Pricing is one of the most critical—and challenging—parts of running an art business. The system you use needs to work for you, be fair to buyers, and make sense to galleries. When it comes to two-dimensional work—paintings, watercolors, pastels, drawings, and similar media—two common approaches are pricing by the square inch and pricing based on the number of hours spent creating a piece. While both have logic behind them, I strongly favor square-inch pricing in most cases.
Why Square-Inch Pricing Works for 2D Work
For two-dimensional pieces, square-inch pricing ensures consistency and transparency. When each work is priced using the same formula, collectors and galleries can quickly understand how your prices are set. A gallery can hang multiple pieces of different sizes without having to explain why one is priced far higher than another of similar scale.
This consistency also builds trust. Buyers know they’re paying based on the work’s size and its place in your overall portfolio—not because you struggled with one piece or finished another unusually quickly.
The Limits of Hourly Pricing for Paintings and Similar Media
On the surface, pricing by the hour might seem fair—you get compensated for your time, and more complex works cost more. The problem is that buyers purchase the result, not the hours.
If one painting takes you 30 hours and another of the same size takes 6, would the longer piece automatically be worth five times as much? Usually, no. The value is in the artistic outcome, not the minutes logged.
Hourly pricing can also lead to erratic price differences across your body of work, which can confuse collectors and undermine your perceived consistency as an artist.
Addressing Production Time Disparities
It’s natural to have variations in how long different pieces take, especially as you experiment with techniques and styles. But over time, you should aim to reduce wide disparities in production time by refining your processes.
This doesn’t mean rushing your work—it means developing a rhythm and methods that keep your production time within a reasonable range for pieces of similar size and complexity. Not only will this improve consistency, it will also make your pricing structure easier to maintain.
Further Reading on Pricing
I’ve written extensively about pricing strategies for artists, including more in-depth discussions of formulas, pitfalls, and adjustments. For more insight, see:
Bottom Line
For two-dimensional work, square-inch pricing provides a stable, fair, and easily understood structure for setting your prices. While time and effort matter deeply to you as the artist, your collectors are ultimately buying the piece—not the process. By aligning your pricing with the finished work and keeping it consistent, you build trust and make it easier for buyers and galleries to say “yes.”
It seems elementary that square – inch pricing is the best way to get standardization through
my pricing system. I favor the illimination of all extra admin. tasks. Hourly pricing would force
a system of hourly tracking, like a time card. Pricing would be inconsistent and same size art presented at a lower price would appear to be inferior based on the artists price structure.
How eould you price texture ” sculputred paintings ?
This is timely. I’m about to try to sell some of my work for the first time at a local market. I’ll read some of those linked, more in-depth articles. Thanks, Jason!
I really like square-inch pricing
In working through the pricing module in the ABA many years ago, a few things struck me. “buyers purchase the result, not the hours”. To that I would add, “the buyer trusts the artist’s skills and technique.”
What I mean is our credentials and labor practices are what we do to produce the images. If we think in hours, we should do that as a cumulative bottom line, divided by the number of pieces. Time spent for me is never pure or single-minded so the cumulative hours is not accurate.
With square inch calculation it feels more objective and is certainlya simpler calculation. I do a couple of things with this.
I check out artists who are doing work similar to mine and calculate their square inch average where I can. This gives me a data point to work from.
The other calculation I add in is a “creative” calculation that will pay me a bit for the creativity, skills, and ideas. I use it as a multiplier with the square inch total.
I’m very happy with this and have built a spreadsheet that does the calculation.
Nothing carved in stone, easily explained to a curious buyer and hopefully well-positioned in the market.
having painted for a living for 50 years now i periodically encounter earlier works from a decade or 2 ago. While the same size as some o do today i look on them as feeble efforts toward finished paintings. The clients however ask me to sell or evaluate them economically at the same rate as current works which i just cannot do. i have moved on and the art has moved on. pricing by size fails at this point in the secondary marketing of art.
Sometimes i will buy them back and keep them as early examples for future retrospective shows.
for the early stage artists square inch works best.
I understand the reasoning about pricing 2-D works of art by the inch, but how would you price 3-D sculptures when each one is a unique one-off piece of art? I weave antler basket sculptures, both for wall and pedestal viewing, using a variety of materials in each piece without duplications of design or size.
Square inch pricing has worked very well for me, especially as I gain more collectors. They know what to expect and it frees me up to create without thinking about the clock.
Jason, you wrote something recently about simplifying one’s art-making and marketing practices. This surely does that.
I have used square inch pricing for many years and it works well for me. Keeping track of the hours I work on a painting is a pain and I just don’t do it anymore.
Although I primarily use square inch pricing, some pieces are just far more complex than others. For example, a cityscape often has a lot of details while a landscape in the country may be far less complex. So two pieces that are the same size may be priced differently.
I find I have to consider not only size but also complexity of the subject matter. Complexity is not defined by hours to create. Complexity has to do with level of detail, which may increase hours, but the hours is not the measure. So I tend to have a price range based on the square inches. Say my price range for medium size pieces is from $1000 to $2500. If the piece is a complex city scene it will likely be priced in the $2000 to $2500 end of the price range, but a simple rolling hill with a lake and a few trees is far less detailed, so I’ll likely price it closer to the $1000 to $2000 range. My customers seem to understand the difference in price since they assume there is more work when there is more complexity.
I can see the point, but I also feel the frustration of the hyper-realistic painter that got $2000-$3000 for a work that took weeks while an abstract painter got 5-figure sales for a day’s work. I play around with abstracts, but my passion is reconstructing scenes that no longer exist, and that can add hours of FINDING the images to combine into what I’m aiming for, before I even lay down a cartoon. I can’t justify jacking up my abstracts and intuitive paintings to match my historical paintings, but I can’t be paying myself a dollar an hour, either.