just put the prices at a fair range, depending on the quality of the image.

The session has taught me to see what income illustrators/artists make for a living and it made me realise that there’s not really a fixed figure for a yearly salary, considering that artists work on many different projects over the years with different pays and contracts, so there could be a year where you would earn more than the usual, and there could be a year where you earned less, which is not far from the truth for all illustrators whose yearly salary are different over the years of profession.