Ok, the title to this may be a little deceiving, as I’m not completely ignorant when it comes to putting art in the local gallery (the On Display Gallery, Fort Collins, Colorado– find them on my Facebook profile). But I struggle with the types of art that gallery viewers would appreciate versus the illustration side.
To be blunt, I’m not a fine artist, I’m an illustrator. So I approach art from the story side of things, and in fact (as is evident from my art blogs) my favorite pieces by other artists have a sense of story behind them. So I’m never sure how the general public, in a gallery environment, is going to react.
Along with that, and quite possibly my worst issue, is pricing. I have a decent idea of the prices I charge as an illustrator, and based on feedback from publishers I seem to be priced ok. But I just never know what to price prints, matted, or framed works.
Do I price it based on what I paid for the materials?
Do I price it based on the market (without really knowing the market)?
Do I price it based on other works in that same gallery or online?
Frankly, the answer is yes to all of that. Which, understandably, is where the confusion lies.
Being a person that’s evenly split between technical and creative endeavors, I of course have spreadsheets and such that tell me what the prints and pieces cost me to make, how it breaks down over number of prints, how much I’ve made on certain ones so far (not quitting the day job just yet).
But that only helps to an extent. There’s also the value in what was created, that what the person is buying is something that came uniquely from my own goofy brain, and no one else’s. That puts a certain unique value on it as well, that they are getting, really, something that only I can give them. So I get input from others, make notes from other artists online, and generally try to price reasonably.
But then I have to actually pick which works to sell.
That’s the hardest part of all. I’ve noticed many times that, when I put my portfolio out there, not a single person picks the same piece of art as the next. In some ways that makes sense, I have a couple of different styles. But aside from that, everyone has a completely different favorite, and that makes it difficult to pick only a few out of all of them to try and sell.
There are a few at the gallery now that I’ll be replacing. One of them is still unpublished (crossed fingers, I’d love to show everyone that one), and the other two are here in the galleries (“In the Wrong World” in the grayscale art, and “Mama Ain’t Happy” in the color art).
We’ll see how they go, and if anything at least I have quite a lot of work to swap out for them.
Unless one of you two would like to buy them…
Mama Aint Happy
